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[Grahar]

Recently, two of my better soldiers died. When I engraved memorials for them, I noticed that one apparently died by an infection he git from a Zombie goblin, he slew four years ago, while the other died by an infection he got from a serpent man/werelizard (which was still alive, but caged at that point.

However, I am rather sure that this infection was not the primary death cause. I am pretty sure they died because of blood loss after every external organ they had rotted away. They spent more than a month in the hospital, blind (because their eyeballs were rotten, too) and spraying miasma all over the place. They didn't even get a relative quick death, because somehow their lungs weren't rotting.

Why were they rotting? The reason was a rather nasty poisonous gas from a forgotten beast. They killed the beast very quickly, but started rotting immediately. At first, they were fit enough to carry on with their business (e.g. naming the axe that slew the beast), and were even able to bring themselves to the hospital. From there, it went downwards.

Now why doesn't this forgotten beast get any credit for those kills? How does the game decide what caused a beings demise?

[Eldin00]

If they had never recovered from the previous infections, they may well have been the cause of death, just that the rotting syndrome finally weakened them enough to succumb to the infections.

[utunnels]

It reminds me of a cat striking down a dragon in another topic. The final blow.

[NW_Kohaku]

Now why doesn't this forgotten beast get any credit for those kills? How does the game decide what caused a beings demise?

Because programs are, in general, really, really poor at the sort of high-level abstract logic it takes to determine the ultimate cause of any event, and they tend to resort to "whatever landed the last punch", as in the case of a dragon being killed by a cat, or a vampire mayor being "killed" by an unarmed peasant after my adventurer had already chopped off both its arms and legs and was about to cleave its skull in two when the thing bled out right after a nearby peasant had landed a kick.  (Freakin' kill stealer!)

I remember someone suggesting once that nobles start executing dwarves "responsible for" Unfortunate Accidents  in the past... and then I tried to explain this concept to them, when three different miners dig the path to the magma, three different engineers build or assemble the mechanisms, two others rearrange the magma through lever-pulls, and for fun, let's say that the noble him/herself pulled the final lever that magma-drowned him/her.  The game doesn't see those events as leading up to that conclusion in terms of a deliberate chain of events the way a human can, all that lever did was open a floodgate, and the only one the game sees as responsible for the death of the noble was the fire, and maybe, with a little coding magic, it might determine that the fire was caused by magma, but it has no idea where there was intent behind it. 

[Putnam]

It's possible, but imagine the FPS issues!

also the bugs

also the decade-long devcycle required

[Vattic]

For combat it could probably keep track of how many of injuries each party inflicted on each other and give credit accordingly. It would be reasonable to mention who was involved rather than just the one who landed the final blow.

[NW_Kohaku]

For combat it could probably keep track of how many of injuries each party inflicted on each other and give credit accordingly. It would be reasonable to mention who was involved rather than just the one who landed the final blow.

That would require some sort of recognition of when injuries heal being linked to the injury's cause.  Otherwise, every single punch ever landed on a target would be listed in the cause of death.  Although perhaps listing every single concussion in the cause of death of a boxer who took one too many blows to the head may perhaps be accurate, that's not how this game really works...

If the real cause of death was an inhaled syndrome, is there even a connection between a syndrome in a dwarf, and its cause?  It may well be that the syndrome gas FB never even layed a claw on the dwarf.

[Putnam]

Is there even a connection between a syndrome in a dwarf, and its cause?

Nope.

[Vattic]

For combat it could probably keep track of how many of injuries each party inflicted on each other and give credit accordingly. It would be reasonable to mention who was involved rather than just the one who landed the final blow.

That would require some sort of recognition of when injuries heal being linked to the injury's cause.  Otherwise, every single punch ever landed on a target would be listed in the cause of death.  Although perhaps listing every single concussion in the cause of death of a boxer who took one too many blows to the head may perhaps be accurate, that's not how this game really works...

If the real cause of death was an inhaled syndrome, is there even a connection between a syndrome in a dwarf, and its cause?  It may well be that the syndrome gas FB never even layed a claw on the dwarf.

I wouldn't expect the game to reason out the responsible party with Rube Goldberg noble killing machines and the like, but some things could reasonably be tracked like the source of a syndrome.

Listing fight participants along with the creature that delivered the final blow doesn't seem unreasonable. It would need to recognise fights between groups. The fights could be small or large like sieges*. They would compose of multiple opposing or allied groups. It would need to recognise the start of a fight (could be: first attack, start of siege, last x ticks). You would then be expanding the responsibility for a death from the individual to the group in the fight the killer belongs to. The game already understands groups/entities to some extent. I also thought responsibility can transfer up to the fort/entity level (getting elves/humans to attack you, adventure mode loyalty shenanigans).

* Unless you wanted to take into account distance and have separate fights within a single siege.

[NW_Kohaku]

I wouldn't expect the game to reason out the responsible party with Rube Goldberg noble killing machines and the like, but some things could reasonably be tracked like the source of a syndrome.

