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For !

Against !

[profit]

I see this as a potential source of serious game slowdowns.

[Skynet 2.0]

What if the tunnels were temporary and 'collapsed' (filled themselves in) after the siege was over? That way, there would be tunnelers that could get to your fort, but they wouldn't be able to do any permanent damage. Also, if they collapsed while there were some enemies inside, they would be crushed, and you could dig them up to get their stuff. If any dwarves were in the tunnels when they collapsed, they would be trapped in a 1x1 square until they got dug out, but they would be able to use their extensive knowledge of tunneling to keep their section of the tunnel from collapsing.

[Footkerchief]

If it gives me an actual reason to fortify underground walls with steel, I'm all for it, because that owns.  That implies that digging would be somehow restricted by race / entity / pick material / pick quality or something, which is sensible.

I don't see how it would be a pathfinding nightmare at all.  Pathfinding through the ground would be pretty straightforward -- undiggable terrain is just treated like walls are treated for normal pathfinding. 

[JoshuaFH]

AGAINST! this is insanity, are people so hard-up for difficulty that they'd actually advocate a something so tagged on as this?

Alot of revisions to AI, farming, trade, politics, and warmaking can ramp up the genuine difficulty EASILY!

This game doesn't need this, not by a long shot.

[Footkerchief]

AGAINST! this is insanity, are people so hard-up for difficulty that they'd actually advocate a something so tagged on as this?

Alot of revisions to AI, farming, trade, politics, and warmaking can ramp up the genuine difficulty EASILY!

This game doesn't need this, not by a long shot.

The game already has wuss-out options like turning off invaders, and I assume this would as well.  Plus there'll probably be a Sapper profession you can disable for all entities or something.  Anyway, as long as there are proper restrictions on digging in general (i.e. no more legendary miners tunneling through adamantine like cheese), it'll be a lot less of a big deal than people are thinking.

[JoshuaFH]

I'm normally very respectful of your opinion footkerchief, but i simply must disagree with you on this.

If handled improperly, even slightly, this could be either laughable or gamebreaking.

laughable, that like trolls are now, simply never show up, or only very rarely show up.

or gamebreaking in the sense that they show up so often, that the only proper way to create a fort would be set up huge mega-defenses all around one's fort. Such things would make fort creation require less imagination because it would be something prerequisite to build forts in this manner, and thus fort expansion beyond initial defense would be incredible difficult, as more defenses would need to be set up. This problem made even more worse if it's in the vanilla version. You can throw in the "Oh, you can change it in the init/raws, you big dummy " argument, but that only brings up more problems! How? because then when DF becomes big and popular (which it WILL!) then a whole flood of newbs having problems with such basic changes to the programming will inhabit the boards forever.

I could be overreacting of course, but it's not likely.

[Footkerchief]

I'm not offended, no worries.  But you do seem to be starting with the assumption that goblin sappers knocking a hole in your dining room wall will be game over, when really it'll be not much different from the "oh shit" moment the first time a troll bats aside your fortress gates.  It's not like the tunnels will be invisible either, so you can muster the troops at the anticipated breach point or build a ballista in front of it or whatever.

The mega-defenses are only a prerequisite if you're a perfectionist, basically.

[JoshuaFH]

"hole in your dining room"? What if their's more than one? then it's like holes coming in from every direction. That could be a four front, unavoidable fight right their.

I'm sorry, it just seems... i don't know... too cheap, too tacked on, not requiring effort on the enemy's part to execute, but massive effort to defend against. Other things can be implemented that would be better.

Now if we were talking about super special rare habitat-specific creatures that can dig (tremors worms anyone?), then i might consider it as a legitimate addition to selecting one's terrain. Tremors worms would be a cool addition to say, savage deserts, which would make sense. they'd be the giant eagles of the sand!

If you don't know what i'm talking about, "Tremors" was a movie about giant worms that dig through sand and eat people. I loved it as a child.

[Footkerchief]

There's nothing to stop you from, you know, defending the fortress, like actually sending a soldier outside to bash some tunneler skulls.  Tunneling is only "easy" if the defenders turtle up and let the attackers do as they please for a substantial period of time, which should be a dangerous or even suicidal tactic for all but the most carefully siege-proofed fortresses.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I'm all for tunnelling, and I'll tell you why: When I first started playing DF, (before I knew better) I assumed it was already a part of the game, and I really got a chill when I started spotting several Antmen outside of my soil-based underground farm (the main source of food for my fortress, which had been difficult for me to set up).

