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[Chief10]

Hi all, in my most recent fort I experienced something weird.

I was working on a pump stuck when suddenly, "An ambush, curse them!"
I sent my axe lords to deal with it, then halfway through the battle, another goblin ambush arrives. Then another. And another... Before I know it my dwarves have fought about 6 ambushes. I thought that was quite a few, but nothing noteworthy.
A couple in-game days later, another ambush arrives at the edge of the map. I send my dwarves, but as I finish each gobling squad, another ambush arrives, one after the other, seemingly without end. In all my dwarves fought off about 50-75 ambushes, of 3-5 goblins each. There was never a siege announcement.

I noticed that the ambushes stopped when my militia was all piled up on the square they were entering the map from. The instant I moved my squad, the stream of ambushes began again. They eventually stopped when I left my dwarves stationed there for approximately an in-game month before moving them again.
There was approximately a 3 second delay between each ambush (I don't know what it was in clicks), and I did not have to finish off one ambush before the next arrived.

I wasn't able to find anything like this on the wiki or forums. I haven't created a bug report because this isn't totally vanilla df (but the raw changes I made were very minor, and the only thing I changed about goblins was natural strength and siege pop-condition). I can upload a save if anyone is interested, but sadly I saved after all of this happened.

Any thoughts on possible causes?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

All of these were killed in the year 1003:

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[steel jackal]

it MIGHT be that it was just one huge ambush and the individual mini ambushes were a result of only a few enemies being shown at one time.

like imagine if 100 ambushers come to your fort, 5 are revealed and the ambush is announced, the 5 are killed and your dwarves think the ambush is over, and then another 5 are revealed and they think its another ambush even though its part of the same one.


im not sure what determines the size of an ambush, but i do know that ambushes are caused when your fort has enough wealth to trigger a siege but not enough population, so it "might" be that if your exceptionally wealthy that a huge ambush was sent and then came in small waves

[NullForceOmega]

Probably an army on the move who's destination was somewhere other than your fort, not sure, but that sounds like the most likely explanation.

[Chief10]

it MIGHT be that it was just one huge ambush and the individual mini ambushes were a result of only a few enemies being shown at one time.

like imagine if 100 ambushers come to your fort, 5 are revealed and the ambush is announced, the 5 are killed and your dwarves think the ambush is over, and then another 5 are revealed and they think its another ambush even though its part of the same one.


im not sure what determines the size of an ambush, but i do know that ambushes are caused when your fort has enough wealth to trigger a siege but not enough population, so it "might" be that if your exceptionally wealthy that a huge ambush was sent and then came in small waves

This is a terrifying thought.. I turned off the population trigger for sieges though, I only have the one for created wealth. My fort was about ~300,000 dorfbucks when this happened, so I don't think it was caused by wealth.

Probably an army on the move who's destination was somewhere other than your fort, not sure, but that sounds like the most likely explanation.

This makes a lot of sense but I was under the impression you'd get a siege notification in this case, like the "hello-goodbye" sieges?

[NullForceOmega]

Not really sure, could be a new manifestation of the bug.  Maybe they were ambushes, but sent out together from their dark tower/pits and hadn't split up yet?  There's a lot going on under the hood now that we can't see and it could be doing some very strange things.

[Fleeting Frames]

Isn't the highest wealth trigger at 100k suns? The default goblin 3 correspondents to that if I read wiki right..

Anyway, I have experienced similar behaviour with visitors wanting to enter the map from a certain square - one time, I'd get simultaneous announcement of 2 performance tropes and 2 visitors coming to see the fort, but they all came onto map from 1 square, only spawning next member when previous character had left the square.

Related advice has been to cut down trees near map edge to get things to enter map.

However, the bandit and the goblin siege I've gotten so far have avoided this bug, using more than 1 tile wide front.

Goblin ambushes should be a bug if not modded to ambush, though elves can theoretically have large goblin population that will send ambushes, most likely by them conquering a dark fortress in worldgen and having that send the ambushes.

