Print

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

[Kode527]

How does the caravan spant to the map's edge? For example If the caravan only has access to my fortress from one part of map edge, will the caravan spawn to that part of map edge, or is it possible to the caravan to spawn somewhere else, where it has no access to my fortress?

[Albedo]

If it only has 1 path, it will appear so it can take that path. Congrats - you can build archer towers to safeguard it and/or a barracks tower to house an escort.

Note that this won't count for liaisons or elven (non-wagon) caravans, which can travel anywhere.

[Grendus]

The best solution is simply to kill off anything dangerous to a caravan before it arrives, though this may be difficult for early civilizations. Spreading cage traps around the world and keeping an active military will let you deal with ambushes fairly easily, plus will provide you with wild animals for taming/military training. Sieges have the decency to announce their presence, so you should be fine.

[Michael]

If it only has 1 path, it will appear so it can take that path. Congrats - you can build archer towers to safeguard it and/or a barracks tower to house an escort.

So says the Wiki, but not in my recent experience. 

It's frustrating because the Shift-D "depot accessible" indication currently lies.  It approves the tightest of herding arrangement (underground tunnel emerging as close to the edge as possible, with a channel around it) yet caravans have bypassed me in looser scenarios.

On top of that, we don't know what the real rules are.  Just engineering so the entire edge of the map is green can take a lot of dwarfpower in some environments, and also has a cost in that it enables the wagons to take silly routes.

[Hyndis]

The path is not calculated from your depot to the edge of the map. Its calculated from the edge of the map to the depot.

If you have only a single route from the edge of the map to your depot, then the wagons will travel with path every single time.

If there are many possible paths, then it will randomly pick one.

[Michael]

The path is not calculated from your depot to the edge of the map. Its calculated from the edge of the map to the depot.

What difference does that make?

Or do you mean that the caravan chooses one of the four edges without regard to depot accessibility, but then allows itself to be herded if there is a single route from that edge?  If that's true, then one needs at least two seperate routes in (one covering each of two opposite corners).

[Hyndis]

Err, wait, no, actually I typed that backwards. 

The path is calculated from the depot to the edge of the map. The pathfinding will then search for routes to the edge of the map. Every green square on the edge of the map is a possible destination. Even squares that are clear but do not lead to the depot will be ignored.

The caravan will then spawn on a random green square and head in to the depot. For diplomats or elves who don't have wagons, pathing is far less restricted. They can move over things like boulders and stairs. A wagon takes up a 3x3 block, an elf takes up a 1x1 tile. Because of this elves and diplomats can spawn pretty much wherever they want to to on the edge of the map unless you're clever about magma, water, and drawbridges to seal off some edges of the map to even foot traffic.

[Michael]

The path is calculated from the depot to the edge of the map. The pathfinding will then search for routes to the edge of the map. Every green square on the edge of the map is a possible destination. Even squares that are clear but do not lead to the depot will be ignored.

That would mean that having at least one green edge square means the wagons will come.   But experience shows this is not the case.

[Albedo]

It's hard to disprove your experience, but I've never seen this fail.  That is hardly counterproof either.

What, exactly, did you see when you had a path and the wagons failed?

If only the edge of the map is green, that means a wagon can enter 1 tile - nothing more.  However, you'd never see that...

The path is not calculated from your depot to the edge of the map. Its calculated from the edge of the map to the depot.

The green path extends out from the TD, not in from an edge.  To find the flaw in a path, you follow the path from your TD and see where it stops.

[Malicus]

I suspect that Michael saw that his tunnel was all green and thought it would be okay.  Was there actually a green tile on the edge of the map at the end of the tunnel at ground level?

[Michael]

It's hard to disprove your experience, but I've never seen this fail.  That is hardly counterproof either.

What, exactly, did you see when you had a path and the wagons failed?

I had auto-savescum on, so I could construct an example save.  The following is two days before the caravan arrived and snubbed me, just after I finished the road:

ftp://ftp.ocis.net/pub/users/ldeutsch/transient/bypass.zip

(This was saved in 40d13.  There might be savefile compatibility issues to 40d -- since I've never seen the cat-mouth bug in the experimental series, and I know the hack to avoid it in 40d breaks compatibility.)

[Malicus]

It appears to be because it's on the west side of that river, and it's not accessible from the east side.  For some reason, they seem DETERMINED to arrive from the north, on the other side of the river.  The tunnel itself doesn't seem to be the problem.

The short amount of time until the merchants arrived gave me little time to work, so multiple reloads were needed.  Bleh.

[Albedo]

You're right in that it says you're good to go, but the Caravan doesn't seem to be forced to take that only route.  There's access - don't know what's up.

I dug a quick set of ramps up the side of the TD to the surface (so the river is no longer a barrier), and that worked 100%. 

Maybe things have changed in d13?

We need to wait on the wisdom of some of the more experienced veterans.

[Malicus]

When I was running my experiments with his save, I was running d12.  I didn't actually try digging a ramp to the surface on the other side, though.  ...I probably should have.  I DID eventually build a trade depot on the surface there, though, and they went to that.

...and they would NOT go to a trade depot I built right outside the entrance to his tunnel.

[Michael]

It appears to be because it's on the west side of that river, and it's not accessible from the east side.  For some reason, they seem DETERMINED to arrive from the north, on the other side of the river.  The tunnel itself doesn't seem to be the problem.

So we've established that herding is not reliable.

The short amount of time until the merchants arrived gave me little time to work, so multiple reloads were needed.  Bleh.

Oh, you wanted time?  I considered it a feature that you didn't have to wait long before the bug appeared.

I'm posting the full set of scum saves as
ftp://ftp.ocis.net/pub/users/ldeutsch/transient/fullbypass.zip

Alternatively, if it's just the site you want, you could input the seeds 434721200, 546876392, and 2967667348, and then search for 6x6, low evil, flux, no aquifer, river, magma pipe.

Zuspozosmlo is a pretty nice world.  You don't often find those criteria plus trees and sand. It's the first site I liked enough to stoop to re-using seeds....