Dwarf Fortress' Simpler, Prettier Cousin: Let's Play Gnomoria!

This thread would totally sell me on Gnomoria if I had a computer that could run it. Apparently I'm a complete sucker for ridiculously detailed combat logs, low-tech architecture, and breeding llamas and emus. (Though not to each other.)

(Wait, is that something that could be invented? A llama-emu farm could rock.)

What would a llama-emu LOOK like? And could we breed yak in there too to get their awesome horns on them?

I guess it'd either be a winged, two-legged llama, or a really wooly emu with dreamy eyes. Why not slap some horns on either? Or have both! Could be wacky sexual dimorphism!

...they just made it...



Seriously, that's how close it was. Amaranthine might not have been guaranteed to survive had they made it just one second earlier, but he'd have had a fighting chance...

My mouth twists. I've lost too many good gnomes this fall.



Now properly armed and armoured troops are here, the goblin that destroyed the leather Amaranthine was wearing is easy meat.



The two-headed ogre is more of an unknown quantity, however. The first problem is one of grammar:



Wait, so.... which left eye is mangled? The right left eye, or the left left eye?



Oh. Well. That's one way to resolve that.



Not a bug; he's mangled both left eyes. He still has his right eye and his right eye, though!



Blackadar takes care of business.



Now for the precisely-half-blind ogre.

Ahah, super. The troublesome peril of which left eye was quickly solved by some humor!
He totally wanted the matching wounds.

Two eyepatches are twice as mysteriously roguish!

Not that I expect the two-headed half-blind ogre is going to make it back home to impress the other ogres of its preferred gender(s). The gnomes will have their revenge.

I almost feel as if this ogre exists purely to give my military more ogre organs to mangle.



Three-quarters blind!



And all the way.



With it blinded, the traditional ogre torture can begin.



Their remains the problem of precisely what is fatal for such a being. The high degree of organ redundancy means several normally-fatal blows won;t do it:



Two necks, two hearts, four eyes, two brains.....




But still only two lungs. Lung fu is back in business!

Still, this whole fight was costly, the sad capper to a season of gnomish blood. This leaves me with a decision.



I have sealed the outer mechanical doors for the moment. I am 99% certain this will leave us utterly impervious to attacks by things from the surface, barring incompetence like me ordering the walls torn down by mistake. This means we'll be completely safe from any goblins, ogres or mants that march in.

You'll note I have rearranged the mechanics of the door slightly to simplify it.

I could leave this door sealed more or less permanently. I don't need regular access to the world beyond the walls: I have food and lumber enough grown within them. The only reason I NEED to open the doors is for merchants and gnomads to be able to visit; as they only arrive at set times during the year, I can just flip the gates open for them and shut them again once they're inside.

So, in theory, I could set things so I'll never again lose a gnome to the greenskins or the mants, who are the main military threats at the moment.

But is that too boring? Without at least the threat of enemy invasions, this game can get pretty dull to watch.

I certainly wouldn't want to leave the gates permanently closed, but I am sorely tempted to leave them closed for the whole of the winter. I'd like to get some firearms made, and gnomes trained in their use: I'd also like to get some proper steel weapons and armour mined and forged, and get all the general population into full bronze.

To be clear, I give it 50/50 odds that if I leave the gate open, I'll suffer a complete or near-complete population wipe due to a too-powerful invasion force showing up at some point. That might be fun to watch! If literally everyone dies, though, the game ends and can't be recovered (unless I make a backup save). Individual dead gnomes can be replaced, but the danger is that if more than a couple of gnomes die at once, that probably means the attackers are powerful enough to kill them all.

With the gate closed, surface enemies will still show up: but they'll just mill around harmlessly outside the walls until eventually, they starve to death. That might make it... interesting for any new gnomads showing up if there are enemies alive outside at the same time.

I will still see attacks from subterranean enemies (zombies, skeletons, golems, beetles) either way, although I'll still be using torch placement to try and avoid it as much as possible.

So! Anyone reading the thread, post below and let me know your vote, in bold: closed doors or open doors?

I vote that you keep your open doors policy. After all, who else will denude the world of its dangerous critters and work to lung-crush the two-headed ogre menace?

closed doors

Because edge-of-the-seat fights are fun, but "we will totally be slaughtered, no kidding" is not.

Why would you miss a chance to relive Roanoke?

