In the current version, once you found a fortress near a goblin civ, they declare war on your civilization and usually end up decimating them. Sometimes goblins also declare war on nearby human and elf civs, conquer their sites and make you unable to trade with them.
So, two questions: why do goblins declare war on your civ if you settle near them and what makes goblins so successful in conquest post-world gen?
I have a impromptu answer to this question, goblins are set to a hostile default (because of babysnatcher prefix) and often the civ (human, elves) are the aggressor because goblins have abhorrent ethical standards (treatment of animals/plants/eating of bodies etc.) as when goblins attack nearby settlement (attacking dwarfs who almost never call aggressive wars) they have their own motives based more in politics rather than ethics.
> In a defensive war, every time a village is sacked by goblins it collectively makes the goblins stronger and the opposing side weaker, i don't know precisely why but the amount of goblins increases (you could say this is population management saying pillaging = more food/wealth increase the pop cap) usually goblins hold out well enough to starve the wars off or remain stifled and don't do anything for the remaining of worldgen.
- I've personally seen goblins swing wars through successive pillages to raise armies and start to slog and overwhelm the opposition when given a numerical advantage, humans do much the same though they are numerous anyway, hence successful at dominating late-game world generation.
If post-artifact update we gained more elaborate negotiation as well as player input to diplomatic decisions (formal agreement being to hand over a artifact on threat of war, then denying it by locking it in the room past the deadline), we might understand more about the reasons goblins get triggered to commit to wars themselves without obvious ethical conflicts (goblins inhibit 'evil' spheres, adding more primary spheres doesn't do much for them behaviorally though its a interesting thing to do.)
- Just to remember that if a race is hostile, until acted on with a 'casus belli' there is effectively a uneasy truce between them and all other races.
If you unset the ability to not eat, and instead make them carnivorous (goblins are already bone carnivores and eat food just fine) i find there is no difference to goblin population in relevance to the hardiness of them because they carry food (trolls/beak dogs) which are replenished via common domestic wherever they go. (Plus no biome supp numbers, just a base of 1)
Using the pillaging example, "Stolen Wealth = Food = Population growth -> More animals = Small increment to total Wealth & Population sustainability", when that formula
goes wrong you see spirals of population even beyond the defined cap of a site as the civ becomes immensely wealthy via a mix of labor created items (big dark fortresses have great stashes of discarded goblinite because of defined space for weapons piles the civ fills up from invaders & dead soldiers/production) animals increase and obviously each member of the civ must be clothed adding to value.
Besides kobolds or thieves/site being routed and finished there is no natural way to divide up that value or detract from it.
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Question for Toady, if you were to tally up (for ease sake omitting value of the walls and value per discovered floorspace) the cost of a hillock or world-gen fortress based on its founding furniture, how many units of Urist would it cost to 'buy' a prebuilt settlement?Which is economically important if you were to do math saying that 1500 urists is a generic supply budget for founding a fortress that hasn't already been prefabbed and equipped to buy the tools, and experts and then from there on rely on immigrants, traders and local production.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1443547 times)