[DF Succession] The Glorious, Bloody Chronicles of Mengkadol

[sbr]

Alrighty then, it is sbr the Farmer's turn to run this place for a year.

The first thing I did was to hire a new decorator and designer for the place (I am using Phoebus' tileset)



Here is the situation on 1 Granite 75.



The first problem is the lack of information, also 4 miners is way too many right now.

The second problem is the complete lack of a military.

I took one of the useless dwarfs from the last migration wave and made him a civil servant, he is bookkeeper and manager.  I made him an office in one of the empty rooms in the workshop area.  He will get me an accurate count of what we have and where it is.  He will also help to automate tasks, I won't have to search the fort to find each hidden workshop.



There are only 2 dwarfs with any military experience (one a miner, the other one of the stonecrafters) so they are the new military.  They will be training in the new barracks I had built near the entrance.



The next problem is that our underground trade depot is inaccessible to wagons for some reason.  The only thing I can think of is the traps in the hallway, the problem is around there somewhere.  I am having a new tunnel dug to allow the wagons to avoid the traps to see if that works.  If it does we will need to rethink the Depot location.



We are also well on our way to a catsplosion.  To remedy this I have all of the unowned male cats and kittens in the fort set to be butchered (sorry Seedy).  I will leave a couple of female cats around to hunt and kill vermin.  This is probably backwards, I should have left the males alive but oh well it is too late now.



I have one more project that was started in the early spring, a new bedroom wing.  There are enough beds that no one has to sleep on the floor, but only 1 or 2 dwarfs have their own room.  Hopefully we can change that.



It is no wonder the keas are stealing shit, there is still stuff sitting out in the front yard on the wagon from when we arrived a year ago.

While tinkering with stockpiles to get the rest of the stuff we brought inside and off the wagon and out of the trade depot we had another wave of migrants show up on the 20th of Slate.

32 new dwarfs, 11 of which are kids or babies to go with the 9 kids already running around this place.    We now have 55 dwarfs and 20 of them are kids.  I am going to have to talk to the Brewer about slipping whore pills into the booze supply from here on out.

There were a few decent dwarfs in the wave including:

Great Gem Cutter
Great Dyer
Great Wax Worker
Great Armorsmith
Adequate Leatherworker
Adequate Weaponsmith
Adequate Engraver

I will get these to work doing what they do best except the Wax Worker.  We don't have any bees yet and he is one of only 3 new dwarfs with military experience.  A bunch of the rest of the riff-raff will be drafted into the military as well.

[sbr]

I remember why I don't like succession games.  I am way too particular about things in this game.  I have spent a few hours dicking around with new migrants labor preferences and stockpile settings and have only had a month pass in game; it's gonna take me a week to finish my turn at this rate.

[PDH]

Suck it up and just pass a half-assed attempt to the next guy.

[Jaron]

This one is a real snoozer. One wonders why FB tries so hard to bring racism and homosexuals into every story he tells.

[Alexandru H.]

In the new patch, a trade wagon cannot pass through traps. Your best bet would be to make a small fortified area with a trade area, with a raising bridge and a door into your fortress: you leave the door closed and the bridge lowered until the traders settle in. You then raise the bridge and open the door, to let your dwarves trade... it's pretty safe...

[sbr]

In the new patch, a trade wagon cannot pass through traps. Your best bet would be to make a small fortified area with a trade area, with a raising bridge and a door into your fortress: you leave the door closed and the bridge lowered until the traders settle in. You then raise the bridge and open the door, to let your dwarves trade... it's pretty safe...

Yeah I already had figured that out but thanks.  I have done something similar, maybe I will add some of your ideas.

By the way hauling really is borked in this release.  I just had 2 dwarfs each carry a full Gem Bin across the fort (slowly) drop the bin on the ground and each dwarf put one gem in each bin and walked away.

Then 2 separate dwarfs came behind with wheelbarrows and took the bins back to the stockpile.    The idea is close but it needs some tweaking.

[Alexandru H.]

The latest patches are skewed towards using minecarts. Which I don't like since it pushes the whole DF into an "Industrial Age" type of game.

[sbr]

The latest patches are skewed towards using minecarts. Which I don't like since it pushes the whole DF into an "Industrial Age" type of game.

Yeah, I haven't built any of those yet and I am sure they would speed things up a bit.  It is mostly the logic of carry heavy container to item and leave it for someone else to take back.  Along with taking the items that the productive dwarfs need to do their jobs with them.

I am trying to figure out the best way to work this.  The biggest problems, for me, are with the Gems and seeds.  The containers with stuff in them keep getting moved which causes job cancellation message spam because the seed/gem the farmer/gem cutter needs is suddenly not where it is supposed to be.  Building a mine cart route for seeds seems a bit overkill and gems are dug out all over the place; I would need to put tracks everywhere.  I guess some "receive from anywhere" stockpiles around the major digging sites that don't use containers that are linked to dedicated stockpiles near the workshops that use bins and Take from the remote piles and only give to the specific workshop is the way to go.  I don't know if gems are heavy enough to need carts or if wheelbarrow are enough.

