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[GameHat]

I'm sure that siege AI is on the list of future developments.

But, please - get this up and running sooner rather than later.

Sieges used to be an excellent challenge for early fortresses - no matter how you wanted to expand your base, you had to be ready to fight off hordes of goblins.  This kept some really good tension in the game.

Now?  Sieges are a game-breaking nuisance.  They arrive and simply mill around the edge of the map.

Often, an early fortress will have more than enough traps to turn back a siege - if only the goblins would simply assault.

As is, it's not uncommon to get sieges that 1) Could be defeated through traps 2) Are TOO difficult to break through military action (Early years, not enough dwarves to conscript or metal to build decent equipment) and as such 3) Block trade and immigration.

I've turned sieges off entirely; there's just not an effective way to deal with them early PLUS they hurt the development of your fortress too much in that they do nothing but block incoming units.

[Dame de la Licorne]

quote:Originally posted by GameHat:
<STRONG>
I've turned sieges off entirely; there's just not an effective way to deal with them early PLUS they hurt the development of your fortress too much in that they do nothing but block incoming units.</STRONG>

But isn't the whole point of a siege to cut the siegee(?) off from all outside contact?  In that case the sieges are behaving exactly as they're supposed to.

[WillNZ]

quote: But isn't the whole point of a siege to cut the siegee(?) off from all outside contact? In that case the sieges are behaving exactly as they're supposed to.

Don't make me laugh. I've never heard of an army milling about on the edge of an enemy fortress and then just leave. If they're supposed to cut off supplies, then they should stick around longer than a season and bring some catapaults.

Early game goblins should be raiders that go straight for the fortress. Late game goblins should be siegers. IMO, at least.

[Miminini]

He's being sarcastic.

[Eagle of Fire]

Longer than a season? You must be lucky, they usually stay around 2-3 seasons for me...

This game is an Alpha, and this mean that the game is still in testing stage. I think a lot of people tend to forget this point way too easily. Doesn't work with you? Toady coded a code tag to allow you to disable those sieges as you want.

What do you want more than that? Voicing your oppinion to help better the game is fine... But unconstructive criticism is not.

[Thexor]

From the development page, under "What's next?":

quote:
After the cleanup following the most recent release, there are a few goals. The first is to get overland civs to dislike each other, raise armies and destroy or capture each others cities. The next is to get them to do this to you in dwarf mode, rather than having them generate armies on top of you periodically.

...so fixing seiges isn't exactly high on Toady's to-do list, because he's planning on scrapping the current seige system entirely. Now, having seiges that actively move to your fortress and either a) attack or b) set up camp outside will be important... but, most likely, the whole thing will be fixed at once. Let's just have patience.  

[cdawg]

quote:This game is an Alpha, and this mean that the game is still in testing stage. I think a lot of people tend to forget this point way too easily. Doesn't work with you? Toady coded a code tag to allow you to disable those sieges as you want.

What do you want more than that? Voicing your oppinion to help better the game is fine... But unconstructive criticism is not.  

i really wouldn't call what he said "unconstructive criticism", i think we all know the game is an alpha and that its obviously going to have bugs and problems, but i also think that this is a pretty major thing that really impacts how the game functions, and i think its something that should probably be fixed, like the guy said, sooner rather than later.  we all appreciate how much toady does for us in creating a game which is free and incredibly rich and entertaining, but i really would enjoy the game better if this this problem were fixed.

[mickel]

Since it's gonna get fixed when it gets fixed no matter what we say there's not much we could do to solve the problem. A quick fix would be to have sieges off by default in the init file, with a comment that they are possibly game-breaking due to only being semi-implemented.

Hopefully new players read the wiki though, where I expect this to be mentioned...

Maybe it's time for a "possibly game breaking semi-implemented stuff"-category in the wiki? Unless there is one already.

[GameHat]

I hope people didn't get get the impression that I was unhappy with DF;  I love it!

Even if Toady means to rework the siege system a simple short-term fix would improve the game enormously, IMO.

Maybe have the goblins, immediately upon arrival ("A Vile Force of Darkness Has Arrived!") select and target a food stockpile (or another target common to nearly every fortress) within the fortress.  Once they arrive, they move towards that target with the AI set to chase and kill as much as possible.

This would make sieges an actual threat again; albeit a rather simple one.  Still, I think it would be better than the current system.

Again, I'm not so much complaining as missing the old sieges in DF 2d

[mrsneeze]

I'd agree with this - I've pretty much stopped playing until sieges are sorted since I'd feel wrong turning them off (and I like the challenge of them in theory anyway, and it's too easy and boring without them), but they're really slow and really annoying, and ultimately do nothing except stop anything interesting happening for a while and stop your dwarves hunting.  Even a quick fix of them running in like the colossususeses do would be lovely (although last time I had a colossus enter, it ran into a load of sieging goblins and died horribly, which I thought was amusing, until all my dwarves ran off to collect the bits of dead goblin).

Anyway, my point being I'd prefer to see sieges fixed sooner rather than later too

[mineditall]

....yet another siege suggestion

so sieges at this moment in this version are rather annoying yes

suggested before was to build catapults/ballista and destroy the goblins!

and again we have written in development notes that future releases will have a wildly changed population control as such we can expect sieges will be different

at most a suggestion should state that how sieges are ran should be varied
2 notes from this same topic say that there are two types of sieges
early sieges running into the fort destroying all it can before comming back to hold off supplies

how many battles in the real world happened over years of time where the defending army just tried to stay alive inside their walls and the attacking army just camped outside waiting for the walled city to starve?

suggestions are great but lets also read the dev pages to see whats next
and i do mean immediately next

[Tormy]

Well....sieges were always useless imo. Even if sieges would work now, simple stonefall traps could destroy all enemy armies...in the old version Ive never lost a dwarf in a siege. Kinda "lame" that traps are so powerful, or that the sieging armies dont have units to disable traps or something, but I guess everything will be improved over time. Perhaps when the military system will be added, sieges will be much more challenging.

[WillNZ]

I didn't mean to come off as angry. I just found it odd that anyone would think the current siege system would be considered anywhere near completion. Yes, you were probably being sarcastic. For this I'll give myself a slap on the wrist.