Early Game Base Defense

[LadyBugzy]

I'm on the second campaign, the Ice world. The hourly spawns are killer for me, I don't have access yet to towers and my dwarves keep dying. I looked up many base defense strategies, but most are for after you can build towers, which I can't do yet. I'm a kind of slow player, I mine a lot so I can make them armor and all that happy stuff for comfort, so the hourly spawns just keep getting worse while I make slight progress on the tech tree.

There's a serious balance issue where like 50+ killer undead spawn, and you have 10 dwarves and nothing else to fight them off with. Archers are a joke and miss 9 out of 10 shots it seems.

I built up dirt block walls to close off my base entrance and stockpile. It is open on the top. I built it up about 10 tiles tall, 3 tiles wide. The skeletons with shields just start stacking and the other creatures come up and over. They won't dig which makes a sand trap kind of useless.

Since its the ice world I can't try the water/fence pit I read about, but it also relies on towers to be effective. I made wood traps, that takes out some of them, but two hits and the trap is done. I haven't unlocked iron ones yet.

Am I missing something on the sand trap idea that makes them dig at the wall to trigger the sand trap?

[Lions_Den]

For early base defense, I dug down and then placed dirt in the background section around my stockpile and as much stone as I could in the foreground with dirt completing what I didn't have enough dirt for. This will hopefully help you out until you can get further in the tech tree.

[LadyBugzy]

I wound up closing it in, I put three layers of stone and fended off the last rotation. Like 20 skeletons were digging on one block, but I had read if you click to mine it and click again it resets the damage. Sad to resort to bug abuse to survive lol

[xenxander]

You can always build a 'hallway'. a one block high passage with about three doors. Keep your dwarves 'inside the shelter' and have them fight through the door. When the first door breaks, they fall back (or should) to the second. Also early on, it's useful to use bows. Not so much later, as bows lack the DPS you need. However for 'early' strategies, all bows can help you stay alive until you can craft silver swords.

Also built this little 'hallways of doors', above ground, and have basically all of your shelter below ground with a hatch. that way even if they get through all doors, they still have to kill the hatch to get in, and you can shoot arrows up through the hatch (if dwarves aren't reatarded and shoot through a hard angle - you know what I mean :P ).

I also (initially) Liike to have only one 'hall of doors' instead of two - you know, waves come from either side, and so you would think to make doors on either side of your stockpile-portal. Well what you can do is build a staircase of dirt a few blocks away from the part of of your shelter that is above ground.. and have a dirt walkway above your shelter, dropping off near your one door. If the dirt walkway you build is about three blocks hovering above your shelter barrier, they tend not to dig down, provided there's a path to walk to get down from the ledge and drop.
Since you're in the snow area, a platform of dirt three to five blocks above the roof of your shelter is also a wise idea to remove the problems of snow buildup on the ground, and allow for an uninterrupted tree farm to grow and with the abiilty to still harvest snow if you need to (by gooing to the platform above).

Sure it 'looks' kinda silly, but unless you're playing sandbox it doesn't matter what your shelter looks like, you will be abanodning it anyway next map.

[ehyder]

And your first 'tall', wide wall defense was too short. Skeletons will almost always climb over rather than dig through. You have to make sure the wall is high enough that the skellies will not climb over it. I usually start with a minimum of a 15 block wall and then increase it. Your best clue to whether wall is tall enough is if the skellies are able to climb it. As you get more waves you will have to increase the height of the wall.

Given that you are on the ice world try putting in some snow wall traps if you are low on sand.

[LadyBugzy]

I like the hallway of doors idea, I'll try that when I'm ready to open it back up. Closing in the top means they have to dig through it and I've been putting traps up there to take out a good bit of them.

@ehyder, it doesn't seem they have a limit to how high they can stack themselves other than the number of skeles with shields that spawned.

I'm now getting portals coming from both sides and just got access to steel weapons. I spend most of my time re-vamping my strategy and haven't been able to explore the depths as much as in my first level so I may have to restart this with the things I've learned.

I didn't know snow falls like sand, I tend to have less snow from making water or ice blocks for crafting.

[A Clockwork Banana]

I used a simple strategy that worked fine:

1 -- Build your house upwards, like a skyscraper (add a couple of levels of dirt on the outside for a farm and easy wood, and to plant grain. Also add a pool of stone outside to gather water and maybe fish) - These outdoors levels can be added directly to the side of your building and will never get attacked by much - only the occasional yeti (they spawn up there for some reason, now and then) and the gargoyles.

2 -- Have only one entrance at the bottom and clear everything around it, at least 4 or 5 squares to each side - the end result is a lonely tower where the only accessible point is a single stairway below. You can make the upper levels wider than the base without any risk, as long as the base is narrow (the storage plus a few squares on one side for the entrance point).


3 -- Make a long path at the bottom, on each side (with earth) of at least 20 squares long (more if you can) and drop traps along it after every portal event. Traps will grind a lot of the mob and leave a lot less for your dwarves to handle. Wood traps are ok, metal traps are awesome.

!!! Make sure the areas where the portals spawn are clear, so the mobs fall down to the paths on each side, as far away as possible.

4 -- MOST IMPORTANT - Focus your fire!! Select the flying gargoyles first, ALWAYS - dwarves will go up to the outer farming level while your traps handle the first foot mobs below the base - then focus your attack one by one (if you have the patience for that). It keeps your dwarves together - if they scatter, they die a lot more.

...

I hope this helps :)

Cheers,
Foo

[ehyder]

@bugsy: The limit depends on the number of skellies in the wave. I know, obvious, but that is why you can get away with shorter walls in the early game, but need to build up as you get through more waves. But by the time there get to be enough skellies to climb my high walls I have moved on to mid/end game defenses, converting the sand walls to a fortress. Which contains two sets of steel doors on each side, towers (lightning and arrow), brick walls, fences/gates, and traps.

Not exactly before and after, but shows the idea:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=272855060

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=450467046

[Alaratt]

Few tips....

-mobs will (mostly)only dig squares that were built by you, so when u start new game and go to dig down, make sure and only dig out 1 square by however deep you need to go. (ex. 1 square wide by 7-8 squares deep, home base accesible only through that path down) Enemies will only try digging that 1 square path down, so just before wave starts recall dwarves and manually build stone, or anything you have thats stronger to block it off, then dig yourself out when waves are done. Steel walls only cost 2 gold and 1 by itself will hold the waves off early game.

-trees growing out of a square make that square invincible as long as the tree is there. This tactic works with several other items too. best way to check is to build an item then try and dig the square its sitting on, if turns red then that square is untouchable, if allows you to dig then pick different item and try again. (just like the stockpile.) (trees will not grow above the stockpile for some reason)

-your mana replenishes completely when you level up so spend all mana you have just before level up on portals. If your lucky enough to find a spot below surface already hollowed out but no surface access then you can portal in, make a shelter and keep portal active for access. works best at beginning levels, as level ups get harder maintaining your access portal will be harder.