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[Virex]

Currently, a fortress is completely depraved of new information about other lands, except for the moments a liason or igrants arive. Curently this is fine because there's nothing happening in the outside world. However, it is forseable that with the caravan arc or the army arc, the outside worlds starts comming alive. And then it'd be usefull to have some communication with the rest of the world.

So here are a few options to gain information about the outside world:

A messenger would be a dwarf, preferably equiped with a horse that goes out and comunicates with the surrounding villages. Whenever he comes back to your fortress you get to hear the information he has gathered. If your fortress is important enough, others might also send messagers to you for information.

Carrier annimals would be similar. they'd be trained birds or bats that could take a single message from or to another site and then return. They'd be usefull to relay requests for trade goods after you've met with the liason for example.

Smoke signals serve a slightly different purpose. They'd be usefull to see beforehand if a caravan is comming, or if your army is returning home (after the army arc is done), enabling you to prepare for that. They could also be used by nearby towns or scouts to relay information in the case of an emergency.

[chucks]

This would give rise to communication failures and misinformation/deception attacks.

The classic problem:
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/HTML/byzantine.html

What happens when your messenger gets cut down by an unexpected goblin ambush?  What happens when your carrier pigeon is shot down by a marksman elf?  What happens if a sophisticated opposition force attempts to forge messages, making it appear as if they are genuinely coming/going to/from the Mountainhome?

Things that would help such things are wax seals on messages, message cyphers, and the ability to potentially break an enemy's cypher.

This is a very deep rabbit hole to go down.  How would it be explained in game to work and resemble real communications, but not be such a PITA so the game can use it in a fun way?

[Joakim]

I donīt think it should be *that* hard to take things like that into account.
Killed messenger = No message sent at all.
Captured messenger = Trickier, but the capturer might be able to take advantage of whatever new information he gets.

Forging messages seems to be a logical second step to be implemented after communication works.

Oh, a don't forget fire beacons btw!