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[SHAD0Wdump]

Lets look at what it means to siege and how it typically was carried out...


(Taken from wikipedia)
A siege is a military blockade of a city or fortress with the intent of conquering by attrition and/or assault. The term derives from the Latin word for "seat" or "sitting."[1] A siege occurs when an attacker encounters a city or fortress that cannot be easily taken by a frontal assault and refuses to surrender. Sieges involve surrounding the target and blocking the reinforcement or escape of troops or provision of supplies (a tactic known as "investment"[2]), typically coupled with attempts to reduce the fortifications by means of siege engines, artillery bombardment, mining (also known as sapping), or the use of deception or treachery to bypass defenses. Failing a military outcome, sieges can often be decided by starvation, thirst or disease, which can afflict both the attacker or defender.

Now according to this the idea is to starve out the inhabitants of said castle/fort,with a little bit of destructive equipment being used to weaken said castle/fort.

Now the typical dwarven diet consists of underground grown mushrooms known as plump helmets,and typically a dwarven fortress is actually part of a mountain face.Taking this into consideration,doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose of sieging?

The dwarves can survive pretty much forever under there with their plump helmets and the ability to dig for ore to make more weapons and furniture.(sans the bed apparently,but the dwarves can just sleep on the ground for all thats worth)

Trading may be shut down but that is about all that can be done.(even that is no guarantee,there could be a massive underground tunnel to another dwarven settlement for all you'd know)

So what is your 2 cents?

[Kagus]

Well, here's my two cents...

The thread title has a typo.  Hey, you get what you pay for.

[Karlito]

You are exactly right.  So the goblins, having figured out that just sitting outside won't do much good, do the next best thing.  Which is to charge straight into your fortress and be slaughtered by whatever nefarious traps you've rigged up.  Its been assumed that during Army Arc release 2, that goblins might tunnel into your fort or knock down your walls, which should make things a little more interesting.

[SHAD0Wdump]

ehm yeah,whatever with the title,I'll leave it there as a easter egg or something.

Now heres my arguement on the tunneling thing,to counter that all they would have to do is harden the walls of the interior(maybe with extra access in certain areas to keep the enemy army off balence if they decide to get some seige going on down there.

Remember,dwarves are the masters of mining and that which is subterranean.So those that dare meet them in their own element are going to have a long row to hoe.

[McDoomhammer]

Well, it would be kind of cool to have sieges be more realistic- wars of attrition, with charges, undermining, siege weapons actually used to lay the siege, etc. etc.  Of course, it will take some time before we're there, the main problem being persuading dwarves to remember that outside during a seige is /bad/.

[Kagus]

The thing is, sieging a dwarven settlement would be much harder than going after a human settlement.

With a human settlement you've got the outlying farms that provide food, the housing for villagers, and walls that were most likely constructed hastily.  Knock over a wall and you've got a clear road into everything.

Dwarven halls, on the other hand, are dug straight into a mountain.  You can try attacking the side of a mountain, but it's not going to do you a whole lot of good.  As for food supply, the dwarves have access to underground water reserves and plants that can grow without sunlight.  The only thing that a dwarven outpost can be blocked off from would be trade caravans, so the only thing the dwarves are in danger of is overcluttering the fortress with random worthless junk.  Not very life-threatening.

[Keiseth]

Now if only we had a modding tag for NetHack style Xorns and Earth Elementals that ignore solid objects entirely...

[Erk]

regarding reinforced walls, surely the dwarves will be able to construct walls the goblins can't tunnel through easily, but I imagine it will take metal. encasing the entirety of a fortress in steel is possible, I'm sure, but far from feasible for the average fortress. If/when gobs can tunnel, keeping them out entirely is going to be a lot more fun.

Of course, if trolls start chucking stones that can knock down constructions from a distance, that will help too.

[Torak]

There could be a new use for metal bars and blocks: Make reinforced wall.


It could use (metal)blocks, (metal)bars, and (stone)blocks to make.

[SmileyMan]

If brewing gets to be dependent on water, then poisoning water supplies becomes a killer tactic as well, unless you've been lucky enough to find an underground river.

[Kagus]

Or an aquifer, which is a slightly more common feature.

[Jetman123]

Well, a siege was often used to starve the enemy out, yes.

But the _reason_ you did that was because charging straight into the enemy castle - which is far more fortified and gives the defending troops an advantage - is suicide unless you have a force three times as big as the enemies. Think about it - 100 archers can slaughter 300 soldiers if they have walls to hide behind, and the enemy have no easy way of retaliating other than by shooting back. Which won't work, because the archers have cover. So you tried to starve them out, weaken them by cutting off their supplies, and bombard them to kill enemy troops BEFORE your assault began.

Again, as others have pointed out, dwarves are very self sufficient. So the meaning of siege changes. It's still a siege... only the intent is not to starve. The intent is to batter down the fortifications and then charge the dwarves, who have the numerical disadvantage. (Goblins and humans (I think) breed faster than dwarves, even though dwarves are tougher) I think it's still considered a siege even if the starving out part is not implemented.

"Siege engines" were still called siege engines even if they were used in a flat-out assault rather than the strict definition of "siege", which I do not support, honestly. To me, siege is a term that means to use tactics that even the odds against a force that's dug in and entrenched in their castle/fortress/underground hall, whether by starving them, using machines, or just using sheer superiority of numbers.

[Wooty]

I tend to think of them more as raids myself - the goblins come in with small bands and try to kill everything they see and can get to, and eventually get bored and leave. The only way a goblin seige or ambush can accomplish anything is if you have a lot of dwarves outside, or mostly undefended entrances and an untrained or poorly equipt army.

A trap filled, militarized, magma moat, underground stores to last for years, all dwarves always inside fortress will beat any seige because its as if the goblins are trying to send a raiding party against a massive and well defended castle.

At the current state of DF warfare, tunneling seems to be the best bet on how to make goblins do a real seige. Increasing their numbers drastically would give them a chance to get past the traps, but we would need an init option for those who don't use tons of traps or can't handle the FPS drain. Tunneling would also require better rewalling... maybe "large rough block" or something weird to replace a goblin tunnel with natural stone, so you don't get weird random strips of constructed wall all over the place.

[folo4]

soon, the goblins won't the the only ones sieging your fortress on a regular basis...

The Arrogant Human. The Elvish Hippies. The Magma Dweller. Hidden Fun Stuff. Cave River Dwellers.

There's a lot of people/creatures vying to take down our Honorable Dwarven Nobility.

[frostedfire]

Honorable Dwarven Nobility.

There is what the objective of the siege is.

1) dwarves hide from siege

2) traders get slaughtered, or otherwise can't get to the dwarves.

3) nobles order greater and greater mandate items, from stuff you don't have because the traders can't get to you

4) hammerer comes after your random socialdwarf who is friends with everyone and dispatches him for the craftsdwarves not having 7 mood-created crystal glass crowns decorated in adamantine, all coloured diamonds and pitchblende.

5) the tantrums start...

6) people start tantrumming and dying in droves

7)

profit/victory for the gobbos

and that's why sooner or later you have to go and do something about the gobbos.  That and if the gobbos hang outside for long enough, a second siege arrives as reinforcements (or even a replenishment) and the siege continues.*

*that last part was made up, but it should be an option for the future to make sieges more than "get the gobbos down to 4 swordsgobbos and let the trade carts run them over" tactics