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For !

Against !

[Silverionmox]

I would like it only if the tunnelers could only breach non smoothed walls. That way you could possibly stop your fortress from being breached but only if it is:

A) Built into the rock, not the soil
B) Smoothed out completly

This would allow you to possibly let the enemies into a specific area of your fort, possibly one riddled with traps or marksdwarves or even a tamed mega beast.

It's hard to believe that a wall, built out of pieces of rock, would be stronger than the natural rock. Instead, let's have a new type of wall: reinforced wall, in which metal bars are used. That might be able to withstand a pickaxe for a bit longer than a normal wall.

[Tormy]

Yeah, but that wouldn't make sense. I mean, how would a wall being smooth stop tunnelers?

Indeed, it wouldn't make any sense.  ... Anyways, keep voting!
The results so far:
Total Voters: 223
For !  156 (70%)
Against !  67 (30%)

[praguepride]

I guess the point is that having siegers who can spawn anywhere in your base would fubar most base design. Then you'd just have people building towers...

Unless the towers can have "climbers"...

[Neonivek]

I guess the point is that having siegers who can spawn anywhere in your base would fubar most base design. Then you'd just have people building towers...

Unless the towers can have "climbers"...

Uhhhh... I think "Climbers" are already slated to be possible as it is. Though not in the immediate future.

It doesn't ruin most base design. It just means that just because you have a great outer defense it doesn't mean you can skip out on inner defenses

As an example... in the Game Evil Genius some enemies can teleport into your base. (At some points they are almost the only thing that can really do any harm) Their limitation is that they always teleported on the outer fringes of your base in which case you just have to plan your defenses accordingly.

In terms of Dwarf Fortress it means that you will have to produce internal defenses and prepared to take a hit once in a while.

I doubt an enemy is going to wipe out a properly equipped Fortress unless the enemy is particularly powerful. If they do then it isn't that your unlucky or the game is unfair... It is that you didn't prepare. Same goes if the enemy was able to climb over your walls (which they will eventually)

[Belteshazzar]

Proper field sappers and engineers would probably be one of the easiest steps in allowing for the games to create more purposeful and realistic fortress and city designs. The sieges would likely not be composed entirely of tunnelers (unless someone modded in a race of innate tunneling invaders or you were being invaded by chasm dwellers.)

Besides this tunneling and building is a lot of work and would only be considered in extremely well equipped or desperate sieges, Elven engineers for instance would be far more likely to just trap likely areas of the map, humans to divert a river, and goblins to build a variety of siege engines in an attempt to crush you to rubble.

As I think I mentioned before the ability to re-hide areas of the ma, build engravable walls and a rather stricter preservation of material (where does all that stone dwarves carve up go! It shouldn't just disappear even if it is not useful for anything more gravel) are thing I would like integrated along with this addition.

[Hyndis]

In Evil Genius, invaders only teleported if parts of your base were completely inaccessible. Behind a locked door was still accessible because they could pick locks, but I'm talking about rooms or parts of rooms that cannot be reached by walking or lockpicking.



But I do think tunneling units would be horrible for DF.

Why?

After a few sieges the embark area will be swiss cheese. There will be tunnels everywhere, which means that even if you rebuild the walls you can't engrave the walls, and it would make building underground forts useless. Towers would be far more defensible than a city built under a volcano, and that just isn't right.

Why spend all the time and effort building an elaborate underground mountain hall when siegers can simply move right through solid rock?

[L0rd_ZOD]

Hell yes!

Understandable the map will have random holes in it, but this is where fortifying walls comes in.
This could have so many potential new game elements, gnomes might actually have a purpose other than target practice.

Maybe to limit the amount of swiss cheese, creatures could just take ages to mine or something along the lines of that.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I really don't think that tunnelling units should be in a position to make a constant mess of things, in a well-established Fortress.

Sure, through soil there could be a "Swiss cheese" effect, but stone intrusions could remain rare and slow, and a last resort.

No "tunnel-rushes". That would be a stupid tactic due to the dangers of sapping, and should have severe risks, and even more severe consequences. A slow push wouldn't be bad, though.

Should be fixable by the time you get a new seige, too.

I still say dwarfs should have special "stone-mending" skills/abilities, that allow broken-into areas to be restored to their original immaculate state.

I've always liked the idea of them being able to detect vibrations through solid stone, so maybe they could have a natural stat for that, that could be further developed via a new skill? Maybe just the basic mining skill? That would make some sense.

I also think there should be several ways to protect areas from being tunnelled into (particularly hard stone? metal walls? areas between walls stuffed with broken glass? anti-tunneling traps/structures? (humans actually had these, dwarfs should too, and a lot more of them) or possibly some kind of magic "no-tunnelling" Rune? Maybe a "preservation" spell that enchants engravings, causing them to increase the strength of the stone they're cut into? Or maybe just regenerate. There should be a way to keep the really nice ones from being destroyed, through accident or war.).

