This is the story of one fort, in which I had to completely rebuild the military mostly from scratch three different times. With all parts it is a little long, but it didn't seem to work to separate the pieces. Apologies and hope you enjoy.
Part One: Oops
The first military was unremarkable, not yet well equipped or trained, but I have to say, they came through when it counted.
It was still a young fortress, when one day I saw a lone dwarf accompanied by like 2 skeletons marching purposefully towards the main entrance. Idly wondering if this was related to my mistreatment of the weirdos, I thought about firing up the whole process of getting everyone inside, slamming the gates, and routing him into the long hallway of watery doom. But it was literally one guy. I decided, what the hell, what's the worst that could happen. I simply told my military to go out and kill him, so nobody would have to stop what they were doing.
The fact that it's being written up as a story should tell you whether this proved to be a good idea or not.
They met him right inside the main entrance to the fort, and the first soldier he engaged with suddenly flew back down the entire length of a hallway, exploded into little superscript "2"s and miscellaneous chunks when he hit the far wall, and fell to the floor stone dead. The dude with his retinue began walking into my fortress like the Terminator, effortlessly dismantling anyone who came to meet him, reanimating miscellaneous body parts or organic objects to fight alongside him as he went. It was a fuckin catastrophe. After a moment of panic and despair, watching helplessly as he wandered inexorably through the main hallway and for some reason into the temple section, I decided that just having everyone mob up and attack him what whatever they had to hand was the best I could come up with.
Surprisingly enough, it worked, and they killed him. It sure was a fuckin wake up call for the fortress though. Most of my military was killed or crippled¹, along with quite a few civilian dwarves, and the blood and chunks that decorated the pathway he had taken took quite a while to clean up. I eventually had to tear down a big part of the temple area and rebuild it to get rid of the bloodstains.
Part Two: The Maniac
The fortress, its innocence now well forgotten, survived, and over time rebuilt and thrived. As my metalworking operation got underway for real, and the population grew, I started kitting out multiple squads in iron and steel, and producing high quality weapons. They got capable. I started sending them on expeditionary trips, so they wouldn't get bored or lazy. They weren't really needed that often for defense, since the water trap was perfectly capable to deal with any invasions that arrived.
They excelled. Several members gained legendary skills, I got some artifact weapons and some non-artifacts that had made a name for themselves, among them a lead mace wielded by the leader that had killed several important adversaries. I started trying to get steel for every piece of every set of armor. As I did that I was engaged with quite effectively subjugating the surrounding area, which was fun.
One day, when flicking through my troops checking up on things, I happened to see that one of them was 18 years old, with skills like the result of hacking the save file or something. Legendary, legendary, legendary, legendary, and so on. Well, that's a little surprising. I looked a little closer, and it hit me.
THIS IS THE FUCKIN LITTLE GIRL
The girl from the weirdos. She'd grown up in the fortress alone, and apparently she had found her calling. She still dreamed of bathing the world in chaos. Her psychological profile, already disquieting at the start, had become the stuff of nightmares. I read further.
The former mayor had been her father. I'd killed him in the water trap, and she remembered. She remembered his body slowly rotting away in there, forgotten, as I distractedly tried to sort out some drainage problems. She remembered some other traumatic experiences. Not summarized in bright red in bullet point form was her day-to-day experience of growing up orphaned in the fortress after I'd removed the only allies she'd ever known, but I know the game models friendships and family bonds, of which she at that point would most likely have had none.
Anyway, she had started to love fighting. Like, really love it. Her eyes blazed with pain and anger, and the only thing in the world that supplied her with joy, or gave expression to anything still alive inside her, was to kill.
What the fuck then. Still a child, her abilities at war were already beyond extraordinary. I checked her gear, made sure she had steel everything and a nice warhammer which was her weapon of choice, and customized her job title to "Hammer Maniac." I thought about having her lead a squad, and thought better of it, but decided that overall, if killing goblins was what made her happy then she could have a solid place in my fortress for as long as she still wanted one.
She got her fill of her preferred emotional outlet and then some. I have to say, though, that if you are looking for a happy or fulfilling ending to this story than you are reading about the wrong game. As mentioned before, my military at the time was more or less always either going to or coming back from mauling some poor outpost or settlement, and inducing them to send me conscripts or wagonloads of low quality booty. And so, it was inevitable that them returning from one of these would overlap with a goblin siege.
