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[Malroc The Valiant]

I currently have 15 legendary soldiers held captive at an Elven fort. Those bastard launched a sneak attack after hundreds of years of being allies, snake fucks. 2000 of those nature loving pricks prance about one of our former forts, truly blasphemous. 

So if The war ends would my soldiers be released and return to me? It seems like they're included in my pop still because no migrants have come to replace them, I'm exactly 15 dwarves under my pop cap.

Still curious about my first question for future reference, but I've decided to send a steal clad grizzly bear man adventurer in to rescue them and hope my fort doesn't fall apart in my absence. I'm pretty sure I've seen accounts of people rescuing dwarves with an adventurer, it is possible right? Where would my units be held? Will they randomly be up on top of one of the tree fort things? Can I tell them to follow me and take all 15 back to my fort, retire and have my 15 units back? If they wont join me will the go back to my fort on their own or decide to migrate somewhere else?

Thanks for any info you have. Damn elves, we had such a good thing going. I'd have taken those fucks to the top, but they had to spit in my face.

[Ziusudra]

I think the prisoners will not be able to spawn in adventure mode since the only generated sites with jails are the goblin ones. I've never been able to find prisoners in other types of sites and I think it's because there's no jail for them to spawn in. (Though, I've not gone searching for prisoners from a player fort.)

You could try a rescue mission in fort mode.

[Jundavr]

You're asking the real questions here. I don't think anyone has ever experimented on that.

Here's my two cents: I once launched several attacks on a necro tower and they ended up capturing some dwarves. Every single one I sent to free them ended up captured as well, so I decided to go there on adv mode and save them. After thousands of turns of tirelessly pulping the walking corpses, I managed to enter the tower, talk about the weather with the necromancers, make one of them join me, learn the secrets of life and death, and... no sign of my dwarven prisioners. I've looked everywhere, and couldn't find them. I used a script that accesses "df.global.world.units.all" and looks for an unit by its first name, and couldn't find them. After a while I clicked that the zombies might have killed them, since they were not necromancers, but retiring the adventurer and checking legends mode shows that my dorfs were still alive and being held prisoners at that tower. Seems like we have a case of units being stuck in a limbo: they are made prisoners of a site and registered as being located there, but the game doesn't know where to place them once the site is loaded.

[Leonidas]

You could use the adventurer to reduce the site's population, then go back to fortress mode and launch missions.

[Malroc The Valiant]

Thanks for the input, all good things to know.

I guess my current course of action will be to go kill most of the elves in the Forest Home then try to rescue my dwarves if I can't find them there. If I can't I'll send in the rescue mission.

Everyone I sent previously in has been captured. I was sending them on sneak raids set to only release prisoners and not the specified rescue mission, does it make a difference? Is one than the other easier or anything?

I'll tell you what I find when I finally get around to retiring the fort. Not looking forward to gathering all the scattered shit upon reclamation, but I want my champions back.

[Leonidas]

Everyone I sent previously in has been captured. I was sending them on sneak raids set to only release prisoners and not the specified rescue mission, does it make a difference? Is one than the other easier or anything?

The type of mission determines which skills are checked.

A Raid uses the Ambusher skill, probably checking the average of all dwarves on the mission. The defenders use the site leader's Observer skill. If the raiders fail their Ambush check, then they go into battle as if they were on a Pillage mission, probably with a disadvantage.

A Pillage or Raze mission checks the mission leader's Military Tactics skill against the site leader's military tactics skill. This establishes a multiplier that affects subsequent combat.

If you don't mind some tedium, it's easy to grind up Ambusher skill by sending single-squad missions to weak enemy sites. Each dwarf on a raid mission gets 500XP to Ambusher, regardless of the outcome. So find a little hamlet with a dozen elves in it and send your squads there in a constant mission loop. After a year or two, depending on your embark size, they'll all be little ninjas with legendary ambusher. Then you can safely send them on raid missions anywhere.

Some caveats:

• If you grind for XP like this, make sure that each member of the squad is physically on the map before you send that squad back out. The game will let you send the squad out earlier, but I think that risks a bug in which squad members never return.
  
• Send your soldiers out in a seasonal cycle. Stop all missions towards the end of the season so that they're all home for the seasonal autosave. Then wait a week or so at the beginning of the new season to see if you'll be hit with a siege.

[Malroc The Valiant]

Is the ambusher skill used in rescue missions too? I took your advice and have been training 2 squads in ambusher, I really don't want to spend like 3 years doing nothing but hauling stuff back to stockpiles after reclamation. I've played DF for two years and have never reclaimed a fort just because the clean up is so daunting. Only going to send in an adventurer as a last resort.

[Jundavr]

Is the ambusher skill used in rescue missions too?

The short answer is yes, if you send a RAID.

For further clarification, there are five types of missions for you to choose from. And of these, there are three in particular that are of your interest in this case:

Raid: this uses Ambusher skill to enter a site undetected and do detailed actions there. If the stealth check fails, regular military action ensues (with drawbacks, as mentioned before), and if you still win despite that, the detailed actions will still happen.

Pillage: this type doesn't bother with stealth and your squads will straight up siege and attack the site. The militia commander's "Leader" skill will be used to determine pre combat modifiers (or the highest of any soldier's skill if the MC isn't present). If you win, the detailed actions you ordered will happen.

Raze: same as pillage, except it will attempt to destroy the site and wipe it out. It seems that sometimes there is some bugged population that remains, making it impossible to truly raze that site.

Detailed actions means the stuff you specify your dwarves to do in the 'd' menu before launching a mission, such as releasing prisoners.

[Leonidas]

I took your advice and have been training 2 squads in ambusher, I really don't want to spend like 3 years doing nothing but hauling stuff back to stockpiles after reclamation. I've played DF for two years and have never reclaimed a fort just because the clean up is so daunting. Only going to send in an adventurer as a last resort.

Grinding up Ambusher skill with raids has nothing to do with retirement or adventurers.

Within fortress mode, just send out raid mission after raid mission under the (c) menu, assuming you've got some soldiers who are well trained and equipped. There's no need for those missions to bring back every type of loot. You probably just want artifacts and prisoners. The results of these repetitive missions are very dull. Soon they should all read: "Squad X searched the site and found nothing." That means you got your XP. You might get a message that they were observed leaving the site, which probably means that they almost failed their Ambusher roll.

You send the missions against a small site so that the soldiers can handle combat if they fail their Ambusher roll. Once they have several thousand XP each in Ambusher, they can successfully raid any site. Then you can rescue prisoners, steal artifacts, and steal animals.

If you want to attack sites and reduce their populations, that's a totally different skill set and training plan. Ambusher doesn't help you kill people. It only helps you steal things. The vocabulary that Toady chose in the missions area is rather confusing, so try to ignore the literal meanings of the words.

[Malroc The Valiant]

Right right, I know most of that, my question was more about when you pull up the people menu in the map and there is an option to create a mission to rescue the person. Does that just create a raid mission or does it create a designated rescue mission? Would that rescue mission success be contingent on the ambusher skill as well? does the amount of people you send on raid impact their probability of being caught?

Grinding ambusher has to do with retirement and adventurers for me because I was going to send and adventurer in kill most the elves, reclaim my fort and send in a raze mission. But I don't want to spend a long ass time afterward hauling all my shit back to where it belongs, so I'm just going to grind up my raiding squads ambusher skill, or rather that's what I'm in the process of doing. My back up plan is sending in an adventure if my raiding party gets caught, but you're saying if I get their ambusher high enough they're essentially little shadow ninjas? What is a good point to stop grinding?