The thing is, though, that Dwarf Fortress is not primarily a military strategy game. A good layout will always,
always make the player all but immune to 'common' invasions, the sorts that come along every year or so later on.
Why? Because as far as repelling regular invasions goes, setting up defenses is the gameplay. Yes, we can give some orders to squads, but those are limited and plainly not intended to give the player military-tactics-level control over defending forces. In other words, if the player can't arrange a setup to repel invading forces, they're basically going to be going for a crap shoot every year later on, which is both not balanced and no fun.
These regular low-level goblin invasions are not, in and of themselves, intended to be a major problem to a well-set-up fortress, no more than food or wood supplies are a major problem to a well-set-up fortress. They're one of the many challenges the player has to meet, but they're not supposed to dominate the game to the point where the player has to drop everything they're doing each year to run a Command & Conquer-style defense. If you want that sort of desperate ZOMG GOBLIN RUSH gameplay, go play something designed for it, like an RTS.
Naturally, the methods the player uses to cope with invading armies do have costs... Lava-based defenses require breaching the magma river with all its attendant threats, and opening a long channel down much of your fortress, to the point where magma creatures could concievably attack you from both sides. Some creatures are immune to fire, while there is a constant risk that something (a fire-immune creature, a dying critter, a berserk dwarf) could damage part of your magma/steam-structure and render it useless, stuck, or worse, flood parts or all of your fortress with magma or water. A goblin might sneak in and pull a lever at the wrong time, killing people. There are all sorts of ways it could go wrong.
Essentially, my feeling about dwarf fortress' gameplay is that it is divided into a series of challenges that are, ultimately, overcomable. Food seems like the main issue at first; then you get a good farm running and it fades to almost nothing. Nobles and immigrants seem like a horrible disaster; then you get good production going and they're easy. Likewise, low-level invasions are a threat at first, but in the end can be reduced to a minor annoyance at worst by proper defenses... for it to work any other way would, in my mind, simply not fit in with the Dwarf Fortress way of doing things.
[ January 25, 2007: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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Topic: It is way too easy to beat the invasion forces! (Read 10715 times)