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[FlavorCat]

to me right now walling everything off is kind of lame. but thats more because walls cant be damaged.

if in the future walls can be slowly damaged then it will be great because you have a reason to defend the walls as well.

Or completely bypassed by sneaks who climb right over them. Might be a bit OP given the size of ambushes and elven invasion late game, unless it would require a climbing check of a certain level, which would split it up. You could even go crazy with it and give archers the ability to bombard over the walls with accuracy penalties, if you wanted.

Casting your wall out of sea magma and cavern water, same thing, who knows if you'll have it full sized and fully intact by the time you need it?  Well, similar thing... obsidian won't melt if you have an abnormally warm summer.

A cool idea, but wouldn't you need to build a wall of some sort anyway, just to contain the magma and water for casting?

Is there any way this could be implemented that wouldn't be completely tedious instead of Fun though? The enjoyment in seeing a tower you've spent seasons building crumble in a day is quite small.

Well, historically it is kind of like that. You spend years, potentially decades building a set of huge walls, the enemy spends a few months building siege weapons to negate them. Before siege engines (i.e. Troy, Athenian siege of Syracuse) it took forever. After siege engines (i.e. Tyre), it only took a few months. Long after siege engines (i.e. medieval Europe), the technology of wall building advanced to the point where it took forever, again. Ultimately you'd have to decide where the dorfs compare on the technological scale, and then try and adapt that into the game. Likely late medieval Europe given they have access to steel and plate armor, but prior to gunpowder so... yeah. No mortars, but highly advanced wooden constructions.

Ultimately they would need to just be strong enough to give you a chance to organize, equip, and slightly train a defense force. And leave stone behind so you could rebuild it, it's not like the goblins can powderize stone in the field.



Unless goblins know how to build ladders...

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Unless goblins know how to build ladders...

Planned.

    Ability to dig (optionally, default on)
    Ability to build bridges/ramps
    Ability to use grappling hooks/ladders/climb

[Cobbler89]

Keep in mind that sometime in the nearly foreseeable future invasions will destroy constructed walls. (And by nearly forseeable I mean that in the next version if you build constructed walls and retire the fortress there's a chance they won't be there when next you see it

Rats, no Great Wall of The Wealthy Daggers then.

No, no, you can have a Great Wall and keep garrisons on it via retirement rather than abandonment! Indeed, I plan to start a succession game based around this (take turns building an embark and passing the world around, rather than taking turns with one embark). You just have to pull off obsidian-casting on the edge of the embark map.

Yes, that's challenging (I've been trying to do it in the current version as proof-of-concept -- I'm having problems with the minecart magma conveyance system). When I go in for a succession game I'll make sure it's clear that the one "cheat" allowed is dfhack-revealing the magma sea, because there's enough challenge in obsidian-casting at the edge of the map and the point is to be a metamegaproject, not to be a challenge game.

[Loud Whispers]

The enjoyment in seeing a tower you've spent seasons building crumble in a day is quite small.

Well, historically it is kind of like that. You spend years, potentially decades building a set of huge walls, the enemy spends a few months building siege weapons to negate them.

*Sigh*

Tediousness vs Realism vs Fun.

Not to mention the only siege engines we have in game can't damage anything. Except maybe trees. Dwarf Fortress worlds also might not follow the same timelines. Furthermore it was generally bad practice to go around tearing down cities. That was usually reserved for bad moods.
As so did the tactics for offensive siege warfare grow, so did defensive. The vast majority of sieges were two sides sitting still for months.
If you gave goblins weapons that tore down walls and the like, the only thing that would result is that they'd go about tearing down everything in a physics defying orgy of violence, undoing vast amounts of construction.
If you build Fortresses worth a damn, they shouldn't fall for a reason. Negation is fine (ladders, ropes and other non-destructive means), sapping is Fun, but there are few ways to implement wall destroyers that wouldn't be so horribly game breaking.
The best Fortresses could have taken years to break through - and that's not even close to total destruction. Some Fortresses, and I do take particular note of the ones that were plonked on top of mountains for obvious reasons, were virtually unbreachable until the gunpowder age, and there exist Fortresses that indeed had never been taken by a hostile enemy.