Open doors.

Close the doors for the winter. If it's too boring, you can always open them again permanently in the spring.

Open doors!

If they don't have siege weapons it's only fair.

Close them for the winter, and open them again in spring. It's not like you'll be completely free of trouble, with the excavations and all.

So.... 3 votes each way. You're all excellent for breaking my indecision. :-)

Close the doors until I have proper iron/steel armor 'cause this bronze breastplate isn't making me feel so safe anymore, what I only have the Terrible Puke's best interests at heart! the Spring and take it from there depending on how boring things go. And now someone will vote for the opposite choice in 5...4...3...2...

Close the gates, and dig DEEPER!

See, that's what I'm thinking. Slam the doors shut! Hold off the mant hordes! Delve deep, deeper, to the VERY DEPTHS OF THE EARTH!

And then when spring comes around, swing open the gates and deal with the gathered mass of cute destruction. Which I guess will be picking their teeth (do mants have teeth?) with the bones of merchants and immigrants by then.

CLOSE THE GATES

Close the gates until spring, if for no other reason than to let us mourn in peace...and so we can focus on hollowing out the flesh of the earth till naught but a few thin columns of stone keep the surface world supported above the molten mantle.

Okay, think I'm going to go for closing them for winter, and trying to get steel production going in the time.

I also suggest you try training your idle gnomes during the winter as well. I brought it up before, but after losing gnomes I think it should become a priority. Oh and you might also want to relocate the top level guards under ground for the winter if it isn't much trouble. Otherwise they will have quite a the hike to save me the miners.

Close the gates.
Get everyone in bronze, the keepers in steel and arm some gnomes with guns.
And then open the gates and show the might of Gnome!

I am also for closing the gates and digging deeper. I want to see gnome!me's tinkering pay off. :D

Well, considering how I'm now dead (:c) I'm for closing the gate. And train up the common gnomes at least a little.

Closing the gates it is!

My priority for the winter is set: seal ourselves off from the world, get everyone in bronze armour and the soldiers into some amount of steel.

I set up mining orders for floor -11.



This'll allow me to rake in yet more copper and tin, which I'll need in abundance for all this bronzecrafting. This time I'm ready with torches at all the intersections.

My miners practically stroll through rock as if it were air these days. Ore veins take a little longer.

Torches or not, we are getting periodic golem invasions. I assume they're stemming from the Crak of Doom down on floor -59, or else from some unlit square somewhere. Maybe the staircases? I haven't lit those up all the way down...

The golems generally come in packs of two or three, and seem to be the most feeble enemy I face these days. Gnomes in leather survive against them with nary an injury, and the army dispatch them very quickly when they reach them. Contempt for golems has reached an all-time high, such that we're now just slapping them with our gloves:



*slap* YOU HAVE WRONGED ME, SIR! I DEMAND SATISFACTION!



Zombie invasions are less frequent but equally undeadly occurrence. This lot can't seem to find the stairs properly and just mill around until they're eventually spotted by the military. Well, four out of five are, anyway.



Somewhere in there Gryff lopped off an arm, too:



See this zombie? He's 'armless!

*dies*



Since the gates are close,d I decide to relocate the Keepers down to floor -59, where most of the action will now presumably be. The Lurked Damages can go back up to their original base forty floors up.



I juggle bedrooms around accordingly. Much of the military now has TWO bedrooms, one near the surface and one way below ground; I hope they'll use whichever is more convenient, but they'll probably just keep going to whichever they feel is nicer.

The sealed gate. My ultimate aim is to use that training ground on the ridge there as a combined shooting-gallery and lookout post, but I want to get everyone in bronze-minimum armour first before I start training up the 1st Gnomish Gunners.



This is well overdue, and doesn't matter right now given that we're heading for winter anyway, but I decide to suspend strawberry farming. We really, really don't need the food -animals are being born faster than we can make them into sandwiches and eat them, and we have enough yak milk to float an armada.



That one missing zombie finally shows up just as the Keepers are moving between training areas. Thasero has us covered:



Job done.



The Damages head back up, The Keepers head down.



Feels weird not to have these guys guarding the gates. Still, I'm assured that the smoothed hunk of bronze we have blocking the way is truly impregnable.



