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[DwarfDwarf]

I spent a couple of game years building a truly beautiful drowning / freezing labyrinth entrance, complete with outflow into the corpse stockpile to save hauling time, but now no one ever attacks! I had a couple goblin sieges early (first six years of the fort I'd say), as well as some relatively large elf invasions.

I've got a nearby elf civilization we're at war with, but unfortunately no goblin pits within about 15 tiles. How can I provoke these jokers into attacking to test out the shiny new infrastructure? Haven't had a siege in about four game years at this point.

[Bumber]

You can force them to retaliate by raiding them. Unfortunately, there's a save corruption issue tied to raiding. Maybe sending completely naked and unarmed units is safe, though.

[Shonai_Dweller]

If you're going to avoid raiding, the main two things to remember are:
 1) Were hostile civs noted in neighbours list on the embark screen (where you chose your starting location)? Raiders won't come from too far away.

 2) Is your population over 80? That's the vanilla setting for allowing each of the other civs to even think about attacking you.

Goblins are hostile by default, but to make non-hostile civs hostile without raiding them is tricky. Robbing human merchants of their stuff usually provokes them. Elves....I dunno, I haven't seen an Elf diplomat demanding tree quotas in years. They tend to be chill about you robbing and killing their merchants too.

Theoretically, opening your tavern to visitors and displaying plenty of artifacts might attract attention from beyond the minimum distance range. But people who want your stuff tend to just steal it these days, so that might not work to attract an army either.

Sending in a naked dwarf to raid someone you want to attack you seems like the best option as it might possibly get around the equipment corruption problems. Raiding negates both 1) and 2) above.

[Vicious_Unicycle]

Civilizations don't need to be nearby to be goaded into attacking you. You can send out a single dwarf to demand tribute from some far flung goblin capital and they'll start sending sieges eventually. If your fortress is large enough, I'm pretty sure killing/trapping visiting diplomats can result in sieges if you do it enough. Not 100% positive though. Never tried it myself.

I believe generating more wealth will draw more hostile attention. If you're feeling confident enough in your trap, you could always start mining out that adamantine...

And, I mean, what with the villains update and all, most visitors nowadays are just spies and thieves looking to steal your artifacts and overthrow your government. I'd say preemptive summary execution is entirely warranted.

[DwarfDwarf]

You can force them to retaliate by raiding them. Unfortunately, there's a save corruption issue tied to raiding. Maybe sending completely naked and unarmed units is safe, though.

Huh, well I guess I'm lucky, I've been raiding my pants off for years in this save, never had any problems. Destroyed a necromancer tower and taken over about five elvish towns. That said, I'll start looking further afield to raid the goblins too.

And I hit the adamantine really recently! Didn't know that would help. Unfortunately the friends that provoked are on the wrong side of my fortress to hit my main trap, but they're gonna be their own kinda fun. Refrained from any wikiing on how best to deal to make sure I get all the FUN out of em

[PatrikLundell]

The raid equipment corruption bug was believed to be fixed, but it has been reported to occur in the current version as well. However, it's reasonable to assume the fix reduced the frequency of corruption considerably. In 0.44.12 I was able to perform a couple of dozen raids before corruption hit, with a few fortresses, but they all eventually went corrupt, so with this version you ought to get quite a few raids in before you lose your fortress. If you're prepared for some replay, you may consider backing up the fortress save from time to time and revert to the latest such backup when corruption hits.

[DwarfDwarf]

Ok, thanks for the good advice on backing up. As is the DF way, that then gives me a new question. I modified my init file to do seasonal backups, and the game does pause and say autosaving every season. However, now that I'm looking in my data/save folder I'm only seeing one save there (region1), no seasonal saves. Does that mean my regional saves aren't actually working, or that they are just saving to the main save folder instead of creating new folders as they should?

In any case, just made a manual backup of my region 1 save folder just in case. I'm probably already at two dozen raids on the save, so I might be pushing my luck without even having known it.

[PatrikLundell]

Given the corruption rate reduction from the recent fix, nobody knows what the likelihood of corruption is, only that it can still happen.

The seasonal save (and DFHack's quicksave, which uses the same DF logic) saves the current game to its folder to protect against crashes. There is another setting for backups, I believe, but I wouldn't use that in this case, but rather check the game for the known signs of corruption and make a backup of the save only when no issues are seen (and I'd rotate the saves over a number of them as well). Auto backup doesn't know if your save is corrupted, and so may overwrite the uncorrupted backup automatically. After all, the insidious thing with the equipment corruption is that it can be present for some time before a crash is triggered, so the game may already be doomed when saved.

[DwarfDwarf]

rather check the game for the known signs of corruption and make a backup of the save only when no issues are seen

That sound smart - any pointers on how to check for signs of corruption? Not seeing any help on the wiki there

[PatrikLundell]

The known sign of corruption is that any of the specific item uniform parts contain nonsensical items, typically early artifact "books". Thus, you'd have to go to the military equipment screen, select Armor, specific item, and go to the bottom of that list to see if there's invalid stuff there. Repeat for each of the other uniform parts (including weapons and shields). It's not known if this check is sufficient or if the corruption can sneak up on you, but my guess is that it happens immediately when a unit returns and DF fails to juggle the equipment.

It's not exactly unexpected that the wiki doesn't contain that much info on how to work around bugs that shouldn't have been there in the first place.