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[SpiralDimentia]

Something... odd just happened. I was doing my thing, throwing some cavern-captures into a hole. Suddenly, an ambush. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then something odd happened. I noticed one of them, instead of ''An ambush! Curse them!" it said "A goblin has sprung from an ambush!" Then, immediately, all the little ambush squads killed their own leaders. A group of lashers Jedi'd their hammer man. Swordmen turned on their Axeman. A crossbowman was hacked apart by axemen.

What the sweet unholy hell just happened?

Edit; Okay, bit of an update. After their commanders were all dispatched, they uhh.. turned on each other. They killed a few of themselves then left the map. Another thing, these ambushes all popped up on the edge of the map, without being seen by anything. All my beards were within the fortress. I'm not sure why they got exposed.

[smjjames]

Sounds like some kind of loyalty cascade. Though were the 5 ambush groups forming into teams or was it every goblin for himself?

[SpiralDimentia]

It's happening again.. This time only 4 ambush groups. They were sighted as soon as they appeared on the edge of the map, then proceeded to murder the everloving hell out of their commanders... They butcher their leaders then some take off, others just stand around clueless.

[Cobbler89]

It certainly sounds like a bug -- at this stage in the game anyway. Theoretically, whatever confused loyalties are possible once the personal and factional loyalty system is improved and fleshed out more ought to be possible for both dwarves and goblins; but inasmuch as the phenomenon of simplestic, self-destroying civilizations known as loyalty cascades is a bug currently, it sounds as though it was compounded with a second bug that it managed to occur to an enemy civ that shouldn't have any reason (as far as I can think) for its members to kill one another and trigger such a cascade.

If you want you can upload the save to the DFFD and link it in a bug report (and if you have a save from before it started, that should probably be uploaded too; I have no idea if it's possible to confirm that such a thing hasn't started yet, though), but I expect Toady would rather just rewrite the areas of the game that it happens to affect than actually figure out what happened to your poor goblin friends.

[smjjames]

It's happening again.. This time only 4 ambush groups. They were sighted as soon as they appeared on the edge of the map, then proceeded to murder the everloving hell out of their commanders... They butcher their leaders then some take off, others just stand around clueless.

Sounds more like a mutiny. Someone else saw something similar when they did a fort reclaim, is that fort a reclaimed fort? That could partially answer it.

[Baffler]

Is it possible that different goblin civs are involved here? that doesn't explain their killing their leaders (but not each other? just the other groups?) but it does put some sense into the situation.

[Keldane]

Were the leaders of a different race? Possibly former prisoners of war or kidnapped citizens? I've heard that these old allegiances can linger, resulting in squads turning on themselves because their leader is considered an enemy of their civilization.

[ORCACommander]

i thought gobos killing gobos's was a personal matter

[snelg]

Reminds me of these bugs.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=3685

From what I can remember from getting it quite long ago it never actually stopped happening when it had started.

[SpiralDimentia]

That almost seemed like it, but no, the commanders are all goblins. They spam my combat log with ''the goblin axeman hacks at the goblin spearman with his axe!" and stuff like that. It's strange.

[Garath]

are you using any mods or did you recently change anything in the raws? It's pretty weird, almost as if they have their own loyalty cascade. Any chance you messed with the goblins as adventurer?

[SpiralDimentia]

No, no mods and no raw changing. I play as vanilla as possible.

Also; I just was able to witness the whole situation. This is maybe the fifth time it's happened, and all three ambush groups appeared near each other on the edge of the map. After slaughtering their commanders, they started in on each other. And not just the other groups. The spearmen started butchering each other. The bowmen started pincushioning each other. The hammermen [who were in between all the crossbowmen] started smashing them apart and then went after each other. I don't even understand it.

Edit; I thought maybe it was different civilizations fighting one another, but no, [c] shows me that there is only 1 goblin faction known at this time. So I've decided that I know fuck all about what's going down here.

[nanomage]

I noticed a similar thing some time ago: occasionally, If a squad leader of an ambush were a historical figure (goblin or not), his unhistorical subordinated would turn on him and hack him apart. This is the bug I believe, maybe somehow connected to what those figures had done in worldgen, and what happens after is just a well-known loyalty cascade.
I never had it with that frequency though, in my games they'd just butcher their general and a couple of kidnapped squad leaders, and after that they'd run out of historical figures and start ambushing properly.

[weenog]

Do goblins feel crowded and lash out randomly if too many are packed into a small area, like domesticated animals do?  Maybe the ambush groups were bunched up too tightly, one gobbo stabbed another as a way of saying "go away", and that's what set them off.