Though your siege cap should be limited to far less units than what you had show up. (albeit I recall one case of 40.03 had unretired fortress get sieged by 4-digit units right after on bugtracker, perhaps because of army getting to attack it in that time).

[Chief10]

Not really sure, could be a new manifestation of the bug.  Maybe they were ambushes, but sent out together from their dark tower/pits and hadn't split up yet?  There's a lot going on under the hood now that we can't see and it could be doing some very strange things.

Oh well, I'm just crossing my fingers it doesn't happen again

Isn't the highest wealth trigger at 100k suns? The default goblin 3 correspondents[sic] to that if I read wiki right..

The highest is 300k, if I read the wiki right. What I changed was [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_PROD_SIEGE], which I set to 5. It doesn't say explicitly on the wiki, but I assume it corresponds to 300,000 produced wealth, as that's the number for 5 on the trigger you linked.

Goblin ambushes should be a bug if not modded to ambush

You're right, I forgot I added the [AMBUSHER] tag.

Though your siege cap should be limited to far less units than what you had show up.

I considered this, but I was killing each squad as they arrived, so I never had more than ~40 gobbos on the map at once. I wonder if they would have stopped at the cap if I had just let them all enter?




Next time I play I'm going to turn on invaders again. I'll report back if it happens again! If it doesn't happen again I think I could put it down to an army passing by. If it does happen again then perhaps its a bug?

[Werdna]

I've had extensive experience encountering this with Fortress Defense mod.  For some reason invaders can trickle onto the map one at a time and if they are ambushers and not siegers, you'll get an individual message the moment you discover the new ambusher unit.  I'm not sure what causes the ambushers to trickle on so slowly, I've usually seen a large group spawn initially and be discovered with a single message, yet that group is then followed by individuals and maybe pairs, and each generate a new message (I have animal watchtowers at map edge but not perfect coverage yet).

So the messages are not infinite; they're generated by new ambushers trickling onto the map and being discovered.

[Chief10]

Welp, it happened again, and it was definitely a bugged siege. There were squads of trolls, and goblins mounted on beak dogs. I guess this just reconfirms that the ambusher tag is bugged in the current version :/ I could have sworn that Toady said the bug caused ambushes to simply not arrive, not that it messes up sieges.

[gchristopher]

Wait, are ambushes fixed now in vanilla df??? I haven't seen one since 34.11.

Having ambushes again would be great!

[PatrikLundell]

Elves, kobolds, and animal people have the "ambusher" tag in their raws in 0.43.05, while goblins do not. At one stage I "restored" the tag to goblins and did get a few ambushes, though, but I've since removed the tag.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Can confirm seeing this in Fortress Defence. Multiple ambushes from big groups of kung-fu pandas as my wandering swordmaster went out one day, including some single beast ambushes "A horse has jumped out in ambush!".

[Dorsidwarf]

Welp, it happened again, and it was definitely a bugged siege. There were squads of trolls, and goblins mounted on beak dogs. I guess this just reconfirms that the ambusher tag is bugged in the current version :/ I could have sworn that Toady said the bug caused ambushes to simply not arrive, not that it messes up sieges.

I don't remember, but do armies on the move path through your fort? Someone once said tha this might be what causes the huge stream of "ambushes" that are blatantly a full siege arriving in Ines and twos.

[steel jackal]

Wait, are ambushes fixed now in vanilla df??? I haven't seen one since 34.11.

Having ambushes again would be great!

i got several recently in 0.43,05, mainly undead, a few kobold though

[Shonai_Dweller]

Wait, are ambushes fixed now in vanilla df??? I haven't seen one since 34.11.

Having ambushes again would be great!

i got several recently in 0.43,05, mainly undead, a few kobold though

Is there such thing as an undead ambush? It's just a regular undead siege, isn't it? And did your kobolds actually launch an ambush, or were they just the usual thieves?