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[irmo]

Thereby completely invalidating the goal of having a fortress.

Agreed. The point of siegers having tunneling units is to give you something else to defend against, not something you can't defend against.

I'm in favor of individual units being able to teleport in, for spying/sabotage/theft purposes, but if they can teleport entire armies in, there's really no defense. "Find the guy maintaining the portal and kill him"--sure, while you have a goblin army wreaking havoc inside your walls, you're going to hunt down and kill one wizard. And then you still have a goblin army inside your walls.

No thanks.

[Timst]

And kill the wizard before he manage to cast the spell will mean attack the whole goblin army who's probably protecting the wizard during his work. It will be active defense (soldiers) only...

[Servant Corps]

To be fair, I expected the time to cast a portal spell to take a very long time (maybe even one season?). You'd know he is trying to cast a portal spell, so you have to kill him before the spell succeds and the portal is established.

[Tormy]

Thereby completely invalidating the goal of having a fortress.

Agreed. The point of siegers having tunneling units is to give you something else to defend against, not something you can't defend against.

That is true, but if the spell would be balanced enough, there wouldn't be any imbalance problems:

1. Since this is an extremely powerful spell, more casters should be needed to perform the ritual.
2. The casters must be close to the fortress itself [IE: on the local map] in order to start the ritual.
3. Casting the ritual must be a very long process. [Months of in-game time..]
4. There must be a chance, that the ritual won't work perfectly. -> Funny momments, such as the invaders will be teleported into the magma etc.
5. If the casters [even 1 caster!] are interrupted [attacked] while they are casting the ritual spell, the whole process will be halted. They must start the whole process over again.

[Silverionmox]

Especially the month-long casting time sounds great. The invasion becomes a very epic undertaking that way.

[Virex]

Wouldn't the goblins need an inside informant to pinpoint the end point of the spell? I mean if they'd cast this blindly they might end up inside a wall for all they know

[Draco18s]

I usually kill all the invades into my domain inside of a week.  Well, those that don't flee anyway.

[qwertyuiopas]

Random thoughts:

A solution would be to randomly teleport a scout in, with a way to teleport out(for balance, the escape takes at least a day to prepare) the scout would either not return(they send another after a day or two) or would tell them of a small segment of the fort.

An appearing portal could be a visible object.

Dwarven countermages, delaying, or REDIRECTING...

Bad portal indistinguishable, results of bodypart scattering, from one arm to everything.

[Theoclymenus]

I have this wonderful image of two portals set vertical above each other with a creature of some sort falling through them. Eventually, when a magic user goes off for booze the portals vanish and the creature, having fallen thousands of z-levels and hopefully reached terminal velocity, would explode in a massive burst of blood.

[Draco18s]

Unless they have springs on their feet, in which case they land without harm.

[Silverionmox]

It would probably combust because of the friction before that. That would be an alternative way to melt ore.. maybe even bauxite

[Granite26]

It would probably combust because of the friction before that. That would be an alternative way to melt ore.. maybe even bauxite

skydivers hit terminal velocity all the time....

[Silverionmox]

Oh, you mean velocity that's terminal on impact. I was thinking in the air.

[Virex]

Terminal velocity in the air would be pretty terminal when you hit the ground though

Anyhow, you guys seem to think of portals as just sitting there and needing no furhter imput. But unless you want to throw the laws of nature completely out of the window instead of just the bit that's needed for magic to function, stepping through a portal would require energy to displace you. So eventualy the guy casting the portal would get exhausted because he's constantly dragging the goblin/test subject up a Z-level...

[qwertyuiopas]

Unless the portals absorbed some of the energy loss from their surroundings(the surface they are attached to?)