There's plans for a siege update of sorts after the steam release and before the "big wait" for myth and magic; this is good, because one of the issues with DF is that despite it's reputation, it's pretty easy to, using the game mechanics, just utterly opt out of a lot of the external threats at any time by using various "easy cheeses", like sealing all entrances entirely (since no enemy can break down walls/raised drawbridges), or using traps to great effect.
It's important I think, that this be solved as much as possible/practical before leaving the game unupdated mostly for several years, and I have some suggestions for it.
Currently, these are the plans of what is on the table for the siege update already (removed one item that will rely on much later updates from the list):
https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.htmlImproved sieges
Eliminate remaining edge-of-map exploits
More highly trained attacking soldiers when appropriate
Many trap exploits are handled above by requiring more to produce a trap, things like cage traps should make more sense vs. large creatures etc. (respect strength/ability vs. material, large cages might be separate object)
Coming up with a plan to overcome pathing obstacles to reach fortress innards
Ability to dig (optionally, default on)
Ability to build bridges/ramps
Ability to use grappling hooks/ladders/climb
Learning from mistakes if first attempted assault plan fails badly
For instance, if many siegers are killed, caged, etc. in a given hallway, they shouldn't generally go that way again, even if that means building/climbing/digging
This is great and definitely gets at most of the major things, but I'd like to recommend a few more, some of which are perhaps less important than fixing the above exploits (and also add a few "notes" about the above).
Tile BreakingTile breaking should be do-able not just by "siege miners" with pickaxes, but also wild creatures/monsters like giants, titans, dragons etc. Their ability to break tiles would ideally be based on their size and strength, versus the tile they're trying to break (pretty much anything should be able to smash a featherwood drawbridge down, since it basically has the properties of styrofoam), although this would perhaps be infeasible before a map rewrite of how tile data and pathfinding work, so maybe in the meantime tile-breaking in general could be restricted to beasts with a specific large size/strength (or raw token), and to siege members capable of digging.
Digging/tile breaking in all cases should respect the strength/properties of the tile versus the power of the breaker, in terms of time it takes to break, though "instant" might sometimes be the right speed.
ClimbingNot much to say here, other than that smoothed stone walls
generally shouldn't be scalable just by regular climbing without tools (or unless they're a creature with innate wall climbing abilities, like giant spiders), and that one such tool should be special metal "claws" (don't know how to describe it) used to stab into the wall to assist climbing; dual knives would work as well probably. Such climbing tools would make climbing easier even for the less skilled climbers.
Legendary WarriorsBeing able to get squads of legendary soldiers in a few short years is a bit absurd both thematically and mechanically; I'm not sure what the solution to this should be exactly, but generally it shouldn't be easy or guaranteed to be able to get legendary fighters, especially in a short time. While a longer-term "skill system rework" may be good, in the short term for this update:
- Some kind of much harsher curve for reaching the higher skill levels.
- Maybe some kind of cap on learning that can be done without actual practice.
- Maybe skill learning rates/curves could be different for different individuals? Like most dwarves just won't really reach legendary even with decades of training, while some incredibly rare prodigies become legendary in only 5 years with a spear (but not with other things).
DoorsI suggest 2 different kinds of door, more or less. Regular, lockpickable doors like we have now, meant to represent personal doors that people use for bedrooms or village houses and such, and bigger, tougher doors meant to represent fortress/castle entrances. The normal doors would be rather quick to break by anything that can break doors (unless it's feasible to allow anything to break a door if the door is weak enough; even a human could realistically break a normal door with an axe) rather than how it is now (doors can be broken, but slow down quite a bit), contingent of course on the strength of the breaker.
The big doors might potentially be multi-tile like current drawbridges, but even if not, they will take slightly more resources to make, and be stronger/take some time to break even for big monsters, time comparable to a wall.
Elven CivsElves have a lot of potential in general related to their apparent affiliation with plants and nature magic, and while that potential would likely be explored more in myth&magic, I think a couple of things could potentially be done in the pre-magic siege update as well to make them more interesting, especially since their civ doesn't really have digging tools available to them (so they wouldn't benefit from tile breaking additions).
