Dwarf fortress how long does siege last

Similar to Goblins , Kobolds will first send thieves dependent on your fort's population or, rather, wealth. Kobold archers will begin to arrive if the Kobold thieves successfully steal any items - the number of successive archers and thieves who arrive will depend on how many items were stolen previously.

Kobold archers tend not to directly siege your fort, but prefer to pick off individual dwarves who may be working in the surrounding wilderness. They will leave once their arrows have been exhausted.

Megabeasts are a siege consisting of a single, enormously powerful enemy creature. A certain wealth or a population of around may trigger one. Verify A megabeast, such as a bronze colossus , dragon , or titan , will arrive on the map and head towards your fortress. Unlike other sieges, they can be stopped simply by shutting a door behind another door. Increasing [DAMBLOCK] or [SIZE] can help buff up megabeasts, as well as editing their body to be more complex realistic dragons with scales, for example and setting them to be made out of certain materials steel or adamantine, for example Verify.

Your dwarves will still attempt to do their jobs during a siege, including cutting down trees or hauling in items and corpses from outdoors. Dwarves will run from invaders, but only after getting within crossbow -range, so their self-preservation skills are lackluster when the enemy has ranged weapons, or moves more quickly than them.

There are several strategies to preserve your civilians' lives, none of them perfect. From Dwarf Fortress Wiki. They are announced with a full-screen message that differs depending on the attacking race, and the main screen showing the SIEGE tag at the top for the duration of the siege. A siege's objective is to exterminate every dwarf in your fortress, or die trying.

It is possible to be sieged by all civilized races, with the exception of kobolds who never go beyond ambushes and subterranean animal people who just don't attack at all. Caravans will not arrive at a besieged fortress. They will arrive, though, if a siege is broken quickly enough, but it is possible to miss out entirely on a civilization's caravan for the year this way.

Even if they do arrive before the siege, the attackers may kill them or chase them off if they can reach them. Consider this when deciding how you set up your trade depot and how heavily reliant your economy is on imported goods. A civilization will be unable to lay siege if it can't reach your fortress site. Armies need to physically move to the location of your fortress; they are normally allowed a tile radius of interaction towers have 10 tiles , beyond which sieges are impossible.

You will never get sieges if you embark on an island or in a valley which is completely surrounded by mountains.

If you want to make sure that a certain civilization will be capable of laying siege to you, then look at the "neighbors" view of the embark site finder when selecting your fortress site. A vile force of darkness has arrived! Usually the tactics used by the goblins are no more sophisticated than charging in an open march toward your fortress and attempting to kill your dwarves. Goblin sieges often include groups of trolls and beak dogs , but may also include things like ogres or cave dragons that can break buildings and smash workshops.

Unlike the squads, however, these 'groups' usually enter the map in a single tile, somewhat akin to arriving migrants. These war creatures usually possess random civilian classes, and show little of the organized behavior of the squads. Goblins may also bring fighters belonging to other races, previously kidnapped by snatchers , and if you're really lucky, they may be commanded by something particularly fun.

Goblin sieges usually involve mounted squads, some of which can fly over whatever defenses you might have set up to stop them. This suggests that the token doesn't regulate the overall ability to send out sieging forces, but merely enables large attacking forces to set up camp and try to wait out a fort, instead of charging in blindly like a pack of fools - the behaviour described in the paragraph on human sieges.

Goblins are also the only race who can siege your fortress without their civilization being explicitly at war with your own, presumably because their evil nature makes them disregard diplomacy entirely. The elves have brought the full forces of their lands against you.

Forum Guidelines. Please login or register. Pages: [ 1 ] 2. Author Topic: How long does a necromancer siege last? That's all! The problem is, the zombies just stand there. Watching you. But since the Necro is gone It should be easier to deal with them. The Age of Man is over. It is the Fire's turn now. I don't think I can deal with all of them. This is a reclaim because my last attempt failed.

So there are a lot of issues like that right, you could [ That could include bashing down a door, placing a bridge, piling up dirt, using a tower, using a rope - grappling hook type things - just being able to climb. There [are] different solutions to different configurations of the terrain and we just have to put those in one at a time and eventually they should be able to take out any static defences or defences that are simple like closing doors.