The timing and positioning was impeccably terrible. My entire military, the young maniac included, came back one dwarf at a time and immediately into the jaws of the entire goblin army. I attempted to shut the entrances and open up a faraway gate, to route them in a different direction and around the danger, but I only had one chance and sort of messed it up and bottom line, it didn't work.
I watched as, one by one, my soldiers encountered solitarily the entire weight of the goblin army, which devoured them like a sparrow eating a series of crumbs. Several of them were extraordinary fighters, who went into martial trances and cut deep swathes of dead goblins before they were overwhelmed from all sides, but it didn't make a difference. The little hammer wielder went into a trance as well, cutting a deep pathway of bodies like a lawnmower going through tall grass, but eventually was overwhelmed and died like all the rest. I never got a chance to find out what she was growing into.
This started a yearslong period of simply shutting all the gates and hiding in the fortress. I disliked doing it but it was literally all I could do. With about a hundred goblins outside the walls at all times, I explored the caverns, did extensive construction, set up some automated systems for necessary goods, and tinkered with the fortress. My population during this time was permanently fixed, and literally every single dwarf with the physical or mental configuration for fighting was a corpse outside my walls with the goblins stomping around on top of what used to be them. I thought about trying to build a tower for shooting down on the goblins, or otherwise trying to fight them without an army, but in the end I couldn't arrive at anything realistic and simply had to wait for years until they at last got bored and went away. Which, eventually, they did.
Part Three: Bears
In the aftermath of my long hermitage, migrant caravans for some reason never came back. I still don't know what that's about. I wasn't especially vulnerable to attack, thanks to the big water trap and an abundance of caution, but my military now was a pitiful thing built up from all the dwarves that had been rejected from multiple rounds of selections for military #2, and newcomers to replenish their numbers were nonexistent.
However. Once, out of idle curiosity, I had purchased some grizzly bears from an elf caravan. I can highly recommend this decision. If you ever see some bears, get the bears. Get the fucking bears. Black bears aren't good for much, but if you see grizzlies, pay any price.
The grizzly bears hung out, in a big room I made for them, and slowly their numbers accumulated, and out of curiosity I trained some of them for war, and as my Mighty Ducks military was getting slowly to be experienced and halfway capable, I started allocating two bears to each soldier.
Let me tell you, if you ever want to win your battles, this is a wonderful way to do it.
A squad of ten mediocre dwarves and twenty well-trained grizzly bears is, as far as I can tell, indestructible to any normal military threat. I was not able to simply click on whatever city I wanted and have them go over and fuck it up. But, almost. And with a sloppy modicum of planning, my grizzly cavalry started going out and fucking up the landscape far more effectively than the legendary earlier squads had been able to.
The only fly in the ointment was having to marshal every single bear to accompany every expeditionary force, when a single stuck bear somewhere in the fortress was enough to delay the adventure indefinitely, until six months later I realized they should have gotten back, and after some searching found the single outlier that was trapped behind a door or something with everyone waiting until he arrived before they could get started. I never arrived at a sure way to prevent this.
But other than that they excelled. They laid waste to the landscape. I started being able to demand additional dwarves, from my defeated places, which helped the population. I swear that at one point I saw a bear become administrator of one of my holdings. I think that is impossible. I think I was just mixing up names or something. But I swear that is what I thought I saw.
So this is the current state of my fortress's military, with a quite large room full of bears ready to go to any city or fuck up any comers. There was also a hilarious incident where a diplomat got into a punch-up with some members of the fortress, and when blows started coming back his way, he ran for safety and took a wrong turn, and entered the bears room. Oops. He was never seen again by anyone, which doubtless upset whatever civilization he came from.
Whatever man. It was his fault. If he didn't want to become pieces, he shouldn't have punched that guy and then went where all the bears are.
Bottom line: Get some bears. Bears are where it's at.
¹ I slightly misremembered in an earlier story. Incident #1 was what crippled the hero dwarf who later became the main cook and had a third career as a crutch-wielder. From the debacle that happened to the second military, there were no survivors, none at all.
