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[PatrikLundell]

- You can't do anything about those suspicions undead/necro visiting hordes until you've had a crime of any kind (typically a tantrum related one), which finally allows you to bring units in for questioning. Before that, no matter how much suspicious behavior you see, you can do nothing.
- To be able to interrogate villains, you have to enable the injustice system, which causes more harm than the one prevented (as that amounts to essentially nothing). This harm can be worked around by modding mandates out of dwarven noble positions, though.
 - Once I've finally gotten an excuse to start questioning suspects, I've had little success in getting the necros to implicate their local associates. I've gotten some bosses, which is completely useless as those never visit the site.
- In the event you actually get a theft report before the artifact has left the site, you still won't get it back, as even if you manage to catch the messenger carrying it off, you can't get it out from the inventory, as it can't be dumped or forbidden (that you can use DFHack to get it back for a second before it's stolen again is absolutely no excuse for vanilla).
- Selecting interrogations or convictions are fire-and-pray orders: once given (e.g. accidentally by trying to get some additional info that isn't there) you can't take them back.
- The interrogation list is cluttered with animals, invaders, FBs, and dead units. The only good thing I can say about it is that DF didn't crash when I tried to interrogate a dead unit: it just pretended to schedule an interrogation while not doing it. You also can't select multiple interrogation targets at the same time, but have to scroll though that the same pages of the list for each one.
- The sentence feedback is extremely poor. Once in a blue moon you may see something about a pending sentence, but most of the time you're limited to see "fighting" reports and have to deduce (from the parties involved) that the sentence probably was a beating. Similarly, you may see someone being hauled off to prison for an unspecified amount of time. Obviously, there's no info of what the sentence resulting from a conviction would be, and you have no control over it.
- The only results of sentences are that your fortress is punished if it's a citizen, through loss of production. It doesn't seem to have any effect whatsoever on the criminals (while imprisoned they are temporarily incapacitated, and I assume the same goes for hospitalization, and I assume it might "help" getting them stressed), but they'll be right back to crime the second they're able to.
- The counter intelligence screens are rather useless. They get cluttered by info about crimes elsewhere, which you can do absolutely nothing about (if restricted to the reports that would be mildly amusing the first 10 times), and there's no way to tell which "Plot against For" line corresponds to the plot a particular criminal you want to interrogate is involved in: it's totally disconnected from the "organization charts" section.
- The were villains that enter the fortress under the guise of visitors and then explode in the tavern aren't fun at all, in particular since the horde of visiting necro villains then make armies out of the slaughter that ensues.
- While legitimate visitors run out (killed by invaders, as they don't have the sense to turn around when the fortress is besieged by undead hordes), there's no shortage of villains: they'll show up even if no legitimate ones appear.
- You can protect the artifacts that can be carried (weapons and armor) or built, but everything else will be stolen sooner or later. If you try to store them in a locked room, I'd expect there to be a rush of corrupt citizens making a beeline for the store room (even if it is on a pedestal with a floor grate above in an attempt to get some use out of the artifacts) as soon as the door is unlocked to store a new artifact. Mine cart dumping into a pit might work, but there they'd be completely useless for everyone.

The best way to deal with villains is probably either to forego visitors altogether, or to kill the obvious villains with DFHack as soon as they are announced (if trying to sic the militia on them you're getting a loyalty cascade sooner or later, at least if you've accepted petitions). At the very least, you can expect other visitors (if you get any) to get bugged hiddenly aggressive from time to time.

In short, the Villains just bring a lot of trouble, and while you can spend effort to investigate and convict, that effort is a wasted chore that has no useful effect.

[Loud Whispers]

As an addendum, you could also have booby trapped rooms with bait artifacts inside to deal with unruly artifact thieves. Literal Indiana Jones falling rocks/flooding chambers/pit spikes ruses with an artifact sock at the end

[Shonai_Dweller]

Well, yes. That's an inevitable result of Toady putting contractual obligations (and potential legal action, loss of sales, bankruptcy due to sudden health emergencies and the end of Dwarf Fortress) over taking the time to roll out the entire release.