I really don't want to see this hand-waved though. Allowing dwarfs to do something in-game, that humans can do in the real world, but not letting humans do it, in-game, is just bad pool.

There's better ways of handling it than just declairing tunnelling off-limits for all species other than dwarfs.

[RAM]

Sigh, I guess nobody bothered to read my wall of text, it's my own fault, stupid spoiler...

Tunnellers would have pathfinding, the tunnels would not be random, and they wouldn't bother if there was already a tunnel to the place they wanted to go. So the swiss cheese analogy shouldn't be relevant except in the early testing phase, which, given that the game is still in alpha stage is likely to be a while...
Being able to engrave walls is only a minor detail, in-game it is a bigger issue that they will dig through masterwork engravings than that they will stop you from replacing them... To be honest, I have no idea why walls can't be engraved, all I can think of is that it stops people from dismantling engravings and rebuilding them until they have one they like, you could stop this by putting the engraving on the block that the wall is made out of, but then people could just fill a room with all masterwork engraved blocks, but that would be a cool way to make libraries, you can have the notable dwarves section, the ancient history section, the demon section, the history of trade section... Perhaps engraving on blocks could have their quality reduced every time they are dismantled...

I would really like invaders to get tired after digging out a small number of tiles and then have to go back the the siege camp to rest, if there isn't a siege camp they take their pay check and leave... Mining could be cool if it was done on a squad by squad basis, each squad decides how it is going to attack, build their equipment, wait for the signal, and then attack from a several different fronts all at once, of course, sometimes 100+ goblins will all flood your main entryway to see if you have been spread out too thin...

Tunnelling is unique in that it is the only way that enemies will be able to bypass the single tunnel in the ground entrance. No amount of pulling down drawbridges, catapulting constructed walls, tearing down constructions or building over channels will have any effect at all on my current fortress, which seems to be pretty much immune to goblins with all of a couple of dozen whips in traps and a couple of dozen stonefall traps spread out over a 3 wide corridor. Even without the traps they still need to deal with a completely underground, 4 storey tall archer tower and a catapult range that is probably about 40 tiles long before actually getting to any civilian paths. So long as attacks rely entirely upon the paths that the dwarves make they will have no way at all of dealing with a fortified bottleneck other than trying to overwhelm it with numbers.

+ - smoothed and fortified rock
# - unmined rock
   - open space
A - axedwarf
M - marksdwarf
g - goblin

 gg###
##g##
M+g+M
MAAAM
MAAAM

How many goblins are required?

[SirHoneyBadger]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sigh, I guess nobody bothered to read my wall of text, it's my own fault, stupid spoiler...

Tunnellers would have pathfinding, the tunnels would not be random, and they wouldn't bother if there was already a tunnel to the place they wanted to go. So the swiss cheese analogy shouldn't be relevant except in the early testing phase, which, given that the game is still in alpha stage is likely to be a while...
Being able to engrave walls is only a minor detail, in-game it is a bigger issue that they will dig through masterwork engravings than that they will stop you from replacing them... To be honest, I have no idea why walls can't be engraved, all I can think of is that it stops people from dismantling engravings and rebuilding them until they have one they like, you could stop this by putting the engraving on the block that the wall is made out of, but then people could just fill a room with all masterwork engraved blocks, but that would be a cool way to make libraries, you can have the notable dwarves section, the ancient history section, the demon section, the history of trade section... Perhaps engraving on blocks could have their quality reduced every time they are dismantled...

I would really like invaders to get tired after digging out a small number of tiles and then have to go back the the siege camp to rest, if there isn't a siege camp they take their pay check and leave... Mining could be cool if it was done on a squad by squad basis, each squad decides how it is going to attack, build their equipment, wait for the signal, and then attack from a several different fronts all at once, of course, sometimes 100+ goblins will all flood your main entryway to see if you have been spread out too thin...

Tunnelling is unique in that it is the only way that enemies will be able to bypass the single tunnel in the ground entrance. No amount of pulling down drawbridges, catapulting constructed walls, tearing down constructions or building over channels will have any effect at all on my current fortress, which seems to be pretty much immune to goblins with all of a couple of dozen whips in traps and a couple of dozen stonefall traps spread out over a 3 wide corridor. Even without the traps they still need to deal with a completely underground, 4 storey tall archer tower and a catapult range that is probably about 40 tiles long before actually getting to any civilian paths. So long as attacks rely entirely upon the paths that the dwarves make they will have no way at all of dealing with a fortified bottleneck other than trying to overwhelm it with numbers.

