Things were going well in my fortress and there has not been any big siege yet only small bands of thieves which had all been quickly dealt with by my two crossbow squads.

The dwarves are currently having some big civilian problems though. It all started with a dwarven child dehydrating and then dying of thirst ( right in the middle of the grand dining hall with plenty of booze and food nearby! ).

The leader (me) thought "hmm... ok must have been a retarded one...(probably a rare incident)". The child was placed in one of the many empty coffins and the crypt sealed of with a door (I do that so I can always tell whether a coffin is already in use without examining it).

This was only the beginning of what turns out to be a long series of child deaths in the fortress. They all dehydrate or start going mad/insane, run berserk, destroy furniture and constructions and then get slain by the adult dwarves.

More and more children keep dying (more than 20 have already died) and it's causing a cascade of unhappiness throughout the whole fortress (many witness the dehydration of children... I wonder why none of the adults near them ever do anything to prevent it).

I quickly defined a burrow in my main food storage and confined all dwarves to that burrow for some time to check up on them to figure out what was wrong (and also hoping they'd stop dehydrating if they'd stand right on top of the booze) and hoping they'd cheer each other up a bit.

I could not find anything wrong with the unhappy children, except many of them complained about a lack of shirts and shoes... so I quickly starting producing large quantities of shoes/shirts/leggings/robes and whatnot.

Oddly enough, many of them also complained about a lack of chairs (although there are easily over 100 chairs in the grand hall) so I also started producing more chairs and putting a chair in each bedroom as well.

Many dwarves are still very unhappy about their dead children/siblings/relatives and friends. On top of that, almost all of them are outrageous over the conviction of two dead langurs ( hehe, what can I say, I thought without witnesses there was no way to find the real convicts for two murder crimes so why not just convict some stupid animals so the cases could be closed? :X ).

Population is over 200 already and yet immigrants keep coming in (I though 200 was the default cap?). I only hope the overall unhappiness will end soon.

All those coffins... they were meant for fallen warriors and old dwarves who earned their resting place in a long life of hardship for the wealth of the fortress and now all they hold is children who never had a chance to contribute anything to the glorious community of "Metalriddled".

I really wonder though why the adults don't take better care of their children as there are still well over 60 children in the fortress and they keep pumping out new ones. Must be un-educated dwarves who think with their wieners first. Must find other sources of entertainment for them.

I started playing yesterday. It's a lot of fun!

My fort:

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It's not much to look at, and I only have 16 dwarves, but no one has starved or otherwise died yet \o/

I've been working on it for about 4 hours. It's my 2nd fort.

Highlight the workshop and you'll be given (confusing) hints at what is needed (you can look them up in the wiki if you want).

So the fallout from that siege continues. I finally killed all the goblins in the spike pit and set my dwarves loose on picking up stuff the goblins dropped... all that without turning off the spikes coming up and down from the floor! Well, that resulted in probably 10 dwarves severely injured, and 4-5 dead on the spot. Some died in the hospital because it was overwhelmed... my main well somehow got it's bucket full so a bunch died from thirst... now everybody is tantruming and smashing up farms... probably half my population is unhappy or worse! It's probably nightmarish to live in my fortress.

I did start on the construction of the waterwheels that will power the magma trap... and I got some new immigrants! I'm sure they'll enjoy their stay, because in all likelihood they'll be dead soon.

Had to break down and install Ubuntu 12.04 to fix the issue of not installing the first time. So now I'll have to re-install DF and everything else (lucky me!).

I was already wondering what all the garbage in their rooms was but never bothered to check, thinking maybe they just don't have enough chests and cabinets to store their belongings.

I've been under heavy siege as well lately. First it was just 10 goblins or so which were all easily drowned in the foyer.

First Invasion
Then some time later an evil force of 109 (onehundredandnine) creatures arrived: jabberwarriors, goblins, trolls, cave crawlers and olms iirc. I could drown a few of them but could not wait for all of them to stand in my entrance hall because then they would have broken the doors (For a moment I thought about using the unclothed unhappy children as a meat shield... that would have stalled the invaders in the entrance a bit and afterwards there should have been enough clothes for the survivors so it would have been a win-win situation for everyone(except the ones who are dead but there's no sense crying over every mistake ) not to mention the beautifully avantgarde crimson paint job which would have come for free with that).

we're going underground!
With the foyer flooded to the ceiling with water though, the remaining enemy forces had no way of entering my fortress but just to be sure I quickly walled off the main doors behind the wet grave of the first bunch and decided to move underground.

A grand plan was forged though to eventually reclaim the surface so I started drafting every useless dwarf and dug out a few archery ranges for secret underground training.