The Damages back on their old stomping ground. I note Gryff has taken control of SuperJay's legendary shield, with which he performed heroics during the Great Cock-Up. Why these guys keep playing pass-the-parcel with their legendary weapons I have no idea. These days I'm grateful if they show up in any armour, never mind the right armour.



Indeed it is! And this Pukemas, our presents are the presence of:



Seven dashing gnomads!
...
Six armless zombies
FIVE RAMPANT YAKS!
Four discarded helms
Three blade traps
Two goblin sausage
And an emu in a pine tree!



Guess I'd better open the door and let these guys in....

Now there's an idea for a naval expansion to the game. Gnomes At Sea: Sailing the Yak-Milk Waves.

I get why it happens in terms of game mechanics, but it still seems somewhat perverse to me that you get bigger gnome migrations after seasons where lots of gnomes have died. Come to the Puke! Violent death rates have never been higher!

So yes, a whole seven gnomads! Let's meet them.



Ozzo and Trudas are both skilled at killing things, and will be joining the military. They're both hammerers. I seem to get a disproportionate number of soldiers who use hammers. A quick assessment marks out Trudas as marginally the better soldier (although she's lousy with a shield), so she gets inducted into the Starry Keepers as the late @Sheepherder's replacement. Ozzo gets the somewhat less glamorous position of replacing the deceased Bram in the otherwise empty Conquered Numbers, who I'll assign to a training ground on the surface. These two bring my military back up to eleven members again, which makes mee feel a little safer. Not safe enough to open up the gates, though.




fadeaccompli and Kaneda both come to me as builders. I typically look for builders to demonstrate other skills as well, so I page through their skilll listings. fadeaccompli proves to have a 13 in Machining and Mechanic, and a 15 in Masonry. He also has 12 in Medic and Metalworking. Evidently his school's careers advice pamphlet both began and ended with M. Anyhow, I assign him to take care of all of those Ms.

Kaneda's next best skill is leatherworking, but she's arrived at just the time when I'm making leather obsolete. She does have reasonable (12) ratings in Animal Husbandry and Butchery, though, so I make her a Rancher anyway to replace the much-missed Tyjenks. She also has a 14 in Machining and 10 in the other two mechanical trades, so I make her part-engineer also. She does have a 14 in armourcrafting, but I'm dumping all of that on Poe at the moment in an effort to concentrate the skill-ups. Maybe it'll come in handy if Poe meets with a horrible accident.



The other three all come to me as woodcutters. Lopping trees doesn't actually take all that much time, and I am well supplied with people who already do it, so I look for additional employment for these three also. I allow all three to be carpenters, purely because the demand for torches is really high in these days of mass-mining, and no-one really cares how good-quality the torches they make are. If I need something made of wood in a high quality I could always create a separate carpenter and assign Shake or Alice to it, who have more experience; but for the bulk of the required woodwork quantity, not quality, is what counts.

Ravenholme proves to be a talented (15) weaver, so I let him do that as well. He also gets to use Mechanic (14) because it annoys me when I don't have anyone awake when I need a lever flipping. (Flipping levers is apparently a job only for qualified mechanics in the Puke, which perhaps speaks to the quality of our engineering).

Snark and Alligator, conversely, don;t have any other notably high talents that I want to employ right now. I'm content to just let them do hauling when they aren't woodworking. Sorry!

----

If it's any comfort, there's a lot of hauling to be done. In many ways the industries of Gnomoria (in this version, anyway - the developer has suggested he wants to change this) are 95% about hauling the ingredients to the right place and only 5% about the application of actually skilled gnomes at a workshop. Making a lump of bronze, for instance, requires one copper bar and one in bar: each of which themselves required 2 units of the appropriate ore and 1 unit of coal. That's six separate hauling jobs per bronze bar (eight if you count hauling the copper and tin bars in-between, although that's typically a much shorter haul). Given that, say, a breastplate or a weapon needs ten bronze bars, that's at least 60 reasonably lengthy (from the mines to the workshops) hauling jobs per one breastplate craft.

This is why all gnomes (except soldiers) haul in my Puke.

----

But wait, we have to get these guys inside first! With the gate closed, the gnomads mill around, confused, with no way to get at the fabled Great Hall which they long to idle in (this being before their assignments).



Skoob gets the lever flipping job, and the mechanical wall descends, allowing entry and egress once more.



Snark and Ravenholme are slower on the uptake and hang back.



The others make tracks for the entrance.