By the time the new Steam folk notice the issues the rest will be done probably, so no big deal at all really.

As someone who follows the game's development, I'd have thought that was obvious to you. But, hey, we're all stuck indoors and needing a place to rant. Here's as good a place as any. 

[Loud Whispers]

Come on now, we can all rant and complain without passive aggressiveness

[Sarmatian123]

My solution:

1.
Forbid visitors. Useless bunch anyhow.
Recruitment from depended economically sites seems better, if it wasn't bugged with merchant hordes.
2.
In announcements.txt add ": P:R" to mandates. You will never miss a single one.

[therahedwig]

Yeah, I too sure hope the graphics and ui stuff gets sorted really quickly so we can have a release that actually gives enough to deal with the villains. I think outside UI trouble and the overabundance of necromancer visitors, the main issue is also that your fortress' residents get flipped a little too easily (which I suspect is a combo of the necro visitors having high social skills and dwarves still being bad at making friends, and stuff like the dungeon master's counterintelligence duties not yet being implemented properly).

I haven't had any trouble with the fortress demands/mandates, like, sure, sometimes a dwarf gets stuck in prison for a while, but that has never been a big problem to me. What does bother me is the UI and that fortress guards can have multiple guards take care of imprisonment duties, but not interrogation. On top of things like not being able to retrieve stolen artifacts, and of course executions missing (this is especially annoying with vampires, like, not everyone wants a vampire fort). What was funny however is that if you convict intelligent undead, and they get through their sentence, afterwards when releasing the undead from their restraints, the dwarves will put them in cages.

At the very least, unlike stress, you don't need to do any modding to turn off visitors, but I was getting a little annoyed that the majority of visitors I got were intelligent undead instead of legitimate visitors. Like, I got more undead than I got goblins, which is weird considering I was embarked between two goblin civs, two elven civs and a human bandit fort.

And yes, the werebeast explosions are funny for the first time, but not so much after that, as they also cause loyalty cascades.

As an addendum, you could also have booby trapped rooms with bait artifacts inside to deal with unruly artifact thieves.

Nope, the flipping means that it's your own dorfs doing the stealing, and fort citizens don't trigger traps.

BTW, it's only artifacts that can be worn on the person that get claimed and thus stolen by thieves, nobody cares about your bone floodgates and lead millstones, they all want your leather frilly headscarves. From legends mode it looks like what happens is that intelligent undead are sent out, they come to your fort, learn there's artifacts there (from your loose lipped dwarves), and then they put a claim on an artifact. After that, they start trying to flip your dwarves to get the artifact, dwarves steal the thing, and hand it over the next visit of the undead, then the undead goes back to their master and offers it to them.

It's... I was sort of worried about this when craftguilds were reintroduced, that they'd just be a source of annoyance, but having played with them, the skill demonstrations do make having a crafthall super useful. The temples are useful because of the console action priests can take, and the libraries are mostly only for fulfilling needs but they do make caravan visits a lot more interesting, but the taverns right now are mostly a bother? There's just no real reason to have your tavern open to visitors, and there's also no challenge to it. You can create a zone in a grass field and assign it to a tavern location, and within three years you'll have two hundred naked elves dancers telling stories there, add the villains to that, well...

Edit: come to think of it, has anyone recently seen the visitors actually share rumours? Because that's supposed to be one of their main draws, but I only seem to get rumours from outpost liaisons and diplomats...

[Loud Whispers]

As an addendum, you could also have booby trapped rooms with bait artifacts inside to deal with unruly artifact thieves.

Nope, the flipping means that it's your own dorfs doing the stealing, and fort citizens don't trigger traps.