Listing fight participants along with the creature that delivered the final blow doesn't seem unreasonable. It would need to recognise fights between groups. The fights could be small or large like sieges*. They would compose of multiple opposing or allied groups. It would need to recognise the start of a fight (could be: first attack, start of siege, last x ticks). You would then be expanding the responsibility for a death from the individual to the group in the fight the killer belongs to. The game already understands groups/entities to some extent. I also thought responsibility can transfer up to the fort/entity level (getting elves/humans to attack you, adventure mode loyalty shenanigans).

* Unless you wanted to take into account distance and have separate fights within a single siege.

Pull lever, magma flows into room is nearly as basic a deathtrap as it gets, which is kind of the point.  If you're pulling magma from a reservoir filled by a pump stack, and also used to peacefully run your magma forges for years before the Unfortunate Accident, then part of the story of how that magma got there was how you built a pump stack. 

Also, while many accidents are Unfortunate Accidents, players have truly accidental accidents all the time.  That's why the game doesn't bother to try distinguishing why a diplomat died on your fort, you're to blame for it happening, even if they happened to get ripped apart by a weretiger two steps in from the edge of the map.  The game can't determine whether the magma flood was purposeful or accidental.

Now, onto your idea about "dying in an attack", the game recognizes this, to an extent, but it isn't necessarily accurate.  Grahar's OP example is a soldier dying of infected wounds four years after the actual injury that killed them.  That's more than enough time for a completely different siege to come along and for that soldier to "die during the siege of such-and-such" when they did nothing at all to participate in that siege but happen to die after a four-year coma.  (In fact, that appears to be the exact thing that caused this thread...) Whatever criteria you're using as a cut-off date for expunging responsibility based upon time or presence of other sieges, unless you have absolutely human-level intuitive thought to understand cause and effect, such that there is tracking of which wound is the wound that caused the infection that lingered in the system long enough to weaken the dwarf to cause a coma when the nurse was off-duty and didn't return to feed him so the dwarf died all for want of a nail, then there's going to be edge cases that fall through the cracks, like the OP case. 

... And frankly, if we go that far, are we going to say that the dwarf died because Urist McBadNurse went to a party instead of feeding their patient as a cause of death alongside the zombie whose scratch caused an infection?

[Vattic]

I already agreed that there will always be edge cases, but that doesn't forbid any improvement. I guess opinions will differ over which bits of information worth making the game recognise and record for the player.

The system I described wouldn't have a problem with a wounded creature dying during a second siege like you suggest. Only creatures fighting would be considered part of fights. It takes no account of how healthy someone was when they entered the fight and wouldn't solve the OPs situation; My first post was more in reference to utunnels' mention of a kitten getting the final blow on a dragon, which I think is solvable without too much, unlike the OP's situation. It could note in legends what syndromes they had when they died and where from.

[Chief10]

I am pretty sure they died because of blood loss after every external organ they had rotted away.

Lolol what's an external organ?

[NW_Kohaku]

Lolol what's an external organ?

An eye?  Technically, the skin is an organ, as well. 

I already agreed that there will always be edge cases, but that doesn't forbid any improvement. I guess opinions will differ over which bits of information worth making the game recognise and record for the player.

The system I described wouldn't have a problem with a wounded creature dying during a second siege like you suggest. Only creatures fighting would be considered part of fights. It takes no account of how healthy someone was when they entered the fight and wouldn't solve the OPs situation; My first post was more in reference to utunnels' mention of a kitten getting the final blow on a dragon, which I think is solvable without too much, unlike the OP's situation. It could note in legends what syndromes they had when they died and where from.

Well, how would that dead dragon's cause of death be listed, with your system, then? 

This isn't a game with hit points, (although pulping and blood loss can be somewhat similar,) so you don't have an easily-compared concept of how much any given character contributed to a character's death.  Let's say that dragon was instead stabbed several times by a speardwarf, including a wound to the lungs that knocked the dragon unconscious from lack of breath, while other dwarves did damage like ripping off small pieces of the body or breaking a leg, and then a hammerdwarf manages to get in the blow that crushes the skull. 

Who is more responsible for that dead dragon, the speardwarf or the hammerdwarf, or are they all sharing glory with the other guys who did the damage that was ultimately irrelevant to the death of that dragon? 

On the other hand, what if an axedwarf was just a tick away from beheading the dragon, and had already done some of that toe-amputating to get some claim in... are they truly not without any claim of bravery in the face of a dragon?  What about a dwarf that valiantly held off the dragon with shield and diverted the attentions of the dragon while the other dwarves rallied to take on the dragon and civilians escaped, but never did any significant damage? 

What if the shielder did no damage at all, but was blocking dragonfire while the marksdwarves pincushioned the dragon?

And again, is the real cause of death of a dwarf who dies in your hospital the crappy nurse who'd rather attend a party than sustain the life of their charge or the zombie that put them in the hospital in the first place?

[Loud Whispers]

It would be hilarious in DF if Dwarves would argue over who killed the dragon