Since the gate has been closed, I have no guarantees that there aren't enemies milling around outside: surface invaders would have been as confused as these guys were at the lack of an entry route to the Puke and will have defaulted to milling around aimlessly. The coast seems clear for the moment, though. I can only hope they all make sensible decisions about how to get in.

Just look at my smashing beard and hat! Truly, my namesake gnome is ready to take on all M-related duties.

I shall bask in the glory of gnommish mediocrity!

So the responsability of kidnapping yaks to dark, secluded places is now on my shoulders? I'm honored, really.

WTF, I had a legendary shield to go with my legendary hammer and Gryff stole it??

HAMMERS AT DAWN, SIR.

I'm distraught. ;)

I want to lash out. I want to place blame, but Fate does not care whether she is blamed or not. She just is.

Lookadem scamper in! D'awwwwwww



The front group makes it to the gate without incident, but fadeaccompli has that look in his eye....



Ravenholme and Snark straggle in late. fadeaccompli 's evidently erratic brain twitches and he lurches spasmodically in entirely the wrong direction.



fadeaccompli
what r u doin
fadeaccompli
STAHP



Yeah, you see what happens? I swear, it's always the ones with the hats. What is it about hats and madness?

Oh right, huffing mercury fumes.



fadeaccompli finally eventually thinks better of his current course and turns tail, and fortunately the goblin doesn't evince much interest in giving chase. I discover this is because he's on the point of expiring of thirst, the invading forces apparently having given no thought as to provisions when they come to lay siege to the Puke.



DAMNIT Pogo



The open gates are perplexing all my gnomes, who suddenly remember orders to pick up any armour lying around and store it and start applying them to the newly available monster-filled expanses outside the walls. Like Pogo above, the'll all quickly run into trouble doing that. So I cancel as many stockpiles as I can find, and even order the soldiers not to defend gnomes in the hopes of preventing them going outside too.

Eventually I corral everyone back into the pen.



Fortunately no-one was injured.



I seal the doors again, and now winter can truly begin.

I like the pile of dead mants near the goblin.

The assignments of the new kids, in case you've forgotten. I'll post up their stats in a separate post or two below, as well, so you can all compare your Pottery skills and brag about them.

All these fellows and ladyfellows need sorting into military/cowardice squads as well. With all the deaths we have a few vacancies.



As mentioned, Trudas steps into Sheepherder's shoes, taking the slot in the all-star Starry Keepers. Literally stepping into his shoes; we were hardly going to waste good armour.

(NB: the armour's quality may not actually be "good" or even "average")

The Lurked Damages remain the same, since no-one has died - Nerys, Darkluna, Minardii, Thasero, Gryff. Evidently they aren't trying hard enough.



Ozzo goes into the lonely solo slot in the Conquered Numbers, to train with himself as Bram did. That's all the proper military.

The original militia(TM) that is the Bolted Dancers of Brunch have also unaccountably failed to die, even though that was their sole purpose. They remain Fishbreath, Dan Lawrence, Fargull, Leriel and flatsinki.

The loss of Schadenfreude has left a gap in the official Miners Guild, The Stretching Candies of Bunch. I plug it by moving JRave, since he's a miner in long standing by now, and I like to keep these squads vaguely themed.



I also move Lionleum into the gap in the Bushelling Deaths left by the death of Amaranthine... they have vaguely builder-y theme.



Both Linoleum and JRave have thus left The Dogcrushers of Syrup, which also has a third vacancy due to the death of Tyjenks, so three non-fighting newbies end up there:



That's all the dead men's boots filled, though, and we still have two newbies left.

fadeaccompli slips nicely into a vacant space in The Severing Sweats, which no-one had to die to create. He'll be doing his terrified huddling away from the enemies along with xanomon, BuckTheStar, aceTechnologist and Bryce.

That leaves Ravenholme with nowhere to go. So: new squad!



The tradition of excellent squad names continues. I love you, random number generator.



There's Ozzo, suited up. I hope they got the bloodstains out.



AND THEN A SKELETON POPPED OUT!

The Keepers are on it, though.



Wait.... Mirriam has the legendary shield now? Why does no-one want to keep this thing? Is it just because it sounds super gross?

The skeleton that popped out is actually two skeletons, but only one bothered with iron armour.



Mirriam has retained her legendary hammer, and it remains as head crushingly effective as ever.