I know people are going to come up with really clever [defences], you know, [a] bunch of bridges moving around in weird ways and thing, that they can't figure out, and we'll just have to work through them one step at a time.

But that's definitely one of the huge problems with sieges [ Right now they're just like 'where's a dwarf? I want to go kill a dwarf' and then they're 'oh I can't get there, oh well'. It's really tragic, the ability to change the map and make buildings has completely outpaced the artificial intelligence, especially for sieges.

The path-finding in general is pretty bad in the game; they can get through labyrinths and stuff well, but they can't really handle unusual terrain situations. It's one of those things where the whole path-finding system needs to be re-written for dwarves in general and [for] these other problems we were talking about like animals being able to climb down ropes when I had them, because I can't have a system where animals can't climb ropes until I change the path-finding.

But for sieges fortunately it's not all down to the whole path-finding rewrite, those can actually be fixed before the path-finding rewrite, because overall when a siege arrives they just need to make a general analysis of the terrain and come up with a few little plans for how to make the terrain conform to the regular path-finding routine just by changing things a little bit.

That'll lead to some of these things like digging and other map modifications. It seems like a reasonable thing for people to be able to do. Now, that doesn't mean they'd just be able to spot them and do it; they'd probably disarm a trap after they saw how it worked on somebody else.

It's certainly reasonable that they should be able to do that; you can't expect a hallway with no dwarves in it and just some mechanisms to stop a hundred people; you might expect it to stop two or three enterprising individuals who are trying to make it into your fortress, just like one of those archaeologist flakes or whatever.

But stopping that many people; they're going to think of a way to surpass it and they should be able to do that so that you'd have to support your traps by harassing people and making them run into them and so on, even if they know about them. Otherwise you should expect - eventually when we've got this worked out - for a trap that's done its job to be dismantled or otherwise dug around, or whatever they need to do, and within a given stretch of hallway that might make them more suspicious of other traps being there and they might actually be able to spot ones that are similar to the other trap.

There's some kind of heuristics they might need to do that, just you know, block out an area: 'we've been hit by a pressure plate here', and then they'd keep an eye out for other pressure plates in that hallway, say. These are all things that need to be added kind of one step at a time so the sieges will improve by one step, then they'll improve by another and by another and by another, and we're planning to do this over a series of releases while we work on some other things.

So hopefully it'll be interesting enough by the time it's far along that you have to think a little bit; it'd be nice if people had to think a little bit about sieges rather than doing what they do now which is just set up a simple countermeasure or impose an artificial challenge on themselves. It's sad right now, of course. The goals depend on the critters. The humans goal is just to kill everybody.

The goblins, when they send a large invasion, their goal is just to kill everybody. The elves are there to shoot a certain number of arrows or until their group gets spotted prematurely; they aren't trying to kill everybody, but they're just trying to mess with you. And if snatchers or item thieves come, which is another kind of invasion, they're just trying to make it out, and their escorts if they have any work like the elves, they just try and bother you a little bit and distract you.

But that's about it; ultimately when we get to the So you might actually have a siege that doesn't feel like it needs to go all the way, or where they're just trying to do something that isn't purely genocidal or whatever.

That should also improve the feel of the sieges and so on. It would be cool if a bunch of humans arrived but then somebody came forward to talk to you and you actually had another dwarf come out and have a meeting.

Yeah I mean there should be, they already do that in I mean they don't, I guess Because there's these fake tribute relationships in world generation that aren't realised in any way. You could start in a fortress where every other fortress in your civilization is paying tribute to humans and you just don't hear or have anything to do with it. That kind of thing is I think all that stuff is up on dev next which means we're kind of starting to think about how it's going to work.

It's all coming; we have this thing up on the future - post version one - goals about actual complicated diplomacy, whatever that means, where we'd actually be thinking a lot more about arrangements and individual goals and so on; but we're going to be doing a lot of that also in the pretty short term here.

