Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Recently I  played 2 pocket worlds and both had only small goblin sieges. Maybe a smaller world also has smaller population for each civ? Or was I just unlucky?

[PatrikLundell]

Black fortresses are about the same size everywhere. However, unless you take care in your fortress embark location, you're likely to get the invaders from a crummy 50 pop dark pit that runs out of warm bodies to send after one or two small sieges.
Sieges are sent from a single population center, so when it runs out of locals the sieges dry up (waiting 70 years can give you a couple of insult sieges of unarmed recruits). Thus, to ensure many and large sieges you need to ensure the closest enemy population center is a big one (and you should really check Legends Mode after embark to check that the buggers haven't established a new dark pit closer to you in the 2 week pre embark frenzy).

[Libash_Thunderhead]

I see. So it's just bad luck.
I got some pretty large sieges(250+ creatures) when I was playing a bigger map.

[PatrikLundell]

Based on the general complaints about lack of sieges on the fora it seems you're actually fairly fortunate. However, with suitable fortress embark location selection and Legends Mode check on the closest enemy site I've found you can get besieged consistently (not accounting for the blocking bugged sieges, though. I've never encountered those, which probably is due to lack of bad luck).

The size of the siege is dependent on the parameters and limited by the enemy's siege departure population center size. The default parameters are 140 enemies, each potentially with a mount, and 40 trolls (which can be ogres as well), if I remember correctly. I don't know if other races have any troll equivalent auxiliaries, though. In 0.30.24 the first siege usually consisted of 10 goblins, but that easy start seems to be gone since 0.42.X.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

I can confirm the first wave is still 10 goblins.

[StarWars1981]

Confirmed, the first siege, if possible, is 10 goblins. If you're unlucky, the dark pits already got raided and you get less. Oh, if you adventure-raid stuff, you can't really complain if you don't have goblins coming out of hiding in that dark pit.

It usually goes up slowly-ish from there, took me to the third siege to get 30+ goblins. I think it was 47. Haven't had another one since then (this was 40.24 fort so lol, haven't played in a month since I actually upgraded to 43.05), but I assume it would go up because I didn't kill many of them. Not too many, at least. And in 43.05, I had my first Snatcher since 34.11! (I'm not a real regular player though, but I've had probably 60+ years in fortresses since then, maybe a little more, and though I got sieges, I never got snatchers. Not one missing child, not one reported attempt, no unexplained blood pooled around anything that could cause it ...)

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Yeah, it is kinda disappointing if you finish your defense.
Several days ago I made a sky fortress, which used a trapped narrow path as the main defense, but I gave up because I got only dozens of goblins every time, and I could just send a squad to clean them out.

[Sethatos]

I think evil embark might help. I have a long running fortress and in 50 years of sieges I've had over 1500 goblins from multiple locations siege the fortress. The fort was started in 40.24 and upgraded to 43.05. Had 150+ goblin sieges in both versions.

[PatrikLundell]

The first wave is not always 10 goblins anymore. It used to be that in 0.40.24, but it's more random in 0.43.03-05 (starting with 0.42.X, I think). My current 0.43.03 fortress received its first goblin invasion in the second autumn, and it was about a full wave (I didn't count, but the number of trolls and ogres seemed to be close to 40, and there were pages worth of goblins and beak dogs).

Sethatos statement that goblins came from multiple locations is interesting, as I've claimed they all come from a single location.

I've seen a very small, but positive, number of snatchers since 0.42.X, so they seem to have returned, but they're not very common.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Strange, because to me the first wave is always10 goblins, unless it is a necro siege.
Maybe something the first wave fails to arrive?

[PatrikLundell]

Well, as I think I said, it used to be 10 in the first wave in 0.40.24 and before (back to 0.40.09 or something like that, when I started with DF), but since 0.42.X that seems to have broken down. My autumn siege should be the first one, since two babies born during the summer brought the pop up to 21 (with a siege pop trigger of 1 = 20).
Necros don't care about pop or numbers (it can be a bit tense if they arrive during the first summer, but a simple door or hatch can keep them out), but Black Towers tend to run out of bodies fairly quickly, as they seem to have a pop of 50-100 most of the time.

[Melting Sky]

There are certainly always exceptions when it comes to any generalization about DF, but I have found it is important to let history run at least a few hundred years if you want large sieges, lots of interesting sites to explore, etc. You want the world to have enough time to develop large goblin population centers and dark towers to be get built. I personally have also found that larger worlds tend to run better when it comes to internal balancing issues, but at the cost of a bit of FPS loss. By internal balancing problems I mean things like the propensity for races to go extinct, dark towers to not get built, interesting species of mega beasts disappearing before you get a chance to encounter them etc. On big maps these things can still happen but it generally is much rarer and it takes much longer. DF is a game that is surprisingly flexible and scalable, but it tends to run smoothest when you avoid playing it in the extreme settings. If you go too small game balancing issues tend to crop up, if you go too large FPS death looms ever closer.

I personally run a small or medium world with 300-600 hundred years history. I never do pocket worlds and I never cut history shorter than a couple hundred years or let it go more than 600 unless I have some specific goal I am trying to achieve like embarking at the end of all Dwarven civilization, or seeing if I can generate a world where dark towers are everywhere. With small or larger world and 300+ years of history I can generally always find a good embark with lots of nearby enemies to play with.

[Weizen1988]

Yeah, im on a pocket world and I just got a siege of ~100 goblins  (actually about 60 beak dogs, and the rest is goblins, trolls and ogres.) and its only year 80 and age of Goblins (I think that means there is a bunch of goblins around yeah?), and they have been destroying settlements pretty regularly. So you can definitely get what seem to be at least moderately large (compared to someone mentioning 250+) sieges. Im still pretty new so I dont know if thats actually particularly large though, biggest ive ever seen by far.

[Melting Sky]

Yeah, im on a pocket world and I just got a siege of ~100 goblins  (actually about 60 beak dogs, and the rest is goblins, trolls and ogres.) and its only year 80 and age of Goblins (I think that means there is a bunch of goblins around yeah?), and they have been destroying settlements pretty regularly. So you can definitely get what seem to be at least moderately large (compared to someone mentioning 250+) sieges. Im still pretty new so I dont know if thats actually particularly large though, biggest ive ever seen by far.

That's not a bad sized siege at all. Ogres are the biggest baddest thing a siege can throw at you outside of perhaps Jabberers.