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[John Johnston]

I've just seen a strange siege by the goblins.  I got the "vile force of darkness" message alright, and closed the outside gates, so the goblins weren't going anywhere.  The dwarves then ignored the outside world (who needs sunlight anyway?) and waited for the siege to go away...

...it didn't.  For a long, long time, a whole year cycle at least.  When I finally paid attention, I saw that only one goblin was listed, a Wrestler, and it was sitting still on top of a tiny one-tile mound at the very edge of the map.  Then a Dragon turned up, and I opened the doors so I could capture it, but the goblins did nothing.

So I eventually sent some champions over to give the goblin a good talking to, which they did - except that after they'd killed it, another one appeared.  So they killed that.  Goblins then kept appearing, one by one, in the same spot, at intervals of about one second, each one surviving just long enough to be whacked about the head with a mallet.  That little one-tile mound is now surrounded by arms, legs, heads and fifteen goblin corpses.  Once the fifteenth goblin had died (one squad's worth, I guess) the "siege" message finally lifted.

It didn't seem to be that they were ambushing, or I'd've expected them to show up all at once, and I've never seen a siege last that long before.  The only thing I did that was in any way unusual is that at one point I'd manually designated a lot of narrow iron gear to be melted, including some of the stuff which it turned out those goblins were wearing.  I wonder if that made them stick around?  Anyone seen anything similar?

All whacky-goblin-behaviour stories welcome. 

[grelphy]

Creatures won't dogpile over each other to enter the map, so if the first goblin spawned and then failed to move, the rest of the goblins would remain queued (my god that's a wierd word) behind him until he moved, for whatever reason.

That doesn't explain why he just stood there for more than a year, of course. He must have been totally awestruck by your fortress. =\

[Tormy]

This should be moved to the bugs subforum. 

[Deathworks]

Hello!

That does sound like a reasonable bug.

I suppose the following happened:

As was indicated by others, after you got the siege warning, the goblin forces were prepared to enter battle, but for some reason, they could only enter from that one tile (do you have a lot of trees there?). So, they could not all be placed on the map.

The behavior you describe seems to indicate that there is some special handling for the period between when the siege warning is given and until all goblins have entered the map. I would assume that this is to avoid the siege being broken if the first goblin got killed as no live goblins are on the map until the next enters.

So, if I am correct, the siege proper never began for that siege, so it could not run through its life cycle and come to an end via time-out. Instead, it was caught in that prepatory phase until the goblin was removed from the tile.

Well, at least that is my theory for what has happened there.

Deathworks

[Untelligent]

I think it also has something to do with the fact that goblins won't move much (or at all) if there's no way they can reach your dwarves.

Since you closed the outside gates as soon as possible, the goblins could never reach your dwarves, and thus never bothered moving.

[Doppel]

I've just seen a strange siege by the goblins.  I got the "vile force of darkness" message alright, and closed the outside gates, so the goblins weren't going anywhere.  The dwarves then ignored the outside world (who needs sunlight anyway?) and waited for the siege to go away...

...it didn't.  For a long, long time, a whole year cycle at least.  When I finally paid attention, I saw that only one goblin was listed, a Wrestler, and it was sitting still on top of a tiny one-tile mound at the very edge of the map.  Then a Dragon turned up, and I opened the doors so I could capture it, but the goblins did nothing.

So I eventually sent some champions over to give the goblin a good talking to, which they did - except that after they'd killed it, another one appeared.  So they killed that.  Goblins then kept appearing, one by one, in the same spot, at intervals of about one second, each one surviving just long enough to be whacked about the head with a mallet.  That little one-tile mound is now surrounded by arms, legs, heads and fifteen goblin corpses.  Once the fifteenth goblin had died (one squad's worth, I guess) the "siege" message finally lifted.

It didn't seem to be that they were ambushing, or I'd've expected them to show up all at once, and I've never seen a siege last that long before.  The only thing I did that was in any way unusual is that at one point I'd manually designated a lot of narrow iron gear to be melted, including some of the stuff which it turned out those goblins were wearing.  I wonder if that made them stick around?  Anyone seen anything similar?

All whacky-goblin-behaviour stories welcome. 

Did you by chance mess with the dumb parameter in world generation? 
Don't really have whacky-goblin-behaviour stories though, most of the time (meaning always) it are my dwarves that are utterly going limbo.