They don't trigger weapon traps, stone traps and cage traps - but every other trap is fair game. A flooding chamber, magma chamber, falling rocks, pit spikes or just a harmless pit trap / raised bridge prison would all be simple to rig up in a secluded artifact vault using pressure plates set to trigger by citizens

[PatrikLundell]

Development: No, I'm still worried. When I asked in the FotF Toady seemed completely uninterested in any active countermeasures. The best I can hope for is my own assassination missions of villains, and I have the same fear of digging invaders: they get better while my tools to deal with them remain the same, although I have some slight hope for squad orders that might occasionally be followed (i.e. things like "hold the line", "retreat", and so on).
It can also be noted that Toady is notorious for leaving half baked "temporary" measures behind (see e.g. the petition screen, which is completely devoid of most of the relevant info, including the most commonly used name of the petitioner). Sure, the new development style might result in an improvement of feature quality from "barely functional" to "functional".

Mandates are incompatible with my play style, since there's a decade or so with too much work and too few dorfs at embarks with no metal when the morons demand some completely useless metal objects, they just won't stop, and have random (important) dorfs mutilated over retroactive export bans when you FINALLY had a break to get rid of that pile of (non metal) junk with a caravan.

Booby traps would work, as you can set them to be triggered by citizens (but not visitors; GRRR!), but, again, that means the items will be locked away. You'd also need a way to disable them when storing new items, but it could work if current thieves have been dealt with, assuming there are any dorfs left in the fortress. When it comes to wearables, I don't know how to order dorfs to wear trinkets (I know it can be done with DFHack, but not vanilla).

If you want to make a multi racial fortress you need visitors. Apart from me not having any dependent sites, I thought you could only request dorfs (at least it seemed to be the case in 0.44.12). I don't care much about the skills of new citizens, as that can be trained.

Strangely enough, I'm among the small minority that doesn't have a major problem with the stress system. It's unbalanced, and I'd like it reworked, but in 0.47.04 I've only had one petitioner crack, and that was after having been a citizen for a few years. The moron was stressed over not getting laid, and then spent literally every other action on chasing the mayor, and most of the rest on hauling his old junk clothing. Needless to say, he didn't have any friends: that part doesn't seem to have improved visibly.

The guilds I've had have been completely useless, with dorfs milling there rather than socializing (although that would probably be with a necro anyway), and I've never seen a demonstration. Too much work, I guess. Apart from the omni temple, I've never made one since I haven't had any petitions for them and been busy dealing with more important issues.
As far as I understand the taverns are the places where dorfs are supposed to socialize and make friends.

When it comes to visitors, I've struggled in every world to get them in significant numbers to make conquest militias (they have to be throwaway units, as I was able to recall an average of about 1 member from each conquered site, out of a squad of 10), and I also struggle with getting gobbo, and, in particular, elven visitors (the latter come in performance troupes to some extent, but these troupes are FUBARed, so you can't accept their petitions [+petition screen info...]).

I don't know how I'd tell if visitors added a rumor to the civ screen...

And finally DF is crashing very frequently for me, but in a random, non reproducible way. Accessing address 0, -1, other addresses, trying to execute illegal locations. Thus, it's possible to go forward by saving every 5 or so days, with about one crash per step (not using TwbT). I tried with DFHack disabled and it crashed almost immediately one time, after a few minutes a few times, after 40 minutes (with DF halted on a pause for an unknown time), and running for over two months on another session. Crashes seem to happen more often on events (new season, migrant waves), or seconds after pausing events.

[therahedwig]

You don't need guilds for the crafthalls, I ended up with a metal worker guild just by placing down a crafthall and half a year later I had 10 metalworkers from the demonstrations.

Dorfs do make friends now, but it's still not the speed at which they used to be made before the tavern release. They do go much less fast insane than in the previous version, where even in a no-invasions fort I had a grave yard of 40 coffins after only a couple of years.

As for Toady's reluctant answers. I suspect that the main reason these things are going in is to ensure people stop turtling and to ensure that even a fort with a legendary adamantine clad military will keep having new challenges. The thing is, however, that there's a huge difference between a fun challenge and an obnoxious thing that just keeps returning. Like, at this rate, might as well put all the artifacts in a stockpile in the tavern and have the necros take them away that way.

