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[PatrikLundell]

1. I eliminated the human vampire diplomat without its guards reacting. The year after no caravan showed up, and the year after that gobbo invaders blocked the humies. The year after that "the enemy has come and laying siege to to fortress". Given what I've read about people deliberately trying to goad elves into war and failing, I'm a bit surprised that a single incident results in war (the caravan left normally with a tidy profit as well). Is this expected, and have the rules changed?

2. Are there any rules of thumb for how large a force you need to conquer a site? My preference would be to do so without a fight (i.e. by being sufficiently much stronger that they yield when demanded), but how many inhabitants would you expect a squad of axe lords to defeat (assuming the X inhabitants aren't backed up by giant animals, trolls, and the like)? Also, does it scale linearly, i.e. 2 squads beating twice the number as one squad)?

3. Is it possible to whittle down a 10000 gobbo dark tower (with its support of ogres, etc.) with repeated raids so the site can be conquered once cut down to size? I'm looking for what it takes to do so, not merely a "Yes" (although a "No" would answer the question, of course).

[FantasticDorf]

1. The diplomat may simply be 'missing' in a status similar to traders, just check over your C < c civilization screen page to see a update of of your diplomatic status. Attacking them and letting them go (or witnesses) would have had more severe consequences but at the minute they're on the lost person's list and your fortress was the last place they were seen so you get half the effect.

2. Only sufficient enough to conquer it, its dicey but all you need is 1 skilled warrior to kill some defenders & become the forced administrator after.

3. Yes, though its costly in lives and equipment to train & renew enough dwarf squads reliably to really spend sending fully armed & trained forces at them (3-4 or more) though in itself 1000's of animal occupants posing a challenge are a bug and the animals shouldnt be affected by tactics in my humble opinion for making stalemates like this. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=10932

[PatrikLundell]

Thanks for the answers.
1. Well, I know I'm at war with the humies, both because they attacked me, and because the civ screen says it's war. I don't think it said war before they attacked, though. There were witnesses in the form of the passive bodyguards. I still think it's overly sensitive to go directly to war over me removing their vampire (with hundreds of kills).

2/3: I don't send dorfs, but rather expendables in the form of performers/sages. It definitely takes time to train them, but until the humies attacked I'd conquered a couple of very weak gobbo sites by sending a highly trained squad there and leaving it (resulting in the squad members gradually drifting away from the sites). Now when I've suddenly got another war it's time to ramp up the effort and try to reuse squad members (the humies have 40+ sites...). If it only requires 30-40 axe lords to make a serious dent in a dark fortress, taking on the gobbos should be very doable given a few decades (but the demon boss is still there, while the gobbos are divided with half of them being outcast).

When it comes to animals and tactics, it very much depends. Slow learners should be affected, I believe, and so should mounts (as they ought to be guided by their riders who should respond to tactics). Other sundry animals ought not to respond, at least not to non elves.

[Sarmatian123]

Now, if you conquer humans and make them vassals, then human trading will return as normal?

[PatrikLundell]

Probably not. It would have taken quite some time to conquer 82 sites (I'd taken two), and my game is dead as it repeatedly crashes about 4 days after the latest save. It's the second game in a row that ends that way...

[FantasticDorf]

Now, if you conquer humans and make them vassals, then human trading will return as normal?

Not quite.

I have a hypothesis i applied to someone else that abandoning your current fortress would make conquered provinces re-sort their trade links naturally within the dwarven civ and instead pick out the nearest large settlement because through the player, "player fortress" sitetypes don't apply for the trade network with the rest of the civilisation while independent sites do, so its a manner of offering conquered sites (which may be over different biomes) autonomy within the 2 week resettlement for making a new fortress.

I haven't managed to get tributaries yet to really comment on how economically viable it is, but until a later date when we could negotiate a peace deal to a war or something similar, when you conquer a site it will flip to the dwarven entity forcefully through the FORCED_ADMINISTRATOR being a dwarf noble.

[Fleeting Frames]

Has that been tested?

If not, I'm not sure that it'd work - because ruined major sites still block founding of new major sites in their 6-7 tile radius in worldgen, which implies the links are not erased there when the site is lost.