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[muldrake]

I had an undead siege and there were more necromancers than I had in my entire military never mind more zombies than I could reasonably deal with, so I turtled up.  For some reason, on my map, this seems to cause them to just wander off.  It's a flat area and my fort is underground with a drawbridge that closes off the outside world when it's down, rather than when it's up.  The only notable surface features are open space over a brook and a couple stagnant pools that are on the level below.

There was also an animal-man on the surface who might or might not have been associated with the necromancer invasion, but who I think was coincidental.  When I went out to kill that guy, it didn't lift the siege.

None of the zombies or necromancers in the invasion are around any more, but there are far more "corpse" enemies listed under the Deceased tab than I've ever actually seen, and there was a lot of "Forbidden" material in my stocks (a lot of which I have never seen in any stockpile since claiming it all).

The only big downside to this so far has been it keeps caravans from arriving. 

A cyclops arrived, and again, seemed too formidable to fight so I just turtled up and let incoming guests finish it off.  Other randos include some grackle men.

Version is 0.43.03.

Is there any way, using dfhack or otherwise, to determine what's continuing the "siege?"  I've looked at previous threads on this issue and this may or may not be something similar to what happened in this thread from earlier this year, although I was not able to replicate the solution in the thread.

[EuphoriaToRegret]

Out of curiosity, have you searched your caverns yet?
Also, is the area heavily forested?

I had a problem earlier where caravans, along with the guards, would get stuck outside of the map due to the amount of trees in the area.

You could use DFhack to see everything in your fort's location and even attempt to exterminate any remaining undead.

Not sure what the commands are, but I vaguely remember it being "region-pops list" or "region-pops list all" to see what's in the area and "exterminate" to exterminate whatever is causing a problem. So, it would probably be "exterminate UNDEAD" or something along those lines. Either that, or it was "slay," but I'm pretty sure that was changed awhile ago.

[muldrake]

I only found the caverns seasons after the siege started, so they weren't the source of the original problem.  The area is forested, but not heavily and I've taken out most of the trees.

There's a command called "cursecheck" I found that looks for the usual culprits:  zombies, vampires, necromancers, ghosts, werebeasts.  None exist.

[MobRules]

so I turtled up.  For some reason, on my map, this seems to cause them to just wander off.  It's a flat area and my fort is underground with a drawbridge that closes off the outside world when it's down, rather than when it's up.

Interesting. I wonder if the invader AI is looking for either something that indicates a fort interior (some sort of building?) OR a raised drawbridge. And if it sees neither, thinks there's no fortress to invade?

Then perhaps one part of the AI abandons the seige because there's nothing there, while another part of the AI hasn't considered this possibility, so it's waiting for the seige to finish. Which it hasn't, because it just ended without finishing.

Just speculation. (But I thought it was interesting that opening a drawbridge to seal up made them wander away.)

[Slogo]

Did you patrol around the outside with troops? It's possible that there's an ambush waiting for you. In previous versions siegers, especially the undead, were content to wait many seasons in a siege attempt before leaving. So maybe an ambushed stayed behind.

[muldrake]

Did you patrol around the outside with troops? It's possible that there's an ambush waiting for you. In previous versions siegers, especially the undead, were content to wait many seasons in a siege attempt before leaving. So maybe an ambushed stayed behind.

I did try this, especially the area where they came in (the north) and where they left.  I also assigned a lot of tasks on the outside of the map, like cutting trees, gathering plants, and fruit gathering zones, in the hopes it would entice whatever back in.

I've seen the general behavior before where turtling caused an undead siege to just wander off, but it never caused a neverending siege.  This was actually the second such undead siege in this specific game, and I had the drawbridge down closing off the down ramps when open rather than closed during that siege without it resulting in a neverending siege.

My plan for this fort is just to dig down to HFS and be an aggressive moron and see what happens.

I do have saves of this so it might be worth a bug report, I just don't want to waste the devs' time if there's a known fix for it.

ETA:  Isn't the whole "undead sieges just wander off if you turtle up" thing itself a bug of sorts?  Unless it's intended.

[PatrikLundell]

As far as I understand, hello/goodbye sieges are a bug. The "normal" behavior is for siegers to path into your fortress, and if no path exists they'll mill around. After a season or a year (one or the other) they'll give up waiting and break the siege.
Undead sieges used to be bugged and just mill around despite a valid path being present, but it seems that bug has been fixed (or one of those bugs, anyway).

There's no valid reason for a siege to be announced only to immediately be cancelled (or fail to cancel without any siegers). If their scouts were to determine there's no point besieging the fortress, they should turn around before any troops enter the embark (and I doubt there is any logic of that kind at all).

