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.
[BABYSNATCHER] does not have anything at all to do with goblin hostility (though it should). It is all ethics and relative strength, the goblins are usually stronger than other folks because they do not eat and their ethics clash with everybody. Vanilla Dwarves do not call aggressive wars because they have no siege_progress values defined in their raws (in vanilla).
> 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.
The amount of vanilla goblins is only capped by the total hard maximum for the site, which is 10,000 for a dark fortress. This means that the only thing that keeps the goblin population below the maximum is being killed off in wars. If the goblins are winning all their wars then fewer of them are getting killed, so you see your goblin population increase, or rather you see them reach the maximum. Additionally sites with a high population can create new dark pits/fortresses while depopulated sites cannot, giving them more sites overall.
It is certainly not stolen wealth, since they are not capped by available food and other reasons.
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.
Vanilla Goblins are already bone-carnivorous, in spite of the fact they do not need to eat anything. You are correct in that
[BONECARN] and
[CARNIVORE] does not cause food problems in modded non-perpetual motion machine goblins, that is however only because they have
[USE_CAVE_ANIMALS]. The other pet acquiring tags are broken for that site, a dark fortress that does not farm vegetable food MUST have this tag or they will only reach a population of a few dozen if they have to eat.
[NO_EAT] does make a big difference to the population. With only cave animals as a food site the population of a dark fortress tends to be capped at between 1000-3000, leading to goblin populations being very much checked by removing of that token. Larger populations (about 5000) can be obtained by making them farm but vanilla goblins neither farm nor eat.
Stolen wealth does not make sense even if goblins ate. The reason that everyone already trades with goblin dark fortresses, which is why the vanilla DF is totally overrun with troll meat, the goblins make the stuff but do not eat it, causing it to be exported even though the importers should (they label it beef but we the player know better). Occupied settlements tend to be near ruined and often become actual ruins after not very long, so from the POV of the goblin dark fortress conquering all their neighbors means less food not more will become available.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1442447 times)