My army-free fortress was about to face its biggest challenge yet.

KOBOLDS.

I hate kobolds. I HATE them. Why?

Well, there I was, feeling smug and secure in my wealthy fortress. I’ve got rows and rows and rows of traps set up at the entrance. Surely nothing can get through. Then the kobolds attack. And what do they do? They walk RIGHT OVER THE TRAPS, completely unharmed. I keep waiting for one of them to get crushed, but it just doesn’t happen. Imagine my surprise – I’ve never encountered kobolds before in this game.

The kobolds make it through the stonefall traps unharmed. And they make it through the blade traps unharmed. The ONLY remaining defense is two war dogs I have on chains, just inside the fortress.

The war dogs rip into the kobolds, killing two of them. But it’s not enough. A third and fourth kobold slash at the dogs, knocking them into stonefall traps, killing them. The kobolds just used my own defenses against me!

With my fortress now completely exposed, I have no choice but to draft my very best miners into a temporary militia.

The miners, armed with their iron picks, kill a few kobolds. The rest flee.

Nobody was injured. Then I check to see if anyone was killed.

Heh, yup, they killed someone. Oh well, he was just a useless dyer. No big loss. I don’t even really have a textile industry.

So…

It seems that traps just aren’t good enough if I want to survive here. But I still don’t want a military. I need something better. Something 100% effective at keeping invaders out, and yet allowing traders in.

I figure it out. I’ll build an “airlock” of sorts. When traders enter the airlock, I’ll shut them in with a drawbridge, and then open the drawbridge to my fort. It’s perfect!

I don’t have any usable screenshots of the airlock under construction, so I drew this instead:

Unfortunately, many dwarves were about to be killed while building it…

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