I immediately posted several guards, and I really gave the possibility that they might break in to my main food source, a lot of thought. It was exciting! It added to my game experience, especially considering that I thought it might be possible that once 1-2 antmen showed up, that they'd (like ants do in real life) lead the rest of the antmen back to my farm and attack it, en-masse.

It's therefore been my personal experience that this is likely to lead to a better, more immersive, gaming experience.

I *will* strongly qualify it with the statement that I absolutely think you should get a message about enemy miners/sappers in your area, WELL before they come anywhere near your Fortress. Like anytime anyone other than a friendly dwarf starts digging into the solid structure of the stone surrounding your Fortress, to a depth of say 12 squares in any direction. That should be a racial dwarf ability.

I also think that the vast majority of animals and primitive humanoids shouldn't be able to dig into anything but soil, and that all of them-except for a few special exceptions, specifically antmen-should dig considerably more slowly than dwarfs, with a greater chance of cave-in.

Humans and goblins (goblins with the help of trolls, anyway) might be able to tunnel into stone, but again, it should be a *lot* slower than dwarfs, and they shouldn't get a warning about counter-sapping or enemy tunnellers.
Cave-ins and other disasters should, again, be a lot more frequent, and a lot more dangerous for them.

Also, as briefly mentioned, there should be counter-sapping options.
Things that come immediately to mind include:
salt-acid traps (melt your enemies, for fun and profit!),
rigged boulder traps that don't even require mechanisms, and are just waiting for someone to mine under them (easy squish),
"stone" that is, in reality, a horrible grey ooze creature, or a living, impaling, stalactite creature, or an earth elemental with a hangover, or the fossilized shell of a giant undead anemone, or...well, you get the point (and the goblins will, too)
Swarms of snakes, scorpions, fire ants, 'The Mummy' style scarab-beetles, undead carp, horribly deadly black mold, and anything else that lies dormant-but ravenously hungry-that your dwarfs can "seed" into a tiny hidden pocket of soil, until some idiot pokes it with a sapper's pick (don't let that idiot be you!)
Traps that only go off if a wall is breached, perhaps dropping a sarcophagus that is solid on every side *except* for the open one facing the breech, and that contains your choice of: zombie minotaur, tentacle demon, lavaman.
The same trap, only with a funnel at the top, from which flows an unending stream of: coal smoke, extremely fine sand, bees.

[JoshuaFH]

There's nothing to stop you from, you know, defending the fortress, like actually sending a soldier outside to bash some tunneler skulls.  Tunneling is only "easy" if the defenders turtle up and let the attackers do as they please for a substantial period of time, which should be a dangerous or even suicidal tactic for all but the most carefully siege-proofed fortresses.

Oh yeah, just go out and bonk those tunnelers on the head! It's so easy! why didn't i think of that? Probably because the actual fighting portion of the invasion squad would be hanging around them, and by opening up your fort that would be alerting them and send them on the move towards said opening, and by moving your military around, your thinning their ranks and making them less effective!

And don't forget the tunnelers are still doing near-irreparable damage to the landscape that other tunnelers can finish. An aged fort will undoubtably have the surrounding landscape be jagged and torn from the persistant tunneling attacks.

[Little]

You either prepare to attack them on the inside or kill them from the outside. Tunneling would be slow...

[Warlord255]

Still of the opinion that other fixes can come first. I'll take goblin catapults over sappers any day.

[Bryan Derksen]

A good baby step in this direction might be to allow siegers to deconstruct or smash constructed walls. Those can be rebuilt just as good as new and deconstructing walls already takes way longer than digging through equivalent rock.

[irmo]

1. For defense against tunneling, I like the idea of building walls of steel (or harder stone, once that concept exists)--though this should only slow them down, not stop them completely. Other than that, what you do is not send your warriors out to the tunnel entrance and into the tunnel and attack their miners from the rear. What you do is think like a dwarf. You see the path their miners are taking and dig your own tunnel across it, so that they eventually break into your tunnel. Into which you put soldiers, war dogs, traps, or a million gallons of pressurized water.

2. I posted this in the other thread, but to anyone concerned about the aesthetic effects: What would you think if underground squares that were completely blocked off with walls (natural or constructed) became invisible again? Then you could seal off the tunnels with constructed walls and they'd go away, at least until you reopened them.