I guess I am lucking out with my mayors and barons only preferring to have bracelets and crossbows made. Demands unlike mandates don't lead to punishments, and thus can be ignored.

[PatrikLundell]

I consider turtling to be a legitimate tactic, in particular when the alternative is no tactic/individual suicide rush, so if that's the reason, Toady is starting in the wrong end. Also, there's a huge difference between getting additional issues to deal with for a mature fortress and get them thrown into your face in year 2.
It takes me a long time to get any dorfs to spare for training (that's why I recruit visiting bards for a military). If I don't get invasions to clean up after, I try to give them a month of training per year (winter, with about 1/3 in training with the rest on R&R [and possibly nuptial encouragement/procreation encouragement]).

If plunking down a metalworker guild hall (open for all citizens at the least, I assume) is that powerful it sounds like a good way to increase the chances for those desirable weapon/armor artifacts, rather than the usual junk you usually get (in particular for kids, if you've put in the effort to get the dorfs to marry and procreate, although I guess the kids won't watch [but it might be an idea to include that area in the kid burrow to see if it does work]).

Crossbows are complete junk in my fortresses. See tactics above...

[Lozzymandias]

Some pointers from my own semisuccessful measures:

First of all remember losing your artifacts is fun pat! It's a game of intrigue and you'll probably lose a bunch!

Secondly, justice Is fine as long as you can head off mandates, eother with modding as you have, or by choosing the right dwarfs for the right positions. Kings can't be helped but barons and mayor's can. Keep a list of suitable dwarves and remember to replace your mayor annually! Something of a ceremony here, a year celebration of the ignoring of democracy.

Then with the justice you have options! Keep the artefacts in plain sight in displays in the tavern and you'll get a crime to interrogate almost every time. I tend to convict the outsider of both crimes to maximise chance of a custodial sentence (whivh will get them in a cage and you can steal your artefact back.) and always make sure you have lockable doors to control the visitor flow as they leave the Fort. It's not foolproof but it's far from unworkable and most importantly it's Fun

[PatrikLundell]

Losing artifacts is as "fun" as losing dorfs. It's not the losses themselves that bugs me, but the utter lack of means with which to at least attempt to thwart them. If a loss resulted in an opportunity to chase the artifact it would be good. As it is, it's less fun than when various critters steal your step ladders (which is merely annoying). There is no "intrigue" in "yes, X stole it and left the map with it. Don't worry. X will be back to steal other artifacts until killed or contained outside of the injustice system".

You have no control over the nobles that inherit positions somewhere else and starts spewing mandates as soon as the game is unpaused.

I've got lockable doors at the inner ends of my entrance tunnels, but the outer ends are controlled by those slow drawbridge lever pulls (and with normal luck it will kill a citizen who happens to be passing through). You can't have doors at the outer end unless you plan to replace all of them after every gobbo siege (as well as the necro experiment sieges).

[Quietust]

You have no control over the nobles that inherit positions somewhere else and starts spewing mandates as soon as the game is unpaused.

To be fair, that's not new - nobles have been uncontrollably spewing mandates for as long as they've existed (all the way back to the first DF release, nearly 14 years ago). If anything, it's better now than it used to be, since there are usually fewer nobles making mandates and you can control the assignment of some of them; back in the old days, they were (nearly) all migrants which would get replaced within a year of being victim of an Unfortunate Accident.

[therahedwig]

I think that was before Patrick's time, though. Nobles got a lot easier to deal with after the .31, or .34 releases, and that's partially because you as a player have more choice over them, but also partially that their refusal to do work has been bugged for years now, and no one is really jumping to get that particular bug fixed :p

[PatrikLundell]

Nobles could be dealt with by not enabling the injustice system before 0.47.01 (but possibly not in a time before my time), which is exactly what I did. Now I've now modded away their mandate spewing in the raws (as I believe I mentioned above), but both of these are work arounds for what I consider to be design flaws (and it's no excuse that flaws and bugs persist for decades so players have had to invent ways to deal with them).