That will require a pretty major redesign and construction of the workshop area in this fort, things are pretty crammed together at the moment.

[sbr]

So things continue to be Unglorious and Unbloody here in Mengkadol.

I spent most of the time fighting unfamiliar game mechanics and the horribly cramped initial design trying to get the fort to some level of productivity, self-sufficiency and able to defend themselves with a military.

It didn't help that over a 7-8 month span the fort's population went from 14 adults and 9 children to 53 adults and 30 kids.

I continued work in the new bedroom wing, trying to get a bed and cabinet in each room and assigning them to dwarfs.  I also built some new traps at the entrance to the fort, a set of cage traps in front of the existing stone fall traps and a set of weapons traps with all of the serrated discs we had lying around the corner.



I also started work on a new Dining Room.  Like everything else around here the current one is too small, cramped and just not good enough.



I tried to rework the existing Trade Depot but I think we are going to have to consider an outside Depot unless my successor can come up with something better than I did.

I dug a new entrance into the fort with ramps down to the second level, where the Depot is



Down below I walled the Depot off to seal it off from the rest of the fort, except for 2 floodgates that are connected to a lever, allowing the floodgates to be opened when the dwarfs need access to the Depot.



The problem is, is that hauling is so slow that the floodgates end up being open almost the entire time, making them useless and leaving an unprotected opening in the fort.  As long as wagons can't get past traps we may need to trade outside.

I also built some nest boxes and hives to give the dwarfs some nice choices for breakfast.

There have been 2 dwarfs taken by moods so far this year.  One was a Stonecrafter and the other a Cook; we got Legendary Stonecrafter and Legendary Bone Carver out of the deal.





The Elf and Human Trade caravans were not very exciting either, I unloaded a mess of stone crafts and cut gems for some food and other boring things.  That does remind me of one thing, that Master Gem Cutter is great, 3 earrings he made bought everything I wanted from the Humans.

The Dwarven Trading Caravan showed up in Late Autumn like always.  As as usual they were followed by a force of Vile darkness.

The goblins appeared, and they brought Glory and Blood with them.

[sbr]

After getting a fuckton of food and some other necessities from the Dwarven traders we worked out an export agreement.

Here is what the Dwarven Traders want next year:



A lot of that should be pretty easy to produce.  I didn't ask for much from them, we are pretty self sufficient at this point and they bring tons of shit anyway.  No point in paying a premium on stuff them will have with them either way.  I did ask for some flux stone as I haven't seen any here yet and steel is always fun and useful.  I also asked for a breeding pair of a few species of livestock since all of ours seems to have died somehow.  It is possible they need to eat and can't live forever in cages anymore.

While this was going on the goblins had invaded.



At this point I had 4 squads of 3 dwarfs each, 3 melee and one of archers.  I attempted to gather my armies at the front gate and prepare for battle.  Since they are idiotic dwarfs and I don't know what buttons to push it ended up a massacre.  And in the bad way for our side.  The marksdwarfs didn't have any bolts in their quivers and the melee dwarfs kept running at the pack of gobbos piecemeal and got picked off in small groups.  I thought the entire fledgling military was doomed but somehow Kivish, the Captain of the Guard swooped in and kicked some goblin ass.  He singlehandedly killed 6 goblins and the rest broke and fled, ending the siege.  We lost 7 dwarfs and a newborn baby who had been carried into battle by her mother.

None of the 7 founders were in the military so they were safe, but all 7 that died were from the second and third migration waves.  At this point 2 dwarfs who had lost parents in the battle started to throw tantrums.  One was still a child, the other had appeared as a child but had since come of age.  The older one has the Attend Meeting job so I used the nifty new way of locking the camera onto him and followed him*.  The Peasant stormed into the Mayor's office and immediately grabbed a stone that had been left from the mining and threw it across the room.  Unfortunately it didn't hit anything.  He then attacked the Mayor, punching him in the chest, in the upper right leg, then scratched him on the foot.  At that point he calmed down and the Mayor ran off to report the crime to someone.  Nothing ever came of it though.  The child calmed down without incident and the tantrum spiral was adverted.

While I was waiting and looking for more tantrums I found something good.  I knew the Dining Room was way too small, and the children were always throwing parties in there but I hadn't really paid much attention to it.  Here is what the Dining Room looked like 24 hours a day the entire year.



It was even more crowded than that.  A lot of those tile have dwarfs and multiple animals.  It is about this same time that I went to look at the combat reports for the battle and realized there was a riot going on inside the Dining Room.

All of these are from the Dining Room right after the battle



There are more but this is all that fit on one page.


*This is pretty neat, it makes it easy to catch a lot that might have been missed before.  Of course you have to know its coming. 

The main culprit seems to be a stray war dog that kept biting people and animals.  No one was hurt but I ended the party by removing all of teh furniture and moving it downstairs to the new Dining Room.

And finally to top off the year the Weaponsmith entered a mood, claimed a Forge and crafted an artifact Battleaxe.  Unfortunately it was a possession so the Smith didn't gain Legendary status.

[sbr]

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