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[groo]

Alright, I know this has been rehashed a million times, but the threads I read were typically confusing and conflicting as all hell, so once more for old time's sake: is it still possible at all for goblin sieges to bring trolls with them as shock troops? Has anybody seen trolls in a goblin siege as of 40d?

I like the military side of the game and I was really hoping for some epic sieges, but the goblins are horribly, horribly disappointing, and not just in terms of how weak they are, but the lack of variety they show; aside from occasionally springing from ambush in order to kill that fisherdwarf immigrant you forgot to smack upside the head and order indoors, they just don't have any fun tricks to keep fights interesting. I played around with the orc mod to fix this some, but I kept feeling as though they absolutely marginalised the goblins, who I actually really like as enemies, so now I'm looking for ways to make the goblins more interesting short of making them size 300 megabeasts that spit fireballs and shoot lasers from their eyes.

I never played the game before 38c (or something), and I've never ever seen a troll in a goblin siege. Right now I'm running a test where nine tenths of my world is an evil biome and there's goblins all over the place, and trolls have [BIOME:ALL_MAIN] so there's no excuse for the goblins not to have access to them; I embarked over a chasm in the mountain my target goblin civ inhabits and double checked, and there are definitely trolls there. Three sieges in I've still not seen a troll. I removed [BABYSNATCHER] from the goblin civ, though, and had to remove [INTELLIGENT] and add [CAN_CIV] and [CAN_LEARN] in turn, and now I have a feeling my impatience might have messed me up, because if troll sieges are still even possible in the game then I have half a thought they're hardcoded to [BABYSNATCHER] or something.

So anyone spotted any trolls lately? Should I try replacing the goblin-specific flags in the raws and suffer through the tedious thief/ambushing phases to try to get to them? Or am I wasting my time trying to get them to come?

[Lordinquisitor]

I have survived many Goblin sieges and i`ve never seen Trolls, either. Maybe the Troll using Goblins are outdated?

[groo]

Well, that would suck, because the idea of goblins using trolls as siege weapons is awesome. 

Keeping my fingers crossed that someone who reads this can say for certain they've seen a troll in a goblin siege at some point in this version...

[sunshaker]

Looking at the raws (comparing trolls and beak dogs) I see four things, first the trolls don't spawn so well (how many goblin civs have evil chasms on the map), second trolls don't breed so it may be that any trolls the goblins are using in war are dying out in world gen, third and fourth are the [MOUNT] and [PET_VALUE:] tokens it may be that you need one of them (or [PET], [COMMON_DOMESTIC], [WAGON_PULLER], [PACK_ANIMAL]).

Troll
[BIOME:SUBTERRANEAN_CHASM]

Beak Dog
[MOUNT]
   [BIOME:MARSH_TEMPERATE_FRESHWATER]
   [BIOME:MARSH_TEMPERATE_SALTWATER]
   [BIOME:MARSH_TROPICAL_FRESHWATER]
   [BIOME:MARSH_TROPICAL_SALTWATER]
   [PETVALUE:50]
   [CHILD:1][CHILDNAME:beak dog pup:beak dog pups]

Unicorn (for comparison purposes as Elves do take them into battle)
   [PETVALUE:1000]
[MOUNT]
   [BIOME:FOREST_TAIGA]
   [BIOME:ANY_TEMPERATE_FOREST]
   [BIOME:ANY_TROPICAL_FOREST]
   [BIOME:SHRUBLAND_TEMPERATE]
   [BIOME:SHRUBLAND_TROPICAL]

The Unicorn has similar tags to the Beak Dog except that it does not have the child tokens, I'd bet that it is one of two things, not enough Biomes to spawn in or it is missing a pet/dometic/use tag.

[groo]

The thing is that the behaviour of bringing trolls along is, or was, totally unique to goblins. If civs ever brought unmounted pets along to their sieges then there'd be a lot more various creatures in the sieges we already get, because plenty of civs have access to a whole slew of animals through the [PET] tokens and similar; right now you never see any animal in a siege that isn't a mount.

Goblins never rode trolls, they just came along as footsoldiers, so I have to assume there's some special behaviour going on somewhere that we don't understand. I'm trying to figure out whether that got completely disabled in the latest version or whether it's just become rare to impossible due to the troll's biome or other bits of code... I've already messed with the biome configuration and made trolls as common as mud in the world, and even verified their local existence with a test embark, but I'll try giving them a petvalue and regenning.

[elizar]

The problem is at the moment is that goblins do not make dark towers in evil environments. I had just now a huge evil mountain, but there was no goblin civ that started in it.

[Ieb]

Wouldn't one solution for trying this out be removing the EVIL tag from trolls, so they would spawn in all mountain chasms?

[groo]

In the world I genned for this test there's a giant sinister mountain range with two dark towers on it, and I pre-embarked on the chasms running through the whole thing to make sure there were trolls in there; sure enough there are. And wandering around the mountains too, since I changed the creature raws to spawn trolls in any evil biome. Presumably if it were a biome scarcity issue this would've dealt with it, yeah?

[Ieb]

Probably. Can't say I've ever seen anything more exotic than a kidnapped human, elf or dwarf among goblin attackers. Well, besides beak dogs.

I guess trolls are one of the broken things that happened after the jump from 2D to 3D.

[groo]

That's what I was afraid of, but while I was crawling all the archived threads about this there were a fair number of people claiming to have seen troll-sieges in 3D iterations of the game, so I figured there was a chance someone might come out of the woodwork who'd definitively seen it happen in 40d.

[elizar]

In the world I genned for this test there's a giant sinister mountain range with two dark towers on it, and I pre-embarked on the chasms running through the whole thing to make sure there were trolls in there; sure enough there are. And wandering around the mountains too, since I changed the creature raws to spawn trolls in any evil biome. Presumably if it were a biome scarcity issue this would've dealt with it, yeah?

Hm, I guess I was wrong about that one. I just haven't seen anywhere dark towers in evil mountains in my gens before.

I think one of the other requirements for trolls is if the dark tower is actually crossing the chasm, as like if one of the tiles representing the dark tower is over a chasm.

[Derakon]

I've had trolls show up in goblin sieges on a couple of maps. I can't remember what version I was playing, but it was either 40d or the prior version.

[groo]

O_o

I don't think I've ever seen a dark tower spanning over a chasm, I didn't think they were allowed to do that by code. But this entire mountain range is utterly infested with trolls, there's at least five in every embark I do with a chasm running through it, and there's a huge stretch of troll-infested chasm a couple of embark tiles away from the nearest dark tower. So I'll regen with [BABYSNATCHER] back in place and maybe add a petvalue to the trolls and see if that encourages the goblins to use them.