Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Jacko13]

I have not seen many people talking about the experience of sending dwarves offsite to go perform raids and daring rescues.  Despite it being pretty buggy this is my main motivation for playing at the moment. Anybody else having fun with this? Noticing strange and unusual things?  My favourite bug/feature so far is the militia commander imprisoned for taking his crossbow on a raid while an export on crossbows prohibition was in place.

[Staalo]

Nothing major so far... all I've noticed is that when I send soldiers on a mission there are dwarves chasing them down and stealing food from their backpacks. Apparently militia's rations somehow lose ownership while on a raid.

[Jacko13]

That is amusing.  I think somehow anything that goes off map at the moment loses ownership including their weapons and armour.

[Senator Jim Death]

Had a crash which I suspect involved raiding. I sent two squads of raiders to pillage a site. One guy (and a merc at that) came home. The report only mentioned one guy being hurt and a few guys being captured, so I assume the rest fell in a hole. I figure it's worth going to look for them anyhow. I send these two squads (one with nobody in it) back on a rescue raid, and managed to rescue two raiders. Then I think is when I made the mistake: I turned around and sent their squads right back a-raiding again. Then comes the crash. I hadn't re-assigned the raiders I rescued to their squads, and I guess that might've caused the problem.

That aside, I kind of see it as a "cute, but not there yet" system. I use trash migrants for raiders, assuming that they could just fail to come back either because of bugs or even just regular old failure. Without any real indication of how a raid is going to go other than personal experience/guesswork based on dwarf skills, I don't think it's wise to send valuable military dwarves with valuable equipment unless I've been prepping them just for raiding. The returns on raiding are pretty low, too.

[Jacko13]

I appear to have just lost my fortress to a save just before a squad returns that Crashes to Desktop.  I assumed mine was something to do with one of the squad members having been elected mayor shortly before departing (which I failed to notice). May also be complicated by the baron dying in a fire imp incident in the caverns while the squad was away.

I had been using the raids as a source of real life training for my main squads... sending them on pillage missions to nearby elf and gobbo forest retreats. Trash migrants appears a more sensible strategy given the technical issues. Really hope its a bit less buggy in the next release as I love the feature conceptually (if not yet in practice)

[Senator Jim Death]

Raiding sites--specifically the "sneak in undetected" raid--seems to be a reliable and low-risk way to train Ambusher, at least. Not the most useful skill. That military tactics skill (is that its name?) probably also gets trained on leaders for raids, but I haven't looked to see if that's true. So there is some use for the relatively safe raids.

I have my raiders double as explorers--picking up artifacts in abandoned sites seems relatively safe. One time I had a squad of raiders travel literally for months from tavern to tavern carousing and asking for rumors of an artifact I wanted. They eventually came home without finding it. No idea how they decided that they'd spent enough time looking for it--I assumed they'd just head to the site, find it or not, and come home.

It's still a really, really early system, and it shows.

[Adequate Swimmer]

It does have its uses even though it's limited.
An embark with no metal can be made viable if raiders are providing a steady if modest supply of metal bars and salvage.
It's also a good way of obtaining books and training combat skills if you have a necro tower within range.

[PatrikLundell]

If you're going to raid necro towers and are short of metal, don't raid the tower until it has depleted its supply of cold bodies and delivered their armor and weapons to you. It usually takes about 5 years for them to be reduced to a few necros and no minions.

[Jacko13]

Raids are also a great source of animals otherwise hard to come by. I have become quite fond of beak dogs as guard dogs at cavern entrances.

Where combat results from the raid the military leader and tactician skills are also trained.