The other dwarves passed the time underground by smoothing the stone in a good chunk of the whole fortress, brewing lots of booze, partying in the grand hall, making more clothes for the children (who seem to be satisfied for now) and producing truckloads of bone bolts.

To my surprise the invaders just left after some time!

we're going to the surface...
So... the wall behind the main doors was removed, the entrance hall drained and the dwarves could enjoy fresh air again after what seemed like an eternity (yet a joyful one) underground.

The peace didn't last long though: just as they were about to chop some trees to restock the underground wood supplies another invasion force of about 90 creatures arrived. Lots of goblins and trolls.

Second Invasion
...or so we thought: back to the underground!
The trolls started dismantling the draining floodgates in the entrance hall and thus tearing a hole into the reusable defense mechanism plan. So without hesitation the dwarves had to pull the lever again and again the fortress was sealed off and again a wall was raised behind the main gates and the dwarves prepared themselves to stay underground for another joyful eternity this time knowing that the enemy would probably just leave again after a while.

Some of the hunters seemed unwilling to wait though and made their way to the roof over the pastures and managed to shoot two passing trolls from there .

The others continued smoothing stone in the living areas. A few dwarves didn't manage to make it back in time underground and had to stay outside and they were all hunted down by the invaders. With their bodies out of reach, the other dwarves were unable to bury them properly so at some point the fortress was haunted by a couple of dwarven ghosts.

Sometimes the dwarves found other dead dwarves whose bodies were completely drained of blood. Later some dwarf reported a murder case and accused another dwarf who turned out to be a vampire!

and back to the surface
So they had a lot of fun underground again until the second invasion army left and they could try to get back to the surface again.

Lasting Peace?
Since the last big invasion things calmed down and even the caravans took up their trade routes again though they passed my fortress at first as the trade depot along with everything else on the surface which wasn't protected behind walls was destroyed by the invaders.

After a while even more immigrants kept streaming in despite the lurking danger.

The dwarves are currently using the time of peace to stock up on wood and doing some major landscaping project on the surface, straightening out the mountainsides, removing ramps and planning to build an epic wall and a moat around the fortress surface level.

The first project after returning to the surface for the second time was to improve the flooding and draining facilities in the entrance though, so invaders would not be able to destroy it anymore.

some pictures:
The first bunch of goblins at the gates curiously examining the statues and attempting to destroy or steal them (couldn't tell).
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Cleaning up after drowning those first goblins. The unhappy dwarves in this image are the children who still didn't have enough clothes at that point.
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A cleaning accident (dwarves kept the doors open too long) caused some water from the entrance hall to spill all the way down into the forge level coloring the walls red with goblin blood (why do drowned goblins bleed anyway? maybe the force of the incoming water was so strong that some of them got smashed into the walls and statues...).
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Some enemies being killed in one of the bigger sieges. Nothing like hearing the melodic gurgling sound of drowning foes in the morning.
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Underground archery ranges (built during the first big siege for the 'reclaim surface at some point' plan before I knew the invaders would just leave eventually).
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Goblins of the second invasion force who hunted down one of the miners who could not run back underground in time.
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The improved/fortified drowning/draining entrance hall system. Also draining is a lot faster now to increase the group drowning frequency.
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The diligent landscaping workforce, busy straightening out another cliff.
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Some of the invader corpses.
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The dark history of the fortress is documented by the huge burial dungeon. At least they're not just full of children anymore but now also hold dead warriors and many a busy civilian who worked himself to death for the greater good...
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...some of those civilians managed to survive the countless landscaping/landslide accidents and are now being treated in the hospital.
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This just shows that not every dwarf is a good miner but what else are you gonna do if you have countless unemployed dwarves sitting around doing nothing?
Right, handing out large numbers of freshly forged copper picks and going on an epic landscaping trip with fishers, farmers and peasants is about the only reasonable thing to do.

I'm sure the many by-standing babies and children who bled to death after caveins caused by their ambitious amateur miner parents are happy to have made that sacrifice knowing it was for the future wealth and everlasting strength of the fortress. It's also an honor to die for the blood god.

I'm curious if they plan to add 2D graphics to DF at some point. Can't remember the game, but I vaguely remember an ASCII game that started out ASCII and then was turned to 2D after they had everything in place. I know someone tried to make it 2D but last I tried that viewer it looked horrible, more so than the text (of course it may just be my computer is challenged.

I do not mind the use of graphics and alternate character sets. My reason for not using them is just because I tend to want to play any game the way it was intended to be played by the developer(s).

