Masterwork:Orcish Civilization

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MDF: v1.31

This article relates to the Orc Fortress game mode of the Masterwork mod.

A civilization is a nation, with settlements and a capital city. When you start a new fortress, there are typically two or more orcish civilizations which you can choose to be the parent civilization of your fortress. You can select your civilization at the site selection screen. Different civilizations can have different items available when you embark.

When it comes to other civilizations, Humans, Dwarves, Elves and Drow, and Automatons will be powerful enemies. The cavern civs and Fortress Defense races will attack you too; note that the "medium" tier are about a match in raw size and strength.

Deep-drow, Chaos-dwarves, Human Bandits, and Ashland Elf rebels are potentially friends and each have unique crates and blueprints to sell you. Goblins, Wild Orcs, and Frost Giants can be trade partners too. Warlocks are troublesome allies at best.

The Taiga Orcs are strong warriors, and can handle a lot of powerful opponents. If you enable too many allies you will find that your trade depot gets crowded, and that your allies guards steal some of the glory of battle. Some suggested groupings are listed below but of course, experiment to see what you like best!

Suggested World Civilization Groupings

Orc Fortress Basic

• Get off to a strong start with some early help from greenskin cousins

Enemies: Dwarves, Elves, Tigermen, Antmen

Friends: Goblins

Orc Fortress Classic

• Prepare to fight for survival against irregular ambush and siege warfare

Enemies: Dwarves, Humans, Elves, Drow, Trogs, Antmen

Friends: -none-

Orc Fortress Defense

• Match brute strength and engineering skill against assaults from more straightforwardly aggressive enemies

Enemies: Dwarves, Elves, Automatons, Serpentmen, Tigermen, Badgermen, Pandashi, Minotaurii, Trogs, Antmen

Friends: (Choose any 2)

Age of the Taiga-Orcs

• Still plenty of action, but lower overall difficulty for project forts. One caravan will visit you every season.

Enemies: Dwarves, Drow, Frogmen, Tigermen, Ferric Elves, Trogs

Friends: Human bandits, Elven rebels, Deep Drow

Enemy Civilizations

Early Dangers & Ambushes

ELF rangers begin Ambushes as soon as the first half of Year Two, and there's no way to know whether the first group will be spear- or bow-elves. Either way these elves are armed to the teeth, quite unlike their wooden-sword toting cousins. No anvil? Try the tribal warcrafter, or perhaps buy a couple weapons from the freelancer's guild. Wrestlers with simple shields can provide cover and subdue elves while your armed warlord provides the killing blow. Of course you could just shut the gate, but you'll be missing out on the bounty: Once you round up the elves weapons, and perhaps refit their scavenged small armor scraps into makeshift mithril mail at the Molten Pit, you'll be in business.

DROW will also ambush you, maybe not quite as early. Make sure to secure entrances with something stronger than a door, because they often have deadly building-destroying Voracious Cave Crawlers, or other nasty underground warbeasts like Jabberers. VCCs can be very dangerous to unskilled militia or civilians, but fall easily enough to archers.

Siegers

DWARF squads will often wait out and siege your fort. After a few seasons of beating elves to death with their own tiaras, you'll feel that Taiga Orcs are more than a match for the Free Peoples, and be ready to just throw the gates open and meet them in honorable melee. Before this, check their armament. The quality of both Dwarf and Human squads depends a lot on what kind of gear and warbeasts they bring. Dwarves have access to heavy armor and excellent materials, martial trances make their weaponmasters deadly, and a few castes like Legion dwarves are tough enough to go toe to toe with your Uruks. The majority of standard orcish weapons like axes, swords, and jagged arrows are slashing type, so until you have advanced materials you may have trouble punching through heavy armor or even golem's armor plating. Try to get some guns, damascene weapons, upgraded bows or enchanted arrows, or simply mix in some blunt/piercing melee weapons.

HUMANS carry gunpowder weapons and cannons in particular can be deadly. Decent armor might keep you alive, but you'll prefer block and dodge to avoid gunshot wounds entirely and stay on your feet. If you normally play more engineering/defensively, note that Dwarf and Human sieges can last a very long time and may (or, may not ^^) ignore open gates into your base. Once you know where they are likely to camp you might want to set up towers, ballistae, tramcart weapons, cave in traps, magma landmines, an obsidianizer, some Flachette gun traps loaded up with poison darts, a refuse pile filled with dead jabberers ready to cast Raise Dead upon, or just some plain old weapon & cage traps ahead of their next visit.

Sub-orcish Primitives

GNOMES, despite their supposed technological wizardry, are laughably weak enemies, although they may pose some minor danger to an unprepared clan with their gunpowder weapons.

TIGERMEN are a limited threat because of their poor access to armor and materials, but fight valiantly in a melee, being savage and somewhat larger in build than any orc. When defeated they are a pretty good source of copper, and of course, tiger leather pelts.

TROGLODYTES should not be underestimated; they can be quite dangerous to under-trained Orcs due to their natural skills in melee combat. If you attempt a cavern embark then be prepared, they may siege from the underground fairly early.

