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[Soralin]

Oh, and a few more that I thought of, stairs can be built and then removed, sections of natural wall can be dug away to collapse and seal an entrance, but those are both just really subsets of channels and natural walls.

[de5me7]

i recon two items of equipment that come standard with every siege could solev this issue

each siege has one or more
battering ram

ladders

battering ram: needs 4 goblins/other enemies to hold - can break doors, flood gates etc differing materials take different lengths of time to destroy.

Cannot break walls or if it can takes a very very long time generaly speaking i recon invaders should only attack walls if the entrance has been sealed with a wall.

ladders - can scale up walls of 2 z levels, can  be put across pits and areas where traps are located. Basically behaves like a mobile bridge or stairway.

The advantage of having individual siege items is the defender can target them, and can build defences that whilst not bullet proof can caounter them. e.g. a barbican - allows you to shoot at battering ram holders.

[Pilsu]

True, but there's no real way of making that threatening as it is.  I mean, food and water aren't hard to get in unlimited supply, even if you made food production take up 1000 times as much space, there's plenty of room for it underground over multiple levels.Water you could get from an aquifer, or even if you did have to get it from an outside source like a hole in the bottom of a river, it's still only vulnerable to those that can swim, and you can put bars along a long straight narrow path, so only vulnerable to swimming building destroyers, and put a ballista aiming down it to easily take care of any of those that exist.

And if they dam your river or worse, poison it without you noticing?

Only way you could get around this would be to deliberately embark in a perfect location in which case, what the hell do you want from me?

I don't see why that would be problematic, my first fortress even Whipcaught had a large section outside that was walled off (was single high at first, added the fortified level later), it wasn't very hard and didn't really take long to do.  When that ran out of trees in the area that I had (because I didn't have magma, and so I needed a lot of trees to make use of all the iron around), I created an attached area surrounded by channels that was even easier to make.  It provided for quite a large number of trees and gatherable plants from herbalism, as well as above ground farms, but those only took up a fraction of the space.  Now perhaps if the plants had to have access to light (no roof over them at all), and flying enemies, or ways to get up over multi-story walls were far more common or easy, it might be a slight limitation.  You could always create an area sunk into a deep pit too though, so they would have to be able to deal with that as well.

Any invader worth it's salt would immediately deny you the use of any open farming areas. Walls aren't going to stop them forever and a generous application of fire would render the spot barren of useful vegetation for a long time. If you're there to repel them, well, you're fighting and having fun aren't you?

Caravans aren't critical but they shouldn't be. You're gonna miss out on a lot if you just sit inside which is the point. You can just jerk off in the dark, isolated from the world but how many players would tolerate it for extended periods if they had a choice?

Morale penalties are currently very easy to counter with an engraved royal dining room and a waterfall, so they'd have to be very severe to have much of an effect.  Even requiring a path to the outside can turn it from Dwarf Fortress to Dwarf Path of Traps.  All of your defenses would only have to be concentrated at a single narrow path, if they have no other way in.

Disabling and jamming traps would handle that. Additionally, sieges might opt to loot and ship out everything you leave lying around undefended, including jammed axe blades and their own armor. Anything useless would be burned just to flip you off and any captured immigrants and merchants would be tortured outside your gates

Morale as is is fundamentally broken so let's not discuss that. There was some other thread where we talked about long term sanity and whatnot. One needs to rework the system in order to build anything on top of it and that isn't a matter for this thread

Just because it is doesn't mean it should be

It's certainly realistic. Due to the very nature of the game, unless you start teleporting tunneling troops around to remove the fortress from the equation entirely, which results in the fort building, the entire point of the game, becoming completely pointless, you're not going to win. It's the nature of the game, if the player chooses the perfect spot and plays his strengths, he wins. Really, can you honestly try to claim you could devise a way with 1400 century tech to get past an underground drowning chamber? Fucking Indiana Jones would die there, plot armor or not. Now try goblins clad in full plate without Hollywood nerves

Conquering other civs would pose a challenge, especially if you switch to goblins and try to capture the overengineered forts other people made. Would of course need guard posts and functioning meeting zones and whatnot or all the NPCs will just mull about outside

[ChairmanPoo]

I think that fortresses should be able to be made impregnable, or impregnable barring freak occurences.