With things like tribute it's going to require I don't want to point everything back at the caravan arc because that became kind of a habit Really what that is shorthand for 'sites have resources and things are tracked', so that's going to have to happen kind of soon too, especially when you start sending armies out which is one of the things right after sieges are improved quite a bit, there's already going to be armies moving on the world map at that time, and your dwarves are also going to be able to send out armies after sieges are improved, and at that point we've got to start thinking about things like supply lines and so on.

There's a sense in which that could be aggravating, but I think it really improves the flow of wars and so on to have to worry about that kind of thing so you just don't have strange things happening like some army marching from town to town without taking anything, just killing everything, without being supported. What I'm getting at, though, is [that] when you've got supply lines where an army's being supplied it's similar to paying tribute, to moving goods around in that way, which also goes back to the caravan arc.

It's kind of a race to see which one's going to go in first, but people are going to be moving stuff around; at that point things like guys coming to you and demanding things of you instead of just trying to kill everybody would be easily attained, which would be cool.

I guess one of my questions was [1e] 'is there a possibility through the siege mechanisms to start eliminating entire populations? That would teach them not to be so eager, and that's the kind of thing They should have to exercise some patience. There's also the matter of right now - which might be more of what you were getting at - sieges are sort of an all or nothing affair.

Two hundred goblins arrive doesn't necessarily mean that all of your dwarves or two hundred goblins have to die. Right now some of them run off but they're not that good at that most of the time. Most of the time a lot of them will just get killed. I don't remember what the numbers are, because people throw all kinds of things out, but there are certain situations where if ten percent of the people in an army died that was considered bad whereas in this game that's nothing at all.

If we start reflecting the actual numbers then it would probably profit the game, especially as civilizations and so on start to interact more. Now, there [are] always going to be situations like getting caught by a dragon where the numbers are going to be a little higher than you might have wanted, but that's part of the fantasy territory. I suppose there were situations in real life where entire armies were cornered and killed, so It just shouldn't be on an open field like it is with the sieges sometimes.

Will you be able to siege other peoples and then it'll show their place, maybe in the far future? Well maybe not so far as we think, because like I was saying, right after improved sieges we want to let people start sending guys out, and there's going to be a lot of reasons to do that; if the kobalds keep sending little guys over to take your things, you might want to make a punative expedition and send twenty really well armed people out and go into their cave I'm sure there's going to be a lot of things that people do to abuse the poor mechanics as they're added.

Then with the larger wars and so on So your fortress is a portion of that, say it's a six by six in a sixteen by sixteen area, but since the map is all seamless now in most respects, like you can't slide your sight rectangle between two map squares, but you can keep it within one map square - now that's an artificial distinction we're going to get rid of at some time - but in general the entire map is seamless, so you could take those sixteen by sixteen maps, stitch them together and get a pretty large battlefield that's sort of a zoomed in world map, and then you can imagine those lines.

In general that's going to require upping the numbers, which is something we're planning to do, there's kind of this conflict - and it ties back in to what Rainseeker was saying about populations being diminished too fast - we want more people, we want to be able to have thousands and thousands and thousands of people - not on the screen at one time, but actually having world populations that are more reasonable, because it'll make a lot of mechanics of the game more reasonable and easier to do.

Because right now it's like those cannibal tribes that go and pick off one or another guy or so on, sending twenty people at a time; and that's not quite what we had in mind for a fantasy world with fantasy wars and stuff. So ostensibly you should be able to send out thousands of people and arrange them in lines and then siege a goblin tower with different approaches and so on. The main problem would be that you'd be restricted; if you ever zoom in you'd be restricted to having just a smaller number of people, while at the same time a fight could be raging on off-screen with further people.

The main problem area this ties back to is fortress mode; what happens if twenty thousand goblins are knocking at your door, what exactly is going to happen there? And we've thought about that quite a bit in terms of But, say that these larger numbers came up; you'd first be able to contest them outside your fortress with larger numbers, with larger army battles; but if they did make it to your fortress and sieged the actual fortress where you've only got your hundred, hundred and fifty guys running around, then they'd have to keep their numbers lower too to keep things fair, or just to keep things running with the CPU.