+ - smoothed and fortified rock
# - unmined rock
   - open space
A - axedwarf
M - marksdwarf
g - goblin

 gg###
##g##
M+g+M
MAAAM
MAAAM

How many goblins are required?

Yah...that there's a wall o' text, alright...

I like the idea of being able to engrave blocks, and then building them into a "library". Gold star on that one.

The rest just makes my eyes cross. Sorry, but please include more paragraphs?

I do get what you're saying, but there's a lot of meaning that's just sloughing off my brain due to the way you've got your writing structured, and it's forced me to read through it several times to grasp it.

Not everybody's gonna waste their time to do that-I'm not trying to be mean, that's just a fact.

Good ideas are silver, but good communication is gold.

Not that it's by any means the worst example I've seen, but I'd rather see you succeed on the Forums (and elsewhere), than not, and not know why. 

[Footkerchief]

The rest just makes my eyes cross. Sorry, but please include more paragraphs?

I do get what you're saying, but there's a lot of meaning that's just sloughing off my brain due to the way you've got your writing structured, and it's forced me to read through it several times to grasp it.

Not everybody's gonna waste their time to do that-I'm not trying to be mean, that's just a fact.

Good ideas are silver, but good communication is gold.

Not that it's by any means the worst example I've seen, but I'd rather see you succeed on the Forums (and elsewhere), than not, and not know why. 

As long as we're critiquing -- I don't think I've ever seen you use more than one sentence per paragraph, and that makes MY eyes cross.  Paragraphs are nice for whitespace but also as modules of reasoning, they force you to organize your thoughts in a vaguely hierarchical fashion instead of rambling.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I've got my own problems and flaws, it's true. Rambling's one of them. Not using proper paragraphs myself, is another.

If you want to critique my writing methods, you're welcome to. Giving me a hard time just because I happen to give someone else what I believe is some constructive criticism seems rather unnecessarily contrarian, however.

I'm not critiquing the ideas. They're good ideas. I'm just suggesting, in a friendly, respectful manner, that it might be more useful for him/her to communicate them in a more effective way.

He/She is free to ignore me, to not take my advice, whatever.

As far as your "critiquing" me in response to that, I'd also kindly suggest it would have had more meaning, and been more useful to me, if you hadn't waited to do it as a reaction to something I said to somebody else, that you took issue with.

[Footkerchief]

When I said "as long as we're critiquing," I meant that literally.  "Contrarian" is a role I often find myself forced into, but in this case I just saw an opportunity to bring up something I'd been meaning to say without further derailing a thread.  I don't "take issue with" your writing style and I'm not giving you a hard time, nor saying you were wrong to criticize.  My criticism was a continuation of your criticism, not a repudiation of it, and I would hope that you care as little as I do about the details of whom it was aimed at.  And if there's anything you'd like to raise about my posts in regard to clarity or well-reasonedness or contrariness, feel free.  I won't take it personally.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Well, actually yes, since you're asking.

While I really did appreciate your support when I was getting dumped on over my suggestion concerning metallic beards for dwarfs, I was subsequently put off when you turned around and used that same suggestion against me in a subsequent post.

I'm not sure if that qualifies as unreasonable or contrary, but I'd much rather that you (or anybody else) pick a side and stick with it, on a particular issue, than stand up for something you obviously don't believe in.

I don't need help defending myself or my ideas--it's nice to have, but I have absolutely no need for it. What I do need is to know who I can rely on, and if possible, what their motives are.

Intrigue is something I think best left to games and governments, not to an internet Forum where very little is at stake (Toady and ThreeToe's livelihood aside), except entertainment and human feelings.

[Footkerchief]

While I really did appreciate your support when I was getting dumped on over my suggestion concerning metallic beards for dwarfs, I was subsequently put off when you turned around and used that same suggestion against me in a subsequent post.

I'm not sure if that qualifies as unreasonable or contrary, but I'd much rather that you (or anybody else) pick a side and stick with it, on a particular issue, than stand up for something you obviously don't believe in.

What I was supporting in that first metallic beards thread was your right to mod the game and tell people about it without getting unreasonably criticized for your own take on the game world.  I still support that right, but I don't support the idea itself -- important distinction there -- and I wouldn't support the use of any backstories of that kind in the vanilla game, which was the context when I brought it up later.

I don't need help defending myself or my ideas--it's nice to have, but I have absolutely no need for it. What I do need is to know who I can rely on, and if possible, what their motives are.

I don't understand -- what do you rely on people for, if not for support?  At any rate, I'd be doing something wrong if I could be relied on to support any one person's ideas, even Toady's.  You can rely on me at most to give a well reasoned assessment.  My motive is to provide meaningful, useful input on the direction of DF's development and to improve the community's ability to do so.