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[Ripian]

Hi, recently i made new fortress near tower(1 tile of distance in world map coordinates) and after only 2 seasons(spring and summer) undead army attacked my fort. Meanwhile my second fort was made about 26-28 tiles(in world map) from goblin civilization(goblins were neighbors   to my fort according to "civilizations tab"). And during 6years  no goblins dare to attack my fort.

This gameplay expierence made me thinking: "if fort is closer to enemy civilizations like goblin pits or necromancer tower, will sieges be more often?". Wiki only says that player will expierence sieges if enemy civilizations are listed as "neighbours", in other words enemy civilization needs to be not further than 30 world tiles(10 tiles in case of Tower).

I doubt that there will be official info about that, so I am looking for stories of your personal expierence or maybe your testings results.

[Sver]

One thing I can say for sure is that the goblin sieges require your fort to have at least 80 dorfs and some meager amount of wealth. Necromancers, on the other hand, have no such restrictions and may attack as early as the first year; the same applies for bandits, should you be lucky to settle somewhere within the reach of their camp. In general, the travel times on the world map are pretty short, unless you have a really big world, so I'd say the distance shouldn't matter much. It somewhat mattered in one of the earlier version, because a marching army could suddenly bug out during their travel - and the less tiles there were between them and the player fort, the lower was the chance of that happening. But that's about it.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Wealth doesn't act as a trigger to allow goblins to think about invading you in vanilla settings. Only population (80, as mentioned above). If there are sites in between you and the goblins, they may be attacking them instead. If goblin populations are low, or systematically being depleted in other wars, they may not be able to attack.

Check Legends. Were your neighbouring goblins in other wars? Were you neighbours with a 10,000 population dark fortress, or a 5 population dark pits?

6 years seems a long time. What year did you reach pop 80?

[Sver]

Wealth doesn't act as a trigger to allow goblins to think about invading you in vanilla settings. Only population (80, as mentioned above).

Yep, you're right, I've mixed it up with the first contact trigger.

[PatrikLundell]

It can be mentioned that the siege triggers can be changed in the raws to lower (or raise) the limit from the default of 80.

As mentioned, the world doesn't revolve around your fortress, so enemies are more likely to attack sites belonging to their enemies closer to them than those further away. If the mountainhome is located on another continent, your goblin neighbors won't have any other sites from your civ to attack: your site is the only one. However, that doesn't guarantee attacks, as they can well be at war with other civs as well, and with your site at the extreme range of normal reach, means you're probably going to be way down on the target priority list.

[Bumber]

Try hitting them first.

[Saiko Kila]

Hi, recently i made new fortress near tower(1 tile of distance in world map coordinates) and after only 2 seasons(spring and summer) undead army attacked my fort. Meanwhile my second fort was made about 26-28 tiles(in world map) from goblin civilization(goblins were neighbors   to my fort according to "civilizations tab"). And during 6years  no goblins dare to attack my fort.

This gameplay expierence made me thinking: "if fort is closer to enemy civilizations like goblin pits or necromancer tower, will sieges be more often?". Wiki only says that player will expierence sieges if enemy civilizations are listed as "neighbours", in other words enemy civilization needs to be not further than 30 world tiles(10 tiles in case of Tower).

I doubt that there will be official info about that, so I am looking for stories of your personal expierence or maybe your testings results.

My experiments show that the siege is chance based. You can savescum, i.e. archive a save of your fortress on the 28th day of the last month of a season, and then try if the goblins attack. If they don't, just kill the game and load the archived save again. If they can attack, they eventually will, though it may (or may not) depend on the last time there was a siege. You can certainly do it if there wasn't a siege for the last year or so. If you do savescumming, be prepared for many tries, because the chance for a siege is quite low, at least in typical conditions.

Time from the beginning of a season to the actual siege vary, but if you have goblin bases in the 1-4 days range, apparently they can attack you 1-4 days after the season begins, so there's a correlation there. Both zombie siege and goblin siege can come in the same month (as well as an incursion of kobold thieves, which also happens in the beginning of the season), though usually they are apart by some hours or a day or two, depending on the difference in distance.

If you have only one tower the visitors come on the same hour of the same day of the season every time, which suggests the time is based on distance. The same with kobold thieves.

Additionally, if you break the siege before the caravan comes (which is in the middle of the first month of a given season, so about two weeks after the siege begins), the caravan will come, otherwise it won't.

[PatrikLundell]

Yes, I'm convinced the siege time is based on travel time from the season tick over. The site an enemy attacks from is randomly selected from eligible sites (Toady said so in a FotF response a year or so ago) with all sites having equal weight. I also suspect the map entrance location is at least partially dependent on where the siegers came from. I've been attacked at day 5, and I believe those attacks were made from a site 28 tiles away (if I remember and counted correctly), with their main site half a day away.

I don't think I've had the same party besiege me two seasons in a row (i.e. 2 attacks: sieges may continue for a season or a year, with some reported anomalies), but I've had them half a year apart, and I've had different parties attack in consecutive seasons.

[Saiko Kila]

I've checked than in my current fort I had goblins attack twice in eight year (in summer and then in winter), though apparently from different sites.

When the attack is from the same site (which it always is for kobolds and tower in my case), then the season tick is the same so far, but the normal tick can be different. Season tick is 10 normal ticks, i.e. 12 minutes in dwarf time, so the difference is very small, if it is late afternoon when the zombies come, it is always the late afternoon, even if the minute is different.

I'm not sure how time is calculated for purpose of siege, though. Distance on world map, displayed as time to reach a site, certainly uses Chebyshev's distance for calculation (i.e. traversing a diagonal takes the same time as traversing in orthogonal direction, like king's movement on a chessboard), and takes mountains and water bodies into consideration. This is different from unit movement on local map (both in adventurer and dwarf mode), where standard Euclidean metric is used (i.e. a diagonal takes about 1.41 more time to traverse than orthogonal move).

My zombies are 9 tiles away, which makes a day's travel on the map, but if they would be able to fly they would be only 5 tiles away (about half a day), or even 5.83 tiles if Euclidean metric was used. They arrive 12.6 hours after the season starts, which suggests crow's flight line (and it's hard to tell the metrics) and not the stated time-distance. However, so close site gives bigger error in calculation (

Site 28 tiles distant is slightly more than three days away (officially), so assailants should come on 4th day, but maybe the mountains are taken into consideration after all, or it uses Euclidean metrics for actual time calculation, or there's a bit of random factor involved, or the attacking site was different, or maybe something other. I don't have attackers so distant on my map, the dark fortress is three days away, and most gobbo sites are two days or less.