Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Aquillion]

Regarding the skill level of attackers:

Historically, I believe that most real-world armies from the Dwarf Fortress period consisted of unskilled conscripts -- farmers who were forced to join, but who had little or no experience with weapons or fighting.

There were exceptions, of course (the roman legions, etc), but those are the exception and not the rule, and the reason they did so well was precisely because they were professionals going up against unskilled peasants.  They required huge empires supporting them that most people just didn't have.  A few other countries would train absolutely everyone for the military (the English requirement that everyone train in using the longbow, all of Spartan society), but that, again, was because professional armies were so rare -- most armies were, largely, just peasants who the local leader forced to pick up weapons, augmented by maybe a few mercenaries and the like.

So having most invaders come down to little more than unskilled peasants is actually not all that strange...  and if the player implements a modern-style military with extensive training for conscripts that compose a significant portion of their population, the fact that they will brutally slaughter those invaders is based on historical fact.

Remember that the player views things as a game; they raise and train an absurdly large army compared to what is realistic.  In the real world, very few societies from the tech level Dwarf Fortress is at are going to turn a huge chunk of their population into a dedicated military that spends all their time training.  (And those few are going to be legendary for their outlandishly militaristic culture.)

Most societies couldn't afford to have that many people as dedicated fighters -- farming was too important and too time-consuming.  If you want to keep the player from training up huge armies of uber-legendaries that slaughter any invaders, I think that the best approach is to try and make it more difficult and less viable for the player to have such an unrealistically big military focus -- not to try and give everyone that same absurd amount of training.

OTOH players should be able to play Dwarven Sparta if they want, of course.

[Rowanas]

Some of you guys are seeing this all wrong. The change will mean that those marksdwarves will stay put behind fortifications, and your shield-bearing defenders will actually stay where they are supposed to stay. Rather than taking away from fortifications, this will add whole new levels of strategic defence to DF. Gobs might have a harder time of it, sure, but if they get an AI upgrade and maybe eventually the ability to make various useful things (ramps, siege towers, bolts throwers) then sieges could be really REALLY cool. Think LOTR siege towers and ladders. Also, when the naval side of things comes into play, naval warfare and goblin pirates would be awesome.

When I discovered DF I thought my head will explode, now I see what's possible, I'm pretty damn sure.

[G-Flex]

I think the ability for goblins to effectively and strategically use things like ramps, ladders, and siege engines would require one hell of an AI upgrade. It'll definitely be interesting if it comes to pass, but it's really difficult to get AI-controlled characters to act at all realistically or strategically in an organic, unpredictable situation.

[Leafsnail]

in an organic, unpredictable situation.

And Armok knows how unpredictable some forts can be.

Anyway, I think goblins will start sending medics along, which could help a bit.

[Rowanas]

I don't see that the AI would need such an enormous upgrade, after all, you set tasks, dwarves do tasks. Animals appear, some eat food or steal stuff. This would only be a mix of the two. Every goblin gets the "Build siege engine" labour, and every goblin gets the "Curious_siege" thingy in their raws (with _siege being defined however toady wants to define it) and voila! Maybe have them come prepacked with wood or stone to build these engines and workshops.

Toady wanted to have the ability to go and conquer other civs, so it makes sense that this would be the starting place. Once the gobins are actually a real civilization (as opposed to an entity that spawns and sends troops) conquering them wil be the next step.

[Pilsu]

Aquillion, do remember that these are carnivores controlled by a giant demon. I think you can agree that a comparison to a medieval farming society doesn't quite work. Human armies are a different matter but my suggestion wasn't tooled for them anyway


Rowanas, having a computer do it intelligently is very, very difficult. If they just react to walls, a storage hut in the wilderness will prompt them to construct a siege machine. A siege machine that then gets stuck in the forest

[Byakugan01]

I think demons won't be the automatic leaders for gobbos in the next version, since one of the goals on the list is removing demons as a forced power for goblins, and have their leaders arise via megabeast behavior. A better comparison for goblins might be the Norse, who tended livestock and hunted more than they tilled the fields-and are famous for their raiding of other peoples (vikings much?)

The thing is, Pilsu, we won't automatically be at war with goblins in the next version. We might start out at war with elves, humans, or a modded in civ. So we need to think of how changes would affect things across the board.

[G-Flex]

Regarding the skill level of attackers:

Historically, I believe that most real-world armies from the Dwarf Fortress period consisted of unskilled conscripts -- farmers who were forced to join, but who had little or no experience with weapons or fighting.

The thing is that this should only necessarily apply to humans, or other creatures when they're similar enough to humans for it to make sense.

The comparison doesn't hold true very well for Goblins, and probably not much for Dwarves, and almost certainly not much for, say, Elves.