I dont think this should be easy, much less as easy as building a corridor full of weapon traps.

BTW: how come trolls dont break the hatches/floodgates/whatever in drowning chambers?

[Pilsu]

A well designed drowning chamber would not rely on doors not being breached. Besides, can trolls even swim? Should they? It's one thing to bust the door when the water is just rushing in but by exploiting pressure, it'll flush in so fast no mortal being would be able to retain composure and reach the door

[Sunken]

I think that fortresses should be able to be made impregnable, or impregnable barring freak occurences.

I think basically it should be possible to make your fort 90% or 99% or 99.9% impregnable, but with increasing costs (time and resources). Once you're impregnable to frontal assault, you have to make yourself invulnerable to starvation, to diverting rivers into your fort, to wall-climbing tame GCS:s, to hired wizards, to gryphon-riders, to the summoning of foul demons, and to treachery by the dwarf whose husband is being held hostage. Not necessarily in that order or in any order.
That's just the basic philosophy. The main thing is that the game (through the goblins or whoever) brings some variation to bear on you. Intelligent beings would try new things. Any single tactic should be possible to defend against - ideally, no defense should work against everything.

[Soralin]

And if they dam your river or worse, poison it without you noticing?

If they can dam the river in a way that's effective, I will be very impressed with the AI   But that's only 1 out of 5 possible renewable sources of water that I can think of (river/brook/stream, cave river, aquifer, muddy pool, ocean/lake).  I suppose that's not 5 depending on how you split them.  Underground pools are there, but not renewable.  Ice is technically renewable due to buggy behavior (1/7 water->ice->7/7 water) or such.  If they can poison it and you know they can do that, then you would have to seal off your intake and run off of reserves.  Which could be very effective in a siege, but requires changes be made so that water is actually required for something, as it is currently, it's not needed for much.  Assuming of course that they have unlimited poison, and can poison it as long as they're there.  And that they can get to the water to poison it, which isn't very easy for all the other sources of water (poison an ocean? an aquifer?  They might not be able to reach the other ones unless they can break through walls.

Only way you could get around this would be to deliberately embark in a perfect location in which case, what the hell do you want from me?

Well it doesn't require that much perfection, a water source other than an aboveground river would go a long way toward it.

Any invader worth it's salt would immediately deny you the use of any open farming areas. Walls aren't going to stop them forever and a generous application of fire would render the spot barren of useful vegetation for a long time. If you're there to repel them, well, you're fighting and having fun aren't you?

True, if they have the ability to break through walls, in addition to requiring surface areas that would help out.  If they can't dig though, you could still currently make a wall out of obsidian.

Caravans aren't critical but they shouldn't be. You're gonna miss out on a lot if you just sit inside which is the point. You can just jerk off in the dark, isolated from the world but how many players would tolerate it for extended periods if they had a choice?

Not that much, you can make practically anything if you have an anvil, the rest would just be bringing metals and supplies that aren't available in your area, or that are easier to trade for then they are to make yourself.

Disabling and jamming traps would handle that. Additionally, sieges might opt to loot and ship out everything you leave lying around undefended, including jammed axe blades and their own armor. Anything useless would be burned just to flip you off and any captured immigrants and merchants would be tortured outside your gates

Well that certanly would help with a corridor of readymade traps, but it isn't just them, there's drowning or lava or such.  But in general, I'm talking about the idea that a fortress only needs defense at a single location, or a single corridor, and the rest can simply be blocked off without worrying about it at all.

It's certainly realistic. Due to the very nature of the game, unless you start teleporting tunneling troops around to remove the fortress from the equation entirely, which results in the fort building, the entire point of the game, becoming completely pointless, you're not going to win.

Well it's not pointless at all, it just becomes more difficult, because instead of being able to wall off an area in 2 dimensions, to be more protected, you'd have to wall off in 3 dimensions.  Like have an open space all around your fortress underground, and then have an inner layer of walls with fortifications for archers to fire out of, and then have your civilians and everything else within the core.  Although that would reduce everything to essentially building a tower underground in a constructed cavern.  For less developed fortresses, there's always the city guard, to patrol the corridors, and be ready for attacks from unknown directions.  An aboveground tower would be naturally defended like this, tunneling enemies could only come up from the bottom layer, so you'd have your guards and defenses on the bottom few floors, unless there are flying wall destroyers.  But you could still have the outer layer be space for archers to fire through fortifications.

