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[mrbane]

Good point  about the pathing. How are they going to know where to dig? You can't just have them suddenly, out of all the ground possible, dig straight into your base.

So this is why I think it should only be used in sieges. Here's my reasoning.

"Right lads, we've got dee's 'orrible lil' stumpy bastards in der and we's gonna get 'em. Grot! Start der and dig thru dat bloody big 'ill until you find sommet."
(Don't know why they're talking like Orks)

So Grot and his tunnel team pick a point, at random, from whatever mountain your entrance is attached to, and digs in a straight line until he either comes out the other side or bursts into your base.

Whils they're digging, there's an goblin squad tailing the tunnellers at a safe distance so that if they do break through they can launch a small assault straight away, with some of the tunnellers running back to report that they're in.

If you can kill all of them before they get back to inform the main body that they're in then you can have time to trap the tunnel before the main body sends in a scout to find out what's happening.

It's a basic idea, but it's a start.

You simply can't have them know everything about your base and work out the best path, it's just not realistic.

[Bohandas]

I think that it would be interesting to for tunneler units to be implemented, but that if they are they should only only be implemented in a limited fashion. To wit:

1. Not everything should be able to tunnel (of course)

2. There should be an option to turn tunneler units off in "d_init"

3. Enemy invaders/siegers/ambushers/whatever who are tunneling should be limited to wielding picks, just like dwarven miners.

4. Not everything that can tunnel should be able to tunnel quickly.

5. The squares constituting your fortress' interior walls (basically all revealed underground tiles) should be assumed to be in some way reinforced (or heavily reinforced in the case of smoothed or engraved walls) and take a longer time to breach (like in the videogame "Dungeon Keeper")

[Shade-o]

On a much less complicated note, what if Goblins sent ambushes through caverns? The route would be too dangerous and complicated for a whole army, but a smaller group of more experienced raiders could attack while you deal with the main army on the surface.

[SirHoneyBadger]

On a much less complicated note, what if Goblins sent ambushes through caverns?

Natural caverns? I'd just assume that enemies would use any open pathing available to them. So yes to that. There's no good reason, even player-driven, to disallow that.

---------------------------------------------------------

And, while it's absolutely not my style of play, I still think it's important to allow for the player who simply enjoys building castles and other such projects, to do that in Dwarf Fortress.

Even if all they want to do is build sand castles.

Different people enjoy the game, in lots of different ways, for lots of different reasons. That's a good thing. It makes for a broad player-base, and healthier donations.

There's no need for those of us who like the idea of seiges, and tunneling, and destruction, to inflict it on those who don't want those elements in their game. That attitude of forcing tunneling, isn't any likelier to get us what we want, than just asking for it as a (main) option.

It isn't the same thing as adding Z levels, and requiring every player to have those elements in their game would almost be a form of bullying, in a way.

I dislike bullying considerably more than I dislike people who are different than I am.

As much as I am for tunneling, we can all have our cake and eat it too, and everyone should be able to live with that.

[Nivim]

 Your post spawned a random thought on the matter of war.
  For the person who really doesn't want to deal with the combat aspect of the game, it might eventually be possible to play a world in a "cold war", or "bloodless war". Where each civilization, or race, is only trying to one-up the others. This could be done by tracking different kinds of fortress and civilization wealth, resources, and power. In something like this, an army could be made purely for the sake of being awesome and increasing certain power statistics. Members of the losing race could also get an unhappy thought of varying severity from other civilizations successfully (1≤x)-upping them, and a positive thought from returning the success. This would be based on change in wealth rather than total wealth, or your dwarves would go insane almost immediately in a place without many dwarves.
 Which thread should this thought go in?

[PTTG??]

What exactly is wrong with having a init option to disable diggers? We already have one to disable sieges...

[RAM]

It would help if there was an in-game ability to change init options. Although it should be easy enough to just make a configuration executable to change the relevant files without needing to know what a text editor is. You see, modern computer programs all need to be compatible with people who know absolutely nothing about computers. It is a rule or something...

[Akjosch]

Caveins: There is no such thing as a sand ceiling.

