I just had a group of elves attack my settlement. They were provoked form hiding and shot a tame Cow to death with a flurry of arrows! After that they were undecided what to do. One of them shot at one of my fishermen a few times you can see a pair of misses and one hit in the upper screen, and gave him a brown wound in his lower arm.
Above-screen is a total of 14 additional shafts scattered above the site where they shot at the cow and the fishers. So they could shoot. But they later wouldn't. Relevant to this story is that even though i didnt kill that many of them, there were around 10 bow-elves in the initial group.
The cow and fleeing fishers dealt with, they just milled around, the whole group moving one square every once in a while.
Since all my lizardmen(innate swim, dam block 2, natural attacks, speed of 1200) are hunters(with plate) and have trained wrestling to 'wrestler'(except cripples, seen as recruits), i recruit everyone and order them stationed outside.
Well outside, all gathered and accounted for i order them over to the elves. I expect a bloodbath here.
The assigned group leader, however has fallen asleep.
I lose time, then i lose more time when half the sub-squad leaders also have gone away to do other things.
Anyway: Only three champion wrestlers, decent armor/shield/sword-users rush them in an act of suicidal insubordination. Note though that elves are almost twice as fast as my lizardmen by the raws: speed 700 vs 1200.
The fastest lizardman to get there by like a dozen squares has one elf shoot at him as he closes in, without wounding him. A meager amount of fire compared to the cow. The champ had max 1 arrow going at him at a time compared to the cow's 4 to 6.
He then plows into the main group of elves, gets entangled and cuts them up with his plain copper training sword. The other two follow suit.
During this whole encounter, i was sure i'd have a couple less champions to order around, but believe it or not, all the elves seem to flee my soldiers. After closing to melee, just one or two bowmen shot anything at all against them, and the wrestlers accompanying them just scatter. A pair of scattered shafts that were not fired at the cow, the fishermen, or the first advancing champion can be seen. There is some mild splatter by the entrance which implies someone else was hit and wounded in the gathered mass by the entrance, but it was nothing big.
The mess you see here, it was caused by three soldiers. And the killed mess is a small amount of a first attacking group. Mid-fight another group attacked, but they fled the scene quickly. There must have been 20-30 mounted elves, and they failed to wound any one of my three guys to even a light gray level.
What gives? We are in a terror/vengeance relationship, have been since i started on this map. Elves, dwarves, kobolds and goblins attack regularly(dwarves are really only duplicated kobolds, lizardmen took all the default dwarfy stuff).
I keep a log what people died from in the unit list by changing their profession after death. Even though elves attack as frequent or more frequently than goblins, goblins stand for 3/4ths of all deaths by invaders.
This stuff has been quite consistent over time, the last pair of elven ambushes havent killed anyone, and has done nothing but to present horse-meat for the butchers, and worthless bloody gear for me to sell to caravans or for lizardman to purchase.
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Topic: [40d11] Invaders half-hearted, break and run without fighting. (Read 1019 times)