Baby snatchers have been working on my last nerve in this fort. Every time I turn around one somehow sneaks up on a mother dragging her baby around and lifts it from her without her knowing. Somehow that just happened to my legendary militia commander, who naturally brought her baby out to stand watch as the caravan rolled in. Thief walked off with her baby with no less than 7 other soldiers standing right next to her.
Fortunately, I've made it an almost OCD habit by this point to continuously check the unit screen to see if this happens, since nobody
ever notices snatchers. It's definitely an exploit, but the z status screen shows what your true population is, but the units screen will hide any snatched kids if a thief currently has them. I know I have 78 in this fort, so when I checked that and saw I only had 77 listed there, I knew someone was gone. Checking through the list, I found it was the militia commander's daughter.
So, next exploit. If you view her relations screen you can zoom to the kidnapped kid as long as they're still on the map. Bingo, thief is halfway to the map edge. Too bad for him I have a few soldiers with absurd strength, agility and armor user, so he was quickly caught and shredded. Kid saved.
Ambush. Of course! And of course they jump on the second least skilled soldier I have, who was still recovering from broken legs. They almost killed her while her squad mates stood around like idiots for a while, but someone slashed a body part off of an invader and sent them all scurrying away before they killed her.
Fabulous. Now I just need to clean up the mess. Time for OCD again, oh, look at
this! 77 instead of 78 listed! The kid of the soldier who was just carted off to the hospital was just grabbed by another snatcher who is halfway across the map again. Never mind her dad was standing right there alongside 20 other civilians cleaning up the mess.
Time to go send the troops out to stop him. I'll use DFHack before I let him get away. This is ridiculous.
Edit: Didn't need to use DFHack, since the exploit was enough. Militia commander caught up in plenty of time to cut his head off. She left the baby to wander around and get snatched
again of course, so I had to send the troops out again. This time I did have to use DFHack because he was too close to the map edge for them to make it in time.
Babysnatchers and ambushes have rapidly become my least favorite parts of DF. I'll be glad if something is ever done to make babies less of a liability. It's nigh on impossible to run an above ground fort because of them, since kids will walk outside and get snatched before you can blink an eye. Barring that, the babies will get snatched right off of their mothers and carted away without so much as a warning before the purple announcement that they're gone shows up.
Ambushes are almost as bad, but at least guard animals at the gatehouse make them usually tolerable. I just have to make sure I send my entire military escort out with any miners or woodcutters or I might as well make coffins for them right then.
But the snatchers and thieves... sometimes I wonder if .34 broke sneaking or something. I've had them walk right past two dogs (had to have come within a tile of them) over a drawbridge and past what had to be at least 20 civilians to walk off with an artifact at the other end of my fort. Or another kid.
Maybe I should mod in natural legendary observer skill and see if
that makes any difference...