Elven agents (maybe pretending to be normal elven visitors), may secretly plant "special" seeds in your fortress, which when the time for the siege comes, will be "activated" by druidic magic and instantly grown into plant monsters which attack your fort from the inside. Such seeds may perhaps instead also be grown into special "traps" that function like normal traps (either trapping or injuring whomever stands on them), but are ostensibly made of living plants.
Another thing that might be appropriate for them is enhancing their wooden weapons with syndrome-inflicting fluids smeared on them in case they manage to get a scratch, and for arrows, perhaps attaching their magic seeds to the ends so that they can ensnare targets in vines, or fire the arrows over your walls and have their plant creatures sprout up on the other side.
Specific CreaturesOkay, this and the next point aren't strictly speaking "sieges", but it's close enough to the topic I think.
Hydras should be able to regrow missing body parts (mostly for the sake of the traditional heads, but the other parts make sense too). There's already a syndrome for regrowing body parts, so I suspect this could mostly be done by just adding a way for a creature to have "innate" syndromes that always apply to them (you could do something with a secretion on an internal organ right now, but that's a kind of weird and hacky way of doing it). Undead hydras of course should not heal at all (if anything they should be rotting, not healing!), so there needs to be a way for the syndrome to be disabled when they are turned undead.
Liquid/Gas/Dust CreaturesForgotten beasts and other things made of non-solid/amorphous matter are pretty weak right now, and there seem to be a few low-hanging fruit options to make them more interesting; these could also make the likes of non-beasts like blood/mud men more interesting to deal with.
I suggested this stuff elsewhere (
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=178483.0), but will summarize a few of the points here (if you've read it before, I recommend checking again; the original post has had lots of information added to it/edited since the initial post):
- Liquid/gas creatures pathfind through/move unimpeded through any tiles that water/magma/miasma/smoke can flow through (grates, bars and fortifications and such). Dust/powder creatures could maybe do the same? I dunno, the portrayal is less consistent for them. Since this relates to pathfinding stuff, this might not be doable before the map rewrite, but I could be wrong and it might turn out to be easy enough for the pre-big-wait siege update (so it's worth suggesting just in case).
- Allow all such creatures to escape cages instantly. Glass terrariums/aquariums will still contain them because those presumably don't have bars/gaps. Beasts and titans are already TRAPAVOID, but they can be trapped if they are unconscious or webbed, and this would also affect the likes of blood men while still letting terrariums work.
- Speaking of being webbed, that probably doesn't make sense for at least liquid or gas creatures (dust may be different), so they should be immune to that as well.
- Give them abilities that allow them to suffocate/choke/drown creatures. A smoke monster's punch might not so much as bruise, but it can certainly shove an arm down your windpipe (where you definitely don't want there to be smoke). And a giant blob made of any liquid or dust can surely engulf and drown anyone that will fit inside it (even if you are freed, getting water or sand out of your lungs isn't a promising prospect).
- Immunity or at least resistance to edge damage, since such creatures traditionally are resistant to it; stabbing a puddle just temporarily displaces the water, and not by much; you need blunt force to splash the pieces away from the main body.
- Give them all the innate ability to heal all their tissues very quickly, or even immunity to certain classes of injury beyond just edge damage (what I'm getting at is that you cannot "mangle" or "twist" water, it's amorphous).
- You also cannot "grab" water or smoke.
- Give them the ability to absorb their own removed body parts/pieces that may have been smashed off, in order to fill in missing tissues/body parts. If you smash off an arm, you better make sure you knocked it far away, or they can just absorb and regrow it almost right away. If the blood man touches that puddle of corrupt blood, they can absorb it and fill in whatever pieces of tissue/body parts they are missing.
- Might make sense to let them heal while in contact with ANY substance of the same material as them; water titans being perpetually healed by sitting in a lake for example, or smoke monsters having great synergy with any co-incidental fires that are going on.
A general weakness to water would make sense for basically all of them (it could dilute them out of existence) except for the ones already made of water.
EDIT:
WorldgenSort of related to this, and I think it fits; taking more factors into account when deciding the outcome of battles in worldgen. A fuller description/breakdown of this can be found in this suggestion:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=180533.0
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Topic: Ideas for siege/army improvements before the myth&magic big wait (Read 1084 times)