[Noble Digger]

It's very fun having a historied fort with old, wounded, soldiers doddering around, and running out of space in your graveyards multiple times, then appointing the most crippled and unproductive dwarf in the fortress your Baron, and things like that. Babies and children get into so much deadly crap when you don't wall in.

My favorite forts and the ones I played for the longest are ones where I defended my fort outdoors with a military that went through a 30% per year attrition rate using crossbows, battleaxes, and warhammers. I always make the fortress guard use spears because I'm hoping they'll cause less grisly injuries when they poke lawbreakers. The fewer cage traps I build, the happier I usually end up being with the fort, and I try not to restrict the behavior of nobles or law officers.

One piece of advice I want to give though, to anyone who plays without walling off. Carefully examine Forgotten Beasts before deciding to fight them. Some of them have properties that make it absolute suicide to fight them (they will kill off your whole fort for a certainty) and the only smart way to deal with them is to either wall off or crush them in a cave-in or collapse, unless you feel like you're done playing that fort. You can direct their path using the fact that they destroy grates aggressively even if the grates are critical to their path into the fortess. Short version: only flying FBs can cross a grate path into your fortress.

[Mushroo]

It is smart tactics and I would build a big wall too in real life.

A really easy tactic is to use (m)ilitary, (a)lerts and bring the civilians safe inside the fortress during the "late" month of each season, because that's when the ambushes usually come.

[Slyjoker87]

It's very fun having a historied fort with old, wounded, soldiers doddering around, and running out of space in your graveyards multiple times, then appointing the most crippled and unproductive dwarf in the fortress your Baron, and things like that. Babies and children get into so much deadly crap when you don't wall in.

My favorite forts and the ones I played for the longest are ones where I defended my fort outdoors with a military that went through a 30% per year attrition rate using crossbows, battleaxes, and warhammers. I always make the fortress guard use spears because I'm hoping they'll cause less grisly injuries when they poke lawbreakers. The fewer cage traps I build, the happier I usually end up being with the fort, and I try not to restrict the behavior of nobles or law officers.

One piece of advice I want to give though, to anyone who plays without walling off. Carefully examine Forgotten Beasts before deciding to fight them. Some of them have properties that make it absolute suicide to fight them (they will kill off your whole fort for a certainty) and the only smart way to deal with them is to either wall off or crush them in a cave-in or collapse, unless you feel like you're done playing that fort. You can direct their path using the fact that they destroy grates aggressively even if the grates are critical to their path into the fortess. Short version: only flying FBs can cross a grate path into your fortress.

Dust syndromes have been the hardest for me to deal with.

[FlavorCat]

Glowiron: Administrator's Log
1058 Felsite 18
Final Entry

The seige has lasted for two months. Supplies are low, and we have only a handful of soldiers. I can hear the relentless scratching of the undead army at the wall. It will not hold much longer.

I strongly approve of your avatar, good sir.

Dwarf Fortress worlds also might not follow the same timelines.

True; I was just saying that it's kind of the nature of the beast, really. Walls aren't typically the kind of thing you can chip away at, especially if they're made of stone. It ends up being a bit of an all-or-nothing proposition. Either they're blocking the goblins or they're not. And if they're not... They're not doing anything.

After all - in Dwarf Fortress it's possible to build a literally self-sufficient fortress within the confines of the map, unlike real life. So sieges of attrition are completely non-existent, which is the main issue with real sieges. Especially considering goblins can't currently starve, so there's no time limit for them.

The biggest issue though is, like you say, wall destroyers being completely overpowered and just going ballistic.

The best Fortresses could have taken years to break through - and that's not even close to total destruction. Some Fortresses, and I do take particular note of the ones that were plonked on top of mountains for obvious reasons, were virtually unbreachable until the gunpowder age, and there exist Fortresses that indeed had never been taken by a hostile enemy.

Absolutely. And you should definitely be able to build a virtually impregnable fortress if you as the player want, which is why I kind of like the system as it is now. There's no model of "treacherous terrain" that prevents siege engines from being used against your fortress like the Swiss alps, and this is currently the next best thing.