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Author Topic: The meaning of seige.  (Read 9328 times)

IndonesiaWarMinister

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Re: The meaning of seige.
« Reply #90 on: July 10, 2008, 08:03:57 pm »

Goblin engineer.
A wimpy wrestler with [trAPAVOID] and [BUILDINGDESTROYER:2]
Nay. Building destroyer tags is instantly destroying things...
I prefer the engineer open the door after some time (300 frame or something?)
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Tiler

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Re: The meaning of seige.
« Reply #91 on: July 13, 2008, 06:10:08 pm »

I've had a lot of ideas on sieges. I'm a bit of an ancient military buff, so I like coming up with ideas on how seiges could be made more epic and more challenging.

As was said at the start of the thread, the basic ideas for sieges is to starve out the enemy. Of course, doing this to dwarves, who have limitless farms that don't require watering, is pointless. Waiting for the dwarves to die of dehydration would also meet with failure thanks to reservoirs and the like. Of course, the whole farming bit will change in the future, but a having the goblins simply sit outside your fort would both be a waste of time and be not fun. And repetitive.

So I figure what would be cool is to have the sieges vary based upon what bested the goblins last time. Did you refuse to fight and simply ate and drank until they left? Next time they'll prelude their sieges with some spies and dwarven traitors to sabatoge your gates, poison your foods and water, and commit some arson in your farmland. Did you get your water from an outside stream? Then they'll bring some poison and blight the river. Oh, you just use archers to pick them off? Then they'll bring bigger shields and some catapults to smash your archers. But wait, you're sending in some infantry to deal with the equipment? Then they'll build their own fortifications around the catapults and bring some archers of their own. And if a spy detected that your farms are just underneath a pathetic layer of soil? Bring in the siege drillers to drill downwards and raid your farmland. And if they have the pressing need to assault your front gates, they'll soften it up with some missile fire to smash apart your fortifications and collapse your towers. Constant escalation and subterfuge.

I'd also like to see sieges become rarer, but become much more devastating events.

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Neonivek

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Re: The meaning of seige.
« Reply #92 on: July 13, 2008, 06:15:14 pm »

One amazing tactic I think ingenius Goblins could do is Dam up your Rivers (and possibly underground rivers) and force you to rely on your existing water and booze supply.
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Reasonableman

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Re: The meaning of seige.
« Reply #93 on: July 13, 2008, 06:37:03 pm »

Well, suppose you divide goblin attacks into raids and sieges. Raids would be slightly less dangerous, in that it would just be a group of goblins pounding on your front gates, but sieges would have siege engines hurling rocks at your fort and siege towers trying to grapple onto the walls, but before all that, they'd dam up all the water sources on the map with some sort of off-map subterfuge. Once water becomes more vital for crop-growing, this'll really put the hurt on understocked forts. Course, we'd also have to make starvation much more gradual, with some sort of control system for ration size (look up Stronghold by Firefly games for an excellent model for castle management. DF could do well to steal some features from it, like pitch ditches, 'simple' moats and 'simple' moat fillers, taxes, and a punishment vs parks and gardens system.)
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