But they could send in two hundred guys or something and you could have your standard sieges, and now if they had twenty thousand people they could do that a hundred times, but we just have to artificially set things up so that that's not how it works, or if it does maybe supporting their supply lines would be what causes them to leave if you keep winning, or just being depressed would cause them to leave if you keep winning and so on.

Yeah, it had like an inordinate amount of detail on the different civilizations having just inaudible. Yeah, I think one of the things that's going to even improve sieges better before we worry about the rest of the stuff is when they start recruiting beasts and having guys come in riding dragons and stuff. That should cause some shaking up of the status quo as far as sieges being silly I'm not sure about airships, they're reasonable enough themselves, having things floating around I guess you could make But who knows?

I think what I've said before is [that] gunpowder is probably something that's not going to be necessarily in the vanilla Dwarf Fortress, but it's something that I'd probably support for modders. But things like electricity and steam power are less likely to be supported.

Although lightning is lightning, lightning's a different matter. I remember you said something like the s is like the cutoff and now everyone's like looking up for proof, 'oh yea, they really had laser guns in the s'. Well yeah, the Mayans are going to destroy everything for us right?

They had princes sitting on sofas watching TVs predicting the end of the world, because that's what Mayans do, right? Absolutely, first of all. The thing is, I haven't thought of every situation so of course when I say 'absolutely' I don't mean to imply that I've thought of everything. But I remember we were going to do a weird kidnap [and] rescue thing back when we were doing these more fixed things.

Certainly right now the people just don't care about the kidnappings enough, right? They're just like 'eh, take my kid, oh well'. I think definitely there should be - when we start thinking about the individual goals that people have, which is something that's going to start driving the wars more and more often - there'll need to be answers to those questions before they start sending goblins around.

In that way when people start tracking more of their individual goals then certainly something like a kidnapped child should matter a lot more because a lot of people will be looking at their families first, like 'what is the situation of each of my family historical figures; is one of them being held prisoner?

Well, maybe I should do everything within my power to change that situation'. It should certainly matter and people will probably treat artifacts like family members when it comes to that. So the answer is yes, as I think of it and am reminded of the various situations that arise in the game, I think that should definitely be a driving thing behind wars. When we add site resources and so on, you're going to have those geo-political geographical determinism type things going on, where they just want a kind of resource or they want access to the things that you've got and that should drive some of the situations.

That's true, wars aside even. It'd be really neat if you had one guy that independently recruited a bunch of people that could carry weapons and they went off and left your screen and the game tells you about it and [then] they come back victorious or they come back having people died or whatever.

Yeah, I wonder what the first one'll be. It might just be dwarves that don't like living in your fortress leaving, because right now they don't. They don't come, people stop coming, but the ones that are there resign themselves to fates worse than death. So would it be possible for a dwarf randomly deciding to leave forever? I know that would make some people mad, it'd be like 'aah, my soapmaker left, now what I am going to do?

I think that having it be sudden or random would be bad; I think if you're going to take something away from someone like that there should be warning signs, and when they leave it should feel like it's your fault. At that point that'd be good enough. Or there's a case like Rainseeker came up with where there's a larger action that might be beyond your control, then it's a trickier situation: should people be able to go off and handle matters?

There won't be a lot of things while people are randomly generated migrants, but if migrants are coming from other areas and have situations and family and everything else that exists outside of your fortress I thought Rainseeker was stopping the show, because there was kind of air of silence. So Rainseeker I understand, we can continue the recording tomorrow if you have to go take care of that.

Yeah, it's that kind of thing. How much of that do you want? How much would that really mess up the game? It's one of those things that probably needs some balance but I think if you've got a fortress with a hundred people, you can always spare one, even if it messes things up a little bit [and] that kind of would be really cool.

Just like with every other concern with high population numbers and so on, there's the game to be thought of. People say that you kind of have to think of gameplay first and fun before realism, all that kind of thing, but it's a more tricky balance than you might think because adding realism gives you these fun payoffs as well, especially when things work together.