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[assimilateur]

I know that hostiles supposedly are clairvoyant and can sense whether or not they can reach their targets. They will not enter a tunnel that clearly serves as the entrance to fort if there's a locked door/grate/floodgate between them and your dwarves.

I've read about the possibility of using tame animals as bait, so I chained a couple of war dogs which I would keep accessible while having the path to my fort proper blocked. It didn't work. The goblins completely ignored my dogs, milling around somewhere above ground instead. When I opened the grates separating them from my dwarves they instantly started marching (or rather strolling at their usual leisurely pace).


Has this trick been nerfed or am I doing something wrong? I'm absolutely positive that my dogs were reachable; as proof, I've attached a screenshot.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The horizontal and vertical rows of engraved tiles below the chained dogs are where I put floodgates. The horizontal ones I kept open, obviously, to provide access to the bait; whenever I closed the vertical floodgates, the goblins would stop dead in their tracks, completely ignoring the bait.



Another thing:

I'm using a shaft-based layout of (mostly) 9x9 rooms with "lifts" in their corners. Cf.:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Will I gain something if I dig extra tunnels between the rooms? I was thinking about knocking out the center tile of each 9-tile wide wall. This has the potential for easier access between the rooms, but I'm a little hazy about how pathfinding in this game works. For a human, more/easier access would be good; but if I made my layout more complicated and gave my dwarves more pathing choices, would this have the potential of being more taxing for the pathing algorithms, and hence cause more lag?

[Slackratchet]

I used the Dog lure in 40d a while back and it worked fine, I have not tried it recently. As for the layout I do something similar to you but I use a 3x3 of Up/Down stairs where you have the single one. It keeps the dwarves from getting bottlenecked at the corners.

[assimilateur]

Another siege and it still isn't working. I'm gonna try making my access tunnel a bit less winding (complicated?) and see if that changes anything.

[MoatMan]

Another siege and it still isn't working. I'm gonna try making my access tunnel a bit less winding (complicated?) and see if that changes anything.

Maybe Goblins avoid War dogs when possible? Or they weren't in their line of sight? I've used kittens and donkey foals as bait and it worked okay. Of course they where between the goblins and my only entrance...

[assimilateur]

Line of sight? Not having one hasn't stopped them from pathing to my dwarves before. If you meant whether there was an unobstructed path leading to the dogs, there was.

[MoatMan]

Line of sight? Not having one hasn't stopped them from pathing to my dwarves before. If you meant whether there was an unobstructed path leading to the dogs, there was.

I recommend kittens.

[assimilateur]

I'll pass. I try to have as few cats as is possible without outright killing adopted ones myself.

I might try a different animal as bait if my plan of making the path to it more direct fails. It sure as hell won't be a goddamn cat, though.

Also, I'm pretty sure I've seen them stop pathing during the last siege when there was a cat between them and my floodgates, so it doesn't seem to work in my case either.