best way to lockdown your fort?

[Endemonadia]

Ive been attacked a couple of times now and each time i have trouble getting my dwarves to safety.

I played the original and remember you could setup 'Burrows' which were basically zones that you could activate in times of danger instantly and your dwarves would make their way there. I cant see this in the Steam game, does it exist?

Whats the best/most efficient way to get your dwarves to drop everything and go hide?

[Haethei]

Burrows are definitely the "drop everything and go here" button for panic rooms and stuff. They force dwarves to keep their tasks / movement restricted to the defined area. They're also useful for making sure your stone workers aren't wandering into bad places like caverns to pick up a sock someone dropped there, but that's less important

Best way to lock yourself in is just to make a drawbridge in your entrance that raises to seal your fort. Enemies can't really do anything about it, unlike regular doors. I keep it open until something bad shows up, the game will usually tell you when that happens. Tell your dwarves to burrow immediately, wait a second for any dwarves outside to get inside, pull the door-bridge up and prepare your military to meet them when the door comes back down

[Andril]

Burrows are "U" or the 4th button from the right side of the bar.

[LastChime]

I just manually assign them all to the burrow, lost a fisher though cause he wouldn't stop...then noticed he's military so I activated the squad and he doddled, stabbed a few with his iron spear though and distracted them until the bridges were up so at least it was a glorious goodnight.

Really miss the Civ alert tho for sure

[Endemonadia]

Originally posted by Haethei:

Best way to lock yourself in is just to make a drawbridge in your entrance that raises to seal your fort. Enemies can't really do anything about it, unlike regular doors.

But how do u get the dwarves working beyond the gate to get back inside?

Also i cannot see a 'burrows' option anywhere... does it even exist in the Steam version?

[Haethei]

Originally posted by Endemonadia:

Originally posted by Haethei:

Best way to lock yourself in is just to make a drawbridge in your entrance that raises to seal your fort. Enemies can't really do anything about it, unlike regular doors.

But how do u get the dwarves working beyond the gate to get back inside?

Also i cannot see a 'burrows' option anywhere... does it even exist in the Steam version?

Burrows are like zones you can use to force your dwarves to stay in a specific area. That's how you get them inside, all the dwarves outside will rush to enter the allowed zone inside your fort

Yes burrows exist in steam version, i think the other guy had a comment to tell you where to find it

[Endemonadia]

Originally posted by Andril:

Burrows are "U" or the 4th button from the right side of the bar.

This brings up the Citizens menu. Ive been using this to play the game so ive used alot of the options within this section.

Unless im being blind i cannot see anything that resembles Burrows :(

[kheftel]

Shift+U, u is units

[Endemonadia]

Originally posted by kheftel:

Shift+U, u is units

Thanks!

That looks like it... ill see how it works :)

[LastChime]

This pez lookin thing

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2904174753

[kheftel]

Originally posted by LastChime:

This pez lookin thing

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2904174753

Haha, nice

[Dagmar]

You'd also do well to dig a trench in front of your drawbridge, and then flatten out the bottom of it so that no ramp even touches the drawbridge diagonally. Some creatures are powerful enough to smash built items like doors and drawbridges, but if they can't reach it they're just out of luck.

It's also important to remember that burrows need dwarves assigned to them, and while when you first create a burrow everyone will automatically be assigned to it, any new dwarves who were just born or migrated to the fortress will not be added automatically so before you activate the burrow (while the game is paused) go and scroll down to the bottom of the list and add everyone.

The insane, and some children, will actually ignore that order for some time and the simplest thing to do about that is nothing. You can afford to lose a couple of idiot dwarves, and hey maybe they can manage to run away long enough to survive, but what you can't do is delay issuing that order to pull the lever and turtle up because Urist McDimwit is taking their sweet time coming inside when there's 30+ heavily armed goblins coming in hot.

Moral relativism aside, screw those guys. Pull up the drawbridge, lock the surface doors, and keep everyone underground until the crisis is over. Goblins can and will fire volleys over the walls, and your militia will only be weakened by being allowed to stay on the surface--most notably because the little maniacs can and will climb right over your walls (unless you've fully enclosed everywhere they can go) and try and take on the entire force by themselves. Sure your militia commander might go out in a blaze of glory, but it's better for the fort if they survive another year to continue training the other squaddies.

Also, if you're working in a biome with lots of trees, ignore what the elves will say about it and cut down every last tree that touches your outer walls, because invaders will merrily climb those trees to get over your walls and get inside. In the past I have just paved a 4-wide strip all around my fortress to ensure no new trees can spring up next to a wall after the siege has begun.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by evildagmar:

You'd also do well to dig a trench in front of your drawbridge, and then flatten out the bottom of it so that no ramp even touches the drawbridge diagonally. Some creatures are powerful enough to smash built items like doors and drawbridges, but if they can't reach it they're just out of luck.

AFAIK, nothing can smash through a drawbridge. Building Destroyers can destroy a lot of things, though. (Doors, mostly)

.....


Dwarves seem to finish what they're doing in terms of some Job tasks before responding to a Burrows summons. Kids "playing make believe," or whatever, outside seem to follow that rule for their "Kid" behaviors, too. Meaning that they will seem to ignore the Burrow's call, but they seem like they're not just done yet with their "job" "playing make believe."

It provides high-drama, though, as your soldiers have to leave their carefully prepared positions to rush out and save the children... or not. :)

"Look! It's Urist Mcpiddlepants out there!"

"That the little brat that threw soup in my beard, yesterday?"

"Yes!"

"Sucks to be him, then..."

[hubris]

Originally posted by evildagmar:

... Some creatures are powerful enough to smash built items like doors and drawbridges, but if they can't reach it they're just out of luck. ...

Moats are a good idea (and fun!), but raised drawbridges are immune to building destroyers.

[Dagmar]

That's good to know, but just the same I'm going to keep doing those trenches so that I don't have to worry about accidentally atom-smashing any idiots hanging around too close to the door when the siege ends. ...and if you think the odds of that are too low, I literally caught a thieving noble this weekend by side effect when they got atom-smashed by a drawbridge going up after which I got the notification that the masterwork they were making off with had suddenly disappeared.

I don't do moats because while it seems like a good idea at a time, if I have anyone fighting near them, I always seem to wind up with perfectly good dwarves landing in the drink from an ill-planned dodge. At least if it's a dry moat I can just sprinkle some traps around down there and my dorfs can walk all the way around to get back out without issue, while anyone else has to take their chances with a bunch of cheap glass goblin slicers. Also... free meat during the off-season because wildlife isn't real smart.

[anthhopper]

I had a peasant dwarf who was mistakenly assigned as a fisherman just before an invasion, and he just WOULD not stop trying to catch a fish to run back the burrow. Guess he had to finish his task first, and since he had 0 fishing skill it was taking him ages. So he was left outside to die, and he didn't even catch any fish before they showed up to slaughter him!