[Rowanas]

Dwarves are a closer comparison to the Norse in traditional mythology. I don't necessarily think that having all the violent civs based on the Norse is a bad thing...

The goblin leaders should be just that, leaders. Having all the goblins subservient to demons only makes sense if the demons conquer the goblins in world gen (or post world gen (fingers crossed))

[G-Flex]

But we don't know that much about how goblin civilization works. We don't know if, conceptually, they even HAVE leaders.

[jamoecw]

when someone says goblin, i think of a weak, poorly equipped creature with green skin.  as there are relatively few ranged weapons currently.  i would say that if one wanted a weak, poorly equipped fighter to be effective, what weapon would one give them great proficiency with?  siege equipment seems pretty good for them, cheap bows are pretty weak, an arbalest also seems too good, javelins require too much strength unless they are too small.  so that leaves: repeating crossbows, blowguns, and slings.  in order for the repeating crossbows and blowguns to be effective they have to be poison tipped, and the slings need lead bullets.

if the goblins have a smart leader (demon or something) then they would use repeating crossbows and slingers as the bulk of their army, otherwise the crossbows would be replaced by blowguns.  slings when used by a trained person can get the same sort of accuracy and range as longbows and arbalests, they also deal damage through armor and are harder predict their course in flight (making shields/dodging less effective).  with weapons having great rate of fire compared to the dwarfs, and in larger numbers with say the same percentage of slingers to your marksdwarfs, with say as many or double as many using either blowguns or repeating crossbows they would be well able to assault your fort and hold corridors once inside fort.  if they bring trained animals to help out with the urban fighting then they would be quite a threat, while giving up little useful equipment when they fail.

[loose nut]

2¢ from my experience with DF:

- agree that it shouldn't be possible to simply spar/ target-shoot past Expert or some other arbitrary level

- believe that melee should be chancier; shouldn't have one dwarven soldier plowing through an entire squad of goblins every time

-  don't think goblins should be extremely well-trained and absolutely should not get better kit. High-quality weapons and armor will only help them if you insist on fighting them chivalrously (bwahaha); traps make goblins' high-quality kit into your high-quality kit in short order, and it's already way too easy to fund your entire fortress from goblin leftovers. I like the idea of goblin slingers; not so much goblin chu-ko-nu wielders, repeating x-bows seems like a dwarf thing (although with the ROF now, who could tell the difference)

- I imagine goblins training better and better beasts to augment their assaults as their strength grows. Their strength should probably wax and wane depending on the defeats you hand them. Maybe if you kill their beastmasters, the beasts go wild... 

[Granite26]

We're still lacking a myth for why they attack.  Right now, they are still in the "video gamey enforce grand conflict on your civ for testing" role.

Again, Goblin only means little and weak in the post D&D world.  Much like the much aligned storm trooper, before that, they weren't considered weak, they just happened to face off with the epic heroes a little too often.

Anywho,  people seem to be thinking of goblins as cockroaches that attack as a means of controlling their own population (common D&D conception) rather than, say, the viking 'we live to fight and raid' or whatnot.

As far as dwarves go, I see something of the American frontier tradition in them.  Most people learn to fight because it's just THAT dangerous.  Training isn't in formations so much, but every adult male can shoot, and when the churchbells clang in the middle of the night, every one of them is up on the walls with his squirrel gun.  Hearing the emphasis on militia over military, that's what I think of, at any rate.  Remember how many of the Western legends types were known as experts in shooting and woodcraft, without being part of any military architecture.

[Rowanas]

That's only how you see it, and imposing such restraints on other people makes no sense.

goblins will eventually attack just like the humans and elves do (because we killed them first/because they feel warmongery) rather than charging because they can. For some reason kobolds get weaker if you hand their arses to them on a platter, whereas the other nations do not, but all that will be resolved when conquering and civs are fully implemented as Toady has envisioned (Armok be with him).

[Felblood]

These are clearly the generic, modern fantasy variant of goblins (in keeping with the generic modern fantasy setting). This really isn't the thread for arguing that they shouldn't be.

Anyway, it occurs to me that making the military more effective won't have any real impact on game difficulty until invaders have some sort of basic plan for traps. Right now soldiers are a little less effective and a lot less reliable than traps, and the update promises to make them a little more effective and a lot less unreliable. This will move them up into the position of being only slightly less effective than traps and slightly less reliable than traps.

The fact of the matter is that goblins are going to suck in the next release, because they already sucked, it's just that our own forces are going to stop sucking so much.

As for how to fix that, the fix won't be in the next release, so we might as well wait and see the thing so we'll have a better idea of what's actually happening on these new battlefields.

I'm really looking forward to those balance threads, and I wouldn't want the topic to get run into the ground before we actually have something to say about it.