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[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

Reflecting on Toady thinking about invasions and nerfing cage traps, obviously without making defenses useless.

I think a solution is be to add a new kind of soldier - an engineer soldier. In armies engineers build/repair bridges/boats/walls/trenches and remove mines to support the actual fighting troops.

They'd have a title so the player can tell who they are - "goblin recruit military engineers" or whatever. I imagine an army having 1 of these/30 regular soldiers.

I propose to make a skill that allow an invader engineer-soldier to:

Find traps in advance

Disable found traps

Open a cage to release the prisoner

Free themselves from a cage

Somehow neutralize drawbridges*, locked doors and hatch covers.

Maybe more things?

Skill level decides time to complete actions plus success rate - a low skilled engineer taking maybe so long to do stuff that he becomes redundant, like FINALLY getting a guy out of a cage when everybody else is already dead. A lowly skilled engineer should also could go "all clear, proceed" and then walk into a missed trap and get speared to the amusement of the player.

Invasions can be made harder/easier by raising/decreasing number of engineers plus by their skill.

It's a knob that can be turned all the way down to hardly matters - if an engineer has say 50/50 fail rate and he's working on a hallway with 10 spear traps, he won't last long! And it can be turned all the way up with a bunch masterengineers neutralizing traps. And it can be everywhere in between.

I guess the first invasion should just have a lone crapppy engineer destined to end up in a trap he messes up trying to remove, so the player gets aware of them being a thing. And afterwards invaders bring more and more of them so it gets harder later on.

Invader behaviour should be changed with invaders sometimes being wary to rush into non-checked areas. The enginners would have no use if the gobs never waited for them

Invaders should neither always wait for an engineer to work on every single square, nor should they just always barge ahead.

It could maybe be simple with invaders considering areas around where people ran into dangerous, but by default they run ahead? So if they meet traps they stop and work on them or path again but an area 5-10 squares from the trap is considered danngerous?

Maybe invaders should always distinguish between "be carefull" areas (maybe around doors and drawbridges inside the fort?) and "safe" areas (outside, featureless rooms) - so this creates a tactical possibility of the player trying to put traps where the gobs don't expect them to be.

Anyway it's another knob to turn up and down - how much do invaders wait for for engineers to clear areas before rushing in. I guess if their engineers died, they just go for it and rush ahead, after all, they're there to wreck shit.

Consequences:

Now we've got a fun tactical situation - with the player wanting to kill specifically the engineers so they can't remove traps. I presume archers in towers would be useful to pick off engineers protected by meleers.

if an enginners stays alone behind the army to free a bunch of goblins from cages, maybe would make the player build some "secret" exits to alllow surprise sorties to get at unprotected engineers.

It would just be great to create a sort of arms race with players having to get more sophisticated to stop invaders. It would make it more attractive to build some more sophisticated defensed, that to me would feel more like real fort-stuff instead of just a trap hallway.

*IDK what they can do about drawbridges? Realistically you'd have to first install a thing to prevent it from crashing down, like stick some logs to it to force it to remain open, and then afterwards use a battering ram to break through it. Then invaders would bring some logs and they could then use logs both to stop a bridge from closing plus to batter it. Then it becomes a tactical thing to get their logs

I guess though drawbridges could be left for a while as un-nerfed and players can then choose to use them or not.

[Mobbstar]

+1  Sounds like sincere fun to balance traps and militia for well-rounded defenses

With armies gaining knowledge of traps through survivors and diplomat-spies, the soldiers would already know in advance where to wait for engineers to do their thing.

Thematically, engineers could also join merchant caravans as "bodyguards" that repair scuttled wagons, if only the wagons didn't explode upon taking any damage at all.

Player-controlled Adventurers might also want these abilities for raiding tombs.

Since it seems centered around mechanic-buildings, maybe it should use the mechanic skill.

[Egan_BW]

This sort of thing seems like an exciting offshoot from Moving Fortress type stuff, as hopefully at that point we'll have a better idea of how mechanisms and things work, and all the things which the Mechanic skill can do.
Unless Toady gets moving fortress stuff in and immediately moves on to boats, and from there to trade and travel stuff, hmm.

As far as I know, the game doesn't really have an idea of different soldiers in an army having different "roles", they just bring whichever weapon they're most skilled in using and otherwise all follow the same AI. It'd be interesting to see the enemies try to form and army with different squads and specialists depending on what they need, but that's not really how the game works right now. Such a system might see armies bringing along things like scouts, diplomats, sappers?

[IndigoFenix]

Good idea.

One thing I would add: instead of simply increasing the number of engineers over time, the game could adjust them based on what percentage of traps vs soldiers the previous invasion encountered.

If you don't use traps, the enemy will fill its army with soldiers. Use many traps, and they will send more engineers in response.

This can also figure into worldgen fortresses and battles. If a site's architect values cunning, they will place more traps. If they value martial prowess, they will invest more heavily in their militia.

[GumNut]

It would make more sense to me if all units were able to use their skills and attributes to give them a chance to detect, evade and dismantle traps.

To detect a trap before stepping into it I could see a perception attribute being added, but the already existing attributes analytical ability or intuition could be used instead. If a trap is detected they would stop and start deconstruction.

For a unit that fails to detect a trap there's the dodge skill, this doesn't apply to cages as far as I know but it could apply here too.

And then they could use the mechanic skill to dismantle traps, cages, drawbridges, constructed walls and whatever else you can think of. This would make them act more like building destroyers with the skill level affecting how fast the building can be deconstructed, and it would also enable invaders to free themselves or others from cages.