The charset I'm using is also a modified one (Marble Dice's 16x16 remake of the original 8x8 charset which I further modified a bit (the two dwarf chars)).

The problem with alternate charsets for this game is that the game does not fully support them yet so there will always be a compromise between shapes and forms and what they represent in the game.

The problem (if you want to call it that (it does not actually matter at all for the gameplay)) is that in DF the visual representation of any in-game object can be one of many things: a symbol, an abbreviation, a character used as a shape or form which abstracts the real thing it represents or even a low resolution texture. The same character may be used by the game for many different things and often you can tell what it is by the additional color information but equally often not even that will be sufficient (which is why the game allows you to inspect any tile any time to receive more information in written form).

This is also why symbolism and abbreviation works best for most objects while in a graphic set it would be preferred if each object would be represented by a picture of the thing it represents. However as the game uses a fixed number of characters which is far lower than the number of unique objects, this can not be achieved at this point in development (not without using mods/hacks/third party visualizers).

So using a charset which keeps the symbolic look of each character works best in DF because a symbol can always represent many more different things than a picture of any individual thing could (e.g. a circle can be millstone, a well, a wheel, a cheese, a ring and whatnot whereas a picture of a ring can always just represent a ring and nothing else).

That being said, I can't wait to finish my current landscaping and surface wall project to see how it looks in a visualizer like Stonesense or in a 3D visualizer (forgot the name but I think there was at least one of them around somewhere).

On the subject of graphics (those that replace dwarves/animals/goblins/etc. with sprites); After getting used to the "ASCII" graphics of the old 2D versions from before graphics were introduced, I now find the graphics to be grating. I know what a dwarf does by its color which is the same the color of the job, whereas deciphering a tiny sprite is annoying and the extra fluff is not sufficient imo to cover for that.

As for using a different tileset with special representations for objects (like ropes), I again find them to be more confusing than the original, especially those that replace the letters of the alphabet and you get someone named fik<bucket>d.

I don't mind using a slightly modified tileset that keeps the original symbols but in a more easily readable font and size, which is why I use this tileset but with dwarves modified to the "original" icons. (it is also one of the few 12x12 tilesets which I find to be a preferable size)

Anyway, this thread motivated my to resume playing again, so maybe I'll have some boring dwarfcraft updates for y'all as well

"Getting everything in place"? Have you seen the todo list? They will never get it done, and therefore they will never add graphics. The dev team is very much in the gameplay above graphics department.

The only reason I use graphics sets is for the dwarves. I really find it hard to memorize the color->profession mapping without extra help. I'd use ASCII graphics for everything else, but it's really hard to have custom dwarves without custom graphics.

EDIT:

Not as much of a problem now, since you can use a different font for text and for graphics these days.

I tried it once and failed horribly. I need some sort of Dwarf Fortress Guide For Five-Year-Olds or something ...

Ok, I tried switching to a plain tileset... here's what it looks like now :

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Do you not have a channel that connects your water reservoir to the river? You could block it and do something... I'd try to keep the titan alive and then use it as the resident of the pit of death that I'd drop enemies in... either as a defensive mechanism or just for fun from cages.

In my fortress I finally completed a working prototype of my magma trap... one issue I found is that it just doesn't drain of magma fast enough. I was thinking of setting goblins on fire but not actually melting their items... I may have to scrap that idea and just let the magma flow. In terms of my dwarf devenders... I built a danger room and got some axe and hammerlords. Can't wait to try them on some goblins.

My fortress became a barony too... no more changing mayors!

EDIT:

So, my fortress got attacked again (while a vampire cavefishman diplomat was visiting o_O) and I got to test out my magma trap! Or... rather... Hot Magma Fat Decimator™ 7000: The one step weight loss solution that will literally melt off the fat from your body, giving you the thin figure you deserve. Take this ogre for example:

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Clearly not a winner of the life's lottery! She definitely needs to lose some weight. We signed her up for a FREE trial treatment in the Hot Magma Fat Decimator™ 7000 and here are the effects:

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Much better! Now she can go out and dismember dwarven children without feeling self-conscious about her body.

Consult your doctor before using Hot Magma Fat Decimator™ 7000. Side effects may include:

Unfortunately not. The channel for the water reservoir is independent from the channels leading to the entrance hall (where the Titan is stuck).

There is a huge design flaw in all of my channels too: in all of them I only blocked the target end to my fortress with floodgates but never the source end near the river so I can't make any changes to the channels now unless I cut off the river (not sure how to do that yet but I'll try building and collapsing a tower over it first).

Using the Titan as an executor is an excellent idea!