[Spectre9000]

If you're on 43.04 I'm assuming you're using the Lazy Newb Pack. I've had a number of issues including flat out crashes associated with it. So much so, I'm no longer using it as I got tired of having to reload saves and losing hours of work. The Autosave feature is also not working after the initial autosave it seems so I lose quite a bit of work. I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's something bugged with it in regard to sieges as it contains fixes and "fixes".

Other than that, it could be an infamous reanimated hair that you can't find, a necromancer/zombie in a tree, or some other random thing you wouldn't expect in a place you wouldn't expect. Does it still say "Siege" in the top left? If not then it's not a siege, and another issue I experienced with the Lazy Newb Pack was that caravans just sometimes wouldn't show up.

I'm using 43.05 vanilla now and I've not had any of the problems I've had with the LNP, so that might be an option.

[muldrake]

As far as I understand, hello/goodbye sieges are a bug. The "normal" behavior is for siegers to path into your fortress, and if no path exists they'll mill around. After a season or a year (one or the other) they'll give up waiting and break the siege.
Undead sieges used to be bugged and just mill around despite a valid path being present, but it seems that bug has been fixed (or one of those bugs, anyway).

There's no valid reason for a siege to be announced only to immediately be cancelled (or fail to cancel without any siegers). If their scouts were to determine there's no point besieging the fortress, they should turn around before any troops enter the embark (and I doubt there is any logic of that kind at all).

I'm not sure if this is that classic situation because the initial siege did actually start with a number of necromancers and zombies.  They just immediately wandered off the map rather than attacking.  They were listed as "deceased" in the z menu.  In fact, more than I ever saw were listed that way.

I still have no idea what happened, and nothing ever appeared in the list of hostiles or under the "cursecheck" dfhack command, but eventually the siege lifted.  I only noticed when the dwarf caravan actually arrived in the fall after having missed a whole year of caravans.  It was slightly after killing something in the caverns (which were not discovered when the siege started) so who knows?  Maybe something down there was causing it to persist.

[PatrikLundell]

Hello/goodbye sieges often have the invaders immediately leave, possibly leaving some stragglers behind. However, displaying the siegers as dead definitely sounds fishy (although I probably haven't checked that tab in those cases. It sounds like something to look out for).
It sounds like the siege was lifted after one year, which is one of the two standard options (but obviously, there should be siegers, so the case itself is erroneous). You might, however, have a skulking necromancer sitting in a tree somewhere, and if the bugger did that for a year, it's probably still there, but when the siege timer runs out everyone flees and the siege marker is lifted, even before they've made it off the map, occasionally leaving siegers stranded in trees.

[Fleeting Frames]

For a human, one of the scariest things about living forever is being buried alive, unable to get out..

Dwarves don't mind being underground, though. For them, being stuck in a tree for eternity is worse.

[PatrikLundell]

As a multitude of forum threads can attest to, the stuck in tree existence only feels like an eternity, but it is actually fairly short...

[muldrake]

Incidentally, same fort.  A couple years in, I've usually just fought off invaders (and murdered elf "diplomats" for complaining about trees), but another necromancer invasion showed up ridiculously soon after a goblin invasion decimated my military.  Most of the reanimated stuff was things like arms, but there were a LOT of these kinds of hacked up dead bodies lying around.

So I decided to turtle up again.

And again, the necromancers immediately disappeared, the absurd army of dead body parts (that dropped my FPS to 5 or so) immediately dropped dead, and again, my fortress is in a state of siege with no attackers at all.

What could cause this? 

[StarWars1981]

Dump all corpse parts in magma, to be sure.
Sounds like it's leaving some marker, flag, or piece of data that trips the "Siege" flag to be active. What I mean is, something is causing the code path resulting in "Siege" conditions NOT to break, and move onto the "Un-Sieged" path.
So, I'm serious, dump everything dead into magma, and flood the map edges too.

[muldrake]

Dump all corpse parts in magma, to be sure.
Sounds like it's leaving some marker, flag, or piece of data that trips the "Siege" flag to be active. What I mean is, something is causing the code path resulting in "Siege" conditions NOT to break, and move onto the "Un-Sieged" path.
So, I'm serious, dump everything dead into magma, and flood the map edges too.

Unfortunately my only available magma is completely infested with magma crabs.  Those things are a pain in the ass.  Plus I embarked on totally flat terrain and the fortress is underground, so flooding the surface with magma might have unintended consequences.  I've been murdering elves whenever they show up for no particular reason, so that part isn't an issue.

Also since I've been working on fairly lengthy public works projects, it's actually somewhat to my advantage that these bogus "sieges" stop other more dangerous sieges from occurring, so it's not like it's wrecking my game.  I just wonder what's going on.

I think a quantum stockpile/dump with an atom smasher might do the trick.  Dwarves are seemingly really reluctant to drag corpses, though.  Or maybe I just dig a shaft directly from the surface into the magma and declare it a dump zone.  I don't think magma crabs can fly.