Actually, there is, you can build a tunnel in sand. It's just usually a bloody awful idea without lots of support structure (read: wood), since sand tends to lose cohesiveness very quickly when exposed to air and drying. People (especially kids) get killed by this now and then.

[Sowelu]

I'd like to turn one unit of metal into ten tiles of reinforced sheeting, or rebar, or what-have-you.  Make your important walls take a lot longer to dig through.

Got chalk walls and can't afford the metal?  Well, dig them out and replace them with mined granite, processed into blocks.

REALLY don't want anything getting through?  Build your walls out of full metal blocks.  Boy will that be expensive...but for certain critical places, I could see that working.

I'd say, give invaders a full picture of all OUTDOORS locations, which means they know where entrances are.  Invaders make guesses about what might be inside:  Maybe this leader thinks it's a shaft straight down, that leader thinks there's a room directly inside, another room expects that he'll find something in a cone from the entrance, a fourth leader figures he can just get close to that entrance, dig down, and find something.  And ALL of them are smart enough to use the same noise rules of dwarves:  If there's a workshop four levels down and it would wake up a dwarf on the surface, then the invaders ought to know that they could dig down and get there.  Give the invaders a memory of what indoors areas they have specifically seen.  Assign value to regions:  If there's ten entrances (9 of them presumably false), all behind little moats, and you've seen a dwarf at one of them...then target the one with the dwarf.

[RAM]

Rules like that are really good, how would you define an entrance? Any dug land? Channels could be a problem... Tunnels next to exposed tiles? Deep land under glass walls used for cave adaptation and surface crops might create issues... Maybe they could find the trade depot, it must be advertised...

[BurnedToast]

I'm all for it.

However, IMO it should be more of a siege breaker type thing. Enemy tunneler should be slow and you should have some warning they are coming, i.e ambushers would never tunnel ever and even sieges would prefer to go in the front door if they can. If you raise a drawbridge (and that really should be a viable defense since castles etc DID have drawbridges) then they should consider digging around back. You'd have the option to open the gate and charge the military out to stop them, or set an ambush inside where they are going to break through, or maybe even just flooding that section of the fort with magma so when they finish the tunnels... SURPRISE!

Randomly having goblins tunnel into your fort all the time for no reason and with no warning would be unfun and annoying.

[drkpaladin]

I think we could have sieges broken in other neat ways without having to rely on tunneling units.  If tunnelers were implemented I'd vote to have them exclusively "spoilers" who can melt rock with magma-vision.

Let them break each other out of cage traps, Let them bring catapults and fling diseased cow corpses into the food stockpiles, let them never get tired of the siege and start calling for reinforcements, let them chop down the trees and build battering rams.  Let the Gobbos build traps to keep the dwarves down there.  Let them pollute the rivers, let them sound war drums in the hundreds constantly until the dwarves are driven insane from lack of sleep (and awaken FBs), let them corrupt the wildlife until its all a terrifying skeletal wasteland with no trees. Let them spar with each other. Once magic is implemented, let them reainimate the corpses in the refuse piles and the piles of dead merchants, summon the ghosts of insane dwarves long gone to wreak vengance upon the living.

And note, I think Its fair to have certain 'siege' units be able to gradually wear down construction like walls which would make it harder to really 'dig in' all the way, but digging holes randomly in the fortress I think would be less cool.

And if all that doesn't give you a challenge, then they should just let loose about 100 adorable disease ridden kittens upon the top of the map.

[RAM]

With the dubious exceptions of the kittens and war drums none of that would make the slightest dent in a simple passage with siege weapons and archers at the end. Implementing conservation of energy would make food reserves a possible weakness, but a few corpses can grow a lot of mushrooms, and it is easy enough to lure goblins into a trap...

[Stworca]

I voted "For" but i'd rather have no-pick-equipped-creatures dig only through sand & co, not rock

[SirHoneyBadger]

I kind of am thinking that the ability to make picks should be required, for digging through solid stone, and possibly also for destroying constructions, below a certain Size value.

In other words, antmen should be able to make and use picks, and critters smaller than, for instance, a giant, shouldn't be able to smash through constructed stone architecture, without a pick.

Exceptions could exist, but these could be rare.