A unit that has nothing better to do and happens to have a pickaxe be their main weapon could start digging randomly with their mining skill. This would happen either if they are wandering around looking for somewhere to cause trouble or if they are stuck in a pit and the pathfinding can't find anywhere to go or buildings to destroy.


An alternative to deconstruction could be for invaders to start smashing stuff with their weapons until the weapons or the stuff they are smashing run out of durability and gets destroyed.

[delphonso]

It would make more sense to me if all units were able to use their skills and attributes to give them a chance to detect, evade and dismantle traps.

I think this is more in keeping with DF as we know it. It would also add levels to defense where traps my work well against elves and kobolds, but humans and goblins might get around them, and you could almost count on dwarves to dismantle them.

[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

It would make more sense to me if all units were able to use their skills and attributes to give them a chance to detect, evade and dismantle traps.

To detect a trap before stepping into it I could see a perception attribute being added, but the already existing attributes analytical ability or intuition could be used instead. If a trap is detected they would stop and start deconstruction.

For a unit that fails to detect a trap there's the dodge skill, this doesn't apply to cages as far as I know but it could apply here too.

And then they could use the mechanic skill to dismantle traps, cages, drawbridges, constructed walls and whatever else you can think of. This would make them act more like building destroyers with the skill level affecting how fast the building can be deconstructed, and it would also enable invaders to free themselves or others from cages.

A unit that has nothing better to do and happens to have a pickaxe be their main weapon could start digging randomly with their mining skill. This would happen either if they are wandering around looking for somewhere to cause trouble or if they are stuck in a pit and the pathfinding can't find anywhere to go or buildings to destroy.


An alternative to deconstruction could be for invaders to start smashing stuff with their weapons until the weapons or the stuff they are smashing run out of durability and gets destroyed.

It could be done that way. I'll just note some reason for my idea to make them specialized:

It's very common in tactic was-games to have some sort of unit with very weak combat skills but ability to change the terrain. The reason for that is: If only a few units have this VITAL ability, you create a tactical situation where the player needs to kill specifically these units before the others. Because if you take out the engineers, you've basically won as the traps then can take care of the swordmasters.

It's more fun if you need to figure out how to take out the specifically the engineer, as opposed to the invaders all being identical so it doesn't matter which order you kill them in.

It creates more challenges. Are you going to sacrifice maybe good soldiers just to kill one engineer, will you set up some militarily unskilled dwarves and just make a dash for it, do you try with marksdwarves, or how do you do it.

For this to arise, it is also imperative the player can identify the engineers by their name.

However, we can have it both ways.

The engineer-skills could be designed so you can do very little with it at low levels of it, and then it gets more and more usefull as the level increased.

So a dabbling engineer maybe would be able to stop a trap if lucky, but only extremely rarely would be able to dismantle one.

That would tbh be kind of cool as well, as you'd then maybe have to worry if the goblins would get lucky and get through a trap field with few losses.

This way you keep the DF-thing with everybody having access to the same skills while keeping the specialization you need for the tactical situation to arise.


Just realized an extra cool possibility:

- Mechanism quality used to make a trap determines how hard it is to dismantle it + how hard it is to remove a prisoner from a cage trap.

- Mechanism skill of dwarf that installs the trap determines how hard it is to spot it.

This would make it matter really A LOT if you have a legendary mechanic.

[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

This sort of thing seems like an exciting offshoot from Moving Fortress type stuff, as hopefully at that point we'll have a better idea of how mechanisms and things work, and all the things which the Mechanic skill can do.
Unless Toady gets moving fortress stuff in and immediately moves on to boats, and from there to trade and travel stuff, hmm.

As far as I know, the game doesn't really have an idea of different soldiers in an army having different "roles", they just bring whichever weapon they're most skilled in using and otherwise all follow the same AI. It'd be interesting to see the enemies try to form and army with different squads and specialists depending on what they need, but that's not really how the game works right now. Such a system might see armies bringing along things like scouts, diplomats, sappers?

Yeah you're right.

I think invader armies really need better AI - so they can also do stuff like make recruits go first and spearmasters last, in order to have the player waste traps and arrows on the recruits.

I think however, even with the invaders having the same "identity" all of them, it could work if the inclination of an invader to do trap-stuff depended on their trap-dismantling skill and if everybody had the skill.

Like this:

Low level - only tries to scan for traps, never tries to dismantle or free caged prisoners

Middle - scans for traps, wants to free all caged prisoners before dismantling any trap

High - scans for traps, dismantles traps before freeing prisoners from cages

Then the master engineers would be the ones breaking a road through the trapfield and the middle one would stay behind and release guys.

[Azerty]

Sappers and engineers were a big part of warfare. There's a reason why Tyr is on a peninsula instead of an island, like they started.

Sappers trying to destroy traps might be a good idea, which would give more uses for engineers and their guilds. Poliorcetics might be even more complex after this: for exemple, could sappers try to use waters from a nearby river to drown a fortress?

[adseaghtrnjty]

I think freeing others can be made available for any soldiers. Also, anyone should be able to dig ditches and make walls since anyone could do those jobs. Care would have to be put into sapper types because it can end up into bull crap territory where an engineer disables a multi-layered trap.

Drawbridges and walls will probably end up being vulnerable if siege weaponry ever gets put into the game.

Also I don't think engineers will be useful anyways in a long hallway without digging out the walls. Imagine a hallway with siege weaponry on one end and spears coming out the walls from the other end. Goblin comes to take care of the spears, it gets shot. That's probably okay though since there's usually a workaround or something else can be used as leverage to defeat a fortress like attrition, economic advantage, or starving them out. It'll just need to be fixed to Dwarf Fortress's needs.