ANTMEN are quite dangerous in large groups, and of course it's tempting to simply wall them out and ignore them. However they carry a ton of gear, since each warrior has 4 arms, and an intrepid warchief can turn all those rusty iron gear into enough Weapon kits or minted Orcish shillings to keep the raider's drydock in business for months. Some castes can fly.

FOUL BLENDECS feel no pain and avoid traps, making them proof against simple trap corridors that can destroy other early enemies like Tigermen. Still, they are no match for a reasonably equipped orcish warband. They can be looted for tin.

SERPENTMEN are slight of build, but they have bronze tier materials and armor and a variety of other advantages. They often have bows or shields, are amphibious, have poisonous bite, avoid traps, and can bring dangerous warbeasts since their civilizations deploy Beast Hunters.

Other Worthy Enemies

BADGERMEN are as large as an Uruk, have good weapons, can enter a berserk state, and sometimes bring dangerous "dwarflike" pets like Cave crawlers and prototype golems. However, they're vulnerable to traps. They are a pretty good opponent for a "fair fight" against orcish squads.

PANDASHII are a powerful enemy, just a bit larger than Uruks, but with excellent natural melee skills, avoid traps, and ambush.

RAPTORMEN are about the same size as Orcs, and mostly notable for being amphibious and able to pick locked doors.

AUTOMATONS will also be hostile. As in Dwarf mode, they are organized into specialized models which each have high degree of mastery of a particular skill. Their metallic skin may provide some proof against jagged arrows.

HARPIES are about the same size as Orcs, and can fly.

MINOTAURS are about 3 times the size of an Orc, have good natural skills, can forge steel, and are building destroyers.

JOTUNAR lack the hard-as-steel icy skin and elite weapon skills of Masterwork Frost Giants, but whatever they lack, they make up for it in raw size and power. The smallest caste of Jotun are still 10x larger than a Frost Giant, or roughly 80x larger than an Orc. Of course, this doesn't make them invincible; after all elephants are almost so big too. What makes them invincible is the kits of steel gear and ability to wield fire magic.

Potential Allies

ELVEN ASHLANDER glassblowers are renowned for the brilliant colored stains and strong alloys they work from the grey wasteland sands. They will bring for trade the blueprints for glassblowers shops, crates of raw moonstone required for crafting weapons-grade ashland glass, spellswords' tomes filled with reality-bending spells, and healing tomes filled with beneficial magics.

DEEP DROW traders occassionally venture to the surface world to barter mysterious goods from the underdark. They will bring blueprints for the Nethermill, crates of raw netherwood and devilthorn for the mill, destruction tomes filled with elemental spells, along with bloodsteel, ironbone, and fine silk from the depths.

HUMAN BANDITS make good allies for gunner-warbands; they will bring gun ammo, bronze, iron, and blueprints for the Buccaneer's Tavern.

CHAOS DWARVEN LEGION are bound by strange and terrible oaths to a dark aspect of the blood god Armok. Their traders will bring some advanced metals like patternwelded wolfram and steel, trap components and engineering supplies, and blueprints for the Legion auxilla outpost, as well as the dark magic contained in the legion arcanii tome.

GOBLINS will visit multiple times per year, bringing lots of low-grade basic supplies like cloth, rusty iron bars, and cheap weapons, cages, and misc goods. This kind of mundane stuff can make all the difference in early years -- you'd much rather face down a murderous elf assassin with a rusty iron flail than with nothing! They sometimes also bring goblin tinker type stuff such as prototype golems and turrets.

WILD ORCS don't have the same quality of gear as the taiga clans. They can be decent trade partners at times, but since they tend to come at the same time as the home caravan, their usefulness is limited.

FROST GIANTS will bring a basic assortment of goods, particularly those made from wolfram.

WARLOCKS don't make good allies, due to their bizarre and warlike ethics, and an unstable and dangerous relationship with magic.

Multi-playable Civ Worlds

Although it is not officially supported you can easily make a world with Dwarves and Orcs both playable.

• Select all your MDF settings in the launcher as normal
• Set the race selector to Orc in the launcher (this has some minor effects on Dwarf mode fortresses like, which "extended domestic animals" and plants exist in the world, e.g. there will be boreal plants, and domestic Taiga Sabrecats instead of Shaggy Badgerdogs)
• Open up the Dwarven Entity file and uncomment the line "[CIV_CONTROLLABLE]". Keep a backup copy of the original file is advised (if you ever want to go back to default behaviour).
• Gen a new world
• On embark, you'll have both kinds of civs to choose from. If you can't tell which is which, tab over to the "Neighbors" tab -- your race will always be at the top. Also the Dwarven civs will be named e.g. "The Hammers of Manufacturing" and live in mountain halls, and the Orcish civ will live in the Taiga dark fortresses and captured human cities, and be called e.g. "The Twilight Rending of Despair"

It should also be possible to create a multi-civ "Dwarvish" world but it will be just slightly more complicated; for one thing you'll need to reenable the Taiga orcish entity, which is disabled by default.

You can't mix and match kobolds because their undiggable stone is a property of the world, not of the race/tools.