Blackadar has meanwhile identified the weak spot on a skeleton if you're wielding a sword:


Who ordered decap?

ahahahahaha

I start to hear news of ogres dying.



This is some way outside my gates, though, and none of my guys were responsible. No:



'twas mants killed the beast.

My enemies, lacking access to my gooey gnomish centre, have settled for killing one another. This ogre is quickly joined by a second:



That must be quite the mant force.

Elsewhere it's not going quite so well for the mants, though:



It's hard to judge who emerges the winner, really. the fights seem pretty well matched, such that even the survivors end up bleeding to death pretty shortly afterwards.



Throughout the winter I see several fights like this daily. I won't bother logging most of them.

Meanwhile, Poe is steadily churning out pauldrons and gauntlets, boosting his Armour Crafting from a meagre 18 to a mighty....



..22.

Well, I think it's impressive.

Maybe this armour crafting project is going to be even more time consuming than I thought...

Nightmarish creatures might be killing one another outside, but within the Terrible Puke all is warm and cosy, and work is being done.

I check on the supplies to last the winter. No tress will grow for the duration, so how's the lumber pile?



That seems like plenty. How're we doing for raw metal materials?



206 tin and enough copper to match... that's enough for 103 bronze bars, which is... about 26 greaves, or enough for 13 gnomes? I'll need more than twice that to get all the armour made. It's a good thing mining can happily continue all winter, and indeed is continuing.

How about food and drink?



...yeah, these aren't a problem. Sandwiches used to get eaten as fast as they were made, but some time in the last few seasons production finally outpaced appetites, and we have a steady stockpile of them now. As they're the King of Foods, everything else (which mostly means eggs and fruit, here) goes uneaten. I've stopped growing fruit, but nothing short of emu genocide will stop the flow of useless eggs. I also have more meat than I need to ensure the continued production of sandwiches, and my butcher's can't keep up with animal births.

Drink-wise, it seems that while there's an eternity of yak milk, the gnomes prefer the wine made out of strawberries. In fairness, I would too. Hmm. That's a wrinkle: if I no longer produce strawberries for the wine, they'll have to sink to drinking the yak milk, and who wants that?

The answer to this problem, and all problems, is simple:



BEER!



And there it is!

I have an astonishing amount of wheat... about a thousand units at this point, I think. Beer production is no threat to that stockpile, and I haven't suspended wheat farming so come spring we'll be making yet more, especially because raw wheat on hand doesn't count as food and thus doesn't attract mants.



SuperJay claimed his shield back again. I really have no idea what motivates all this.



Look at all these dead mants. I almost feel sorry for them. All they wanted was to brutally tear us limb from limb.



The first fatality I've seen due to lack of provisions as opposed to mant/greenskin/animal warfare. I'm pretty sure this is the goblin fadeaccompli nearly ran into when he arrived.

There's a pretty ridiculous number of mant corpses out there. I guess this validates the decision to close the gates: I wouldn't have liked to fight all those guys at once.

I fiddle around with stockpile priorities in an effort to expedite metal production. I th as the intended effect, and soon nearly every gnome in the Puke is traipsing up and down stairs with armfuls of coal and ore.



We see a golem squad roughly one a day. This is how they all end.



Here's the status of the metal armor stocks. This includes the stuff people are wearing right now. With a population of 42, I need 84 of everything except helmets and breastplates, which you only need one of per gnome and I thus have enough of already. You can see I am nearing 84 for pauldrons, at which point I can direct everyone to upgrade to bronze shoulder armour without fear the hoi polloi will poach it from the soldiery. But there's still gauntlets, greaves and boots to go! Mercifully gauntlets and boots take half the metal of greaves and pauldrons, but it's still a long road, and were already about a quarter of the way through the winter already.

Dawn on day four gives me a look at the size of the mant force causing all the deaths the previous night. It definitely affirms my fears which led me to seal the gates:



That's nine mants visible in that one shot alone, and that's not counting those who ended up dead due to fighting greenskins. I can't be sure how many the invasion originally comprised, but I'm betting it was a lot.



Mercifully the mants aren't the problem for the Keepers right now. Instead they get relatively tame two-zombie fights to deal with.



Need a hand?

ahahahahhaha



Look ma, no hands!







Mirriam doesn't appreciate my sense of humour.