Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[pikachu17]

I was playing my unmodded Fort, happy as could be, when a bunch of merchants showed up, I decided to make some more iron serrated disks, when some lions showed up in the edge. I decided to kill them before an inebriated non-soldier decided to fight it. I'm SURE that I didn't tell them to kill a merchant.
after killing the lions with some help from a solid citizen(inebriated non-soldier). they started to go back home. I didn't see it, but I did see the message. Kel
Whats-his-name has been found dead. I zoomed to his location and found his corpse and one of my soldiers. I looked through reports. seemed the soldier killed the citizen because he wanted to.by the way his crime isn't shown on the justice screen. I continued on wondering what to do, when I got the message,
Whats-his-name Miner has canceled eat, interrupted by a smelter. neither dwarf was having a temper tantrum or was beserk and it was unmodded so no potions of anger  caused this. other people saw the miner and smelter fighting and decided to join in. it dissolved into chaso.
what caused this? can I prevent it from happening again by save-scummming? can I save the fort?

[PatrikLundell]

Your description seems to be inconsistent. First you talk about killing a merchant, and then a dead citizen, after which a revenge killing spiral broke out.
My guess is that the first one killed was actually a dwarven merchant who had relatives in the fortress, and said relatives then attacked the killer,... leading to a tantrum spiral.

I've had a couple of odd incidents (possibly) regarding merchants (non dwarven ones, since my civs are dead). In one case it seems a merchant got into an argument with one of my dorfs for an unknown reason, hit at the dorf, and the dorf retaliated by smashing a toe nail on the attacker. All the merchants packed up and left after that.
The second incident is a dorf who comes flying and dies hitting a wall, while another dorf dodged out of the way and stunned itself against a wall. Since this happened in the trade depot, my guess is that merchants, guards, or their animals somehow were involved, but nothing more happened after that.

If my guess is correct, you might be able to avoid the issue by making sure the merchant killing dorf doesn't meet the merchant to receive the killer worthy insult. You might try to deal with the lions and then station the militia rather than taking them home, or station them so they enter through a different entrance (you do have multiple ones, don't you?).

[NullForceOmega]

It's called a loyalty cascade, it used to pretty rare, as it required actually telling your militia to attack members of your civilization.  Since the personality rewrite it happens more often but on a more limited scale, basically: your soldier decided to fight with the merchant, he get's flagged as an enemy, his buddies start brawling, more enemy flags, and so on.  The good news is that it is rarely a fortress ending thing now, but it can still lead to heavy losses.

As for avoiding it, if you have a save prior to the incident, you can order a different soldier or squad to fight the lion instead, that should alleviate the problem.

[mirrizin]

I've had this happen. It's very aggravating.

[pikachu17]

No I actually said they DIDN'T kill a merchant as far as I'm aware. I already knew fighting merchants could cause a loyalty cascade, so I didn't want you to think that happened(irony). but looking at the combat reports nobody ever attacked a merchant.
The soldier simply walked up to a citizen well outside the walls and just killed him. then a miner inside the walls decided to kill a smelter,well before soldiers went near any merchants

[NullForceOmega]

Still a loyalty cascade, the issue is with the game setting enemy flags that don't get cleared properly, thereby causing a 'cascade' of 'loyalty' failures resulting in a large number of deaths.  Regardless of how it started it's still a cascade and therefore the only option to prevent it from happening is to change the circumstances, i.e. ordering another squad to assist with the lions or ignoring them.