It's the nature of the game, if the player chooses the perfect spot and plays his strengths, he wins.

Well, right now, if you choose a horrible spot, and play to building a perfect defense in a single tile, you win (or at least, don't lose).

Really, can you honestly try to claim you could devise a way with 1400 century tech to get past an underground drowning chamber? Fucking Indiana Jones would die there, plot armor or not. Now try goblins clad in full plate without Hollywood nerves

Sure you can, by not going into it.   If the drowning chamber is really the weakest point in your defenses, then you may have something there.  If however the goblins know about it, and could instead smash down a tile of wall, or dig down through a tile of soil or rock and get directly into an undefended area, then that's definitely the smarter move.

Conquering other civs would pose a challenge, especially if you switch to goblins and try to capture the overengineered forts other people made. Would of course need guard posts and functioning meeting zones and whatnot or all the NPCs will just mull about outside

That might be a challenge, right now it would be an impossibility unless you could dig or deconstruct walls, and well as possibly building pumps and such.  And if you could do that in the main game, that would leave a reason to break a siege to leave your own fortress, but without more it would still mean none of your fortresses would ever fall.

A well designed drowning chamber would not rely on doors not being breached. Besides, can trolls even swim? Should they? It's one thing to bust the door when the water is just rushing in but by exploiting pressure, it'll flush in so fast no mortal being would be able to retain composure and reach the door

Even if they can't swim, drowning isn't instant, and if they're dense enough, they may simply be able to walk along the bottom until they reached a door or such.  And of course, there could always be those that can, frogmen, or bronze colossuses that shouldn't be effected by the water.  But the latter is rare, and the former can't break down doors, and doesn't siege at all, it's always just goblins.

[tsen]

I have nothing against fortresses being impregnable, but there should be associated costs for each defensive measure. One (relatively) easy (if cheesy) method would be to let them dam your water supply off-map. So any flowing water that goes in gets cut off until the siege is lifted. I suppose the biggest thing DF ignores so far is ventilation, which would certainly be a major weakness in defenses. You can cut down the odd raiding party that tries to sneak down your ventilation shafts, but since you'd need the system to be throughout your fortress... If there was a sustained attack you would eventually not be able to kill them all with just traps. Adding the option for reinforcements and larger numbers of attackers would go a long way to helping that.

I've always seen traps as a way of shaping the battlefield to be more advantageous to an active military and not a way of stopping an invasion cold.

[Jasper]

And if they dam your river or worse, poison it without you noticing?

If they can dam the river in a way that's effective, I will be very impressed with the AI   But that's only 1 out of 5 possible renewable sources of water that I can think of (river/brook/stream, cave river, aquifer, muddy pool, ocean/lake).  I suppose that's not 5 depending on how you split them.  Underground pools are there, but not renewable.  Ice is technically renewable due to buggy behavior (1/7 water->ice->7/7 water) or such.  If they can poison it and you know they can do that, then you would have to seal off your intake and run off of reserves.  Which could be very effective in a siege, but requires changes be made so that water is actually required for something, as it is currently, it's not needed for much.  Assuming of course that they have unlimited poison, and can poison it as long as they're there.  And that they can get to the water to poison it, which isn't very easy for all the other sources of water (poison an ocean? an aquifer?  They might not be able to reach the other ones unless they can break through walls.

I think this is the direction we should be heading. Make it so that farming requires water even when farming on soil. 
Goblins should poisin aquafiers and try to dam above ground rivers. This way the fortress actualy has to worry about  supplies getting low. (something that would cause bad thoughts. Perhaps the game , as it already reconizes when the fortress is under siege, could change the regular "Mc Ulrist is worried about the low supplies" to the more siege related "Mc Ulrist is worried about the terrible effect the siege has on our supplies" kind of thoughts.

Ofcourse, with the new underground improvements the player had acces to masive underground lakes, but those lakes are protected by the never ending attacks of underground critters. Killing / wounding your dwarves, causing bad thoughts all over the place, and at that moment the dwarfs realize that there isnt enough water to treat the wounded / irrigate the farms.

This would make sieges more difficult and cause siege related bad thougts without resorting to the, in my opinion, 'gamey' sollutions like arbitrary mood penalty's






Also: Iam sorry for raping the english language.

[Quift]

I really feel that the solution to this is in more detail to real world physics.

1, agriculture should be much more important too the fortress wellbeing, and productivity should be really nerfed. 5 planters supporting a fortress of 200 on a patch the size of a living room? minimum 25 planters tending to a plot about 30x30, needing constant watering, tending to by hand, etc. and this is aboveground. Underground you would have twice that area needing tending to, and fertilization being a requirement due to the lack of sunshine. So there would be a heavy price to have all your agruculture underground.

Also, critters such as cows, donkeys or camels should have to be outside, watered and fed.

2, ventilation would be an awesome requirement. It doesn't have to be overly complicated but would put some restraints on fortress design aswell as force som openings to the outside world.

3, water should be needed in huge quantities to make booze

4, No intelligent creature should be stopped by doors, locked or not.

5, walls should break under constant fire from catapults etc. siege weapons are after all intended to to be used by siegers, and not against troops.

6, goblins should be able to build ladders or stairs to climb walls.

7, the player should not see the goblins unless they are visible by the dwarves themselves. omniscience makes defence a tad to easy.

So the resulting fortress would either have a huge walled enclosure for agriculture aswell as either pastures (large swathes of land), or even more agriculture to grain feed you cattle. This huge wall could then be either climped or opened up with some catapults. Since you would have to have a larger part of your workforce in the peasantry instead of in the proffesional army it wold be difficult to man the large ramparts with sufficiently trained marksdwarves. instead it would more probably be a peasant militia which does not have the same devastating rate of fire. So storming this would be possible for the goblins. This might not lead them into the fortress itself but would cut off most fortresses from their foodsource. This can be countered by having larger underground agriculture which would be a huge investment in terms of initial investment as well as uppkeep. if you wish you could also stable your cattle and feed them underground crops but then we start to see some serious agriculturial business. maybe above 100 dwarves working around the clock to create a surplus big enough to support another 100 dwarves (still not realistic, realistic would be around 90%).

2, outside watersource should be either cut off or poisened. One could argue that the goblins would rather try to cut it off than poisen it since one cuold supose that they themselves drink the water. This would cause a problem to a fortress when the booze runs out. Could be counteered by having a large underground reservoir, large winecellar, or underground access to water. so easily countered.

3, in case of a huge underground fortress with underground water, underground agriculture, or even just a very fortified entrypoint the ventilationshafts would be tried unbeknowest to the player. They would be climbed up and down, realising goblins in the very heart of the fortress. countered by putting in bars, watchdogs, traps, etc. still not hard to defeat but the day the goblins start to drop rotten corpes, feces, fireboms etc it becomes interesting.

Imagine your fortress being bombed by fire, miasma, desease and a few catapults banging away at your front doors. According to your calculations you have about 6 months left in the food supply, not the mention that the growth time of new crops would be another 3 months, giving an effective waiting time til starvation of 3 months. in effect this would force you to go out and fight the goblins in the field. Hopefully they will be strong enough to actually be able to win at that point instead of being all killed by a single dwarf. This would pose a real threat to your fortress.

now, we all know that goblins will come from the real world, meaning that under the current siege system we will depopulate the world of goblins in a few years. now imagine that instead of the yearly easily killed and mauled raid you have something like the situation above to counter. once every ten years start to sound a lot more plausible then, doesn't it? A real threat and challenge every ten years, which might actually really kill yur dwarves. specially if they plan to stay for about 1 year, and are cautious enough not to all jump into the meat grinder.

[ChairmanPoo]

Underground you would have twice that area needing tending to, and fertilization being a requirement due to the lack of sunshine

THIS.


if fertilization is not anymore an unneeded bonus, but a MUST, then a standing siege is a serious thing, because for fertilization you need wood to burn into ash, and make into potash. And wood can only be either traded, or logged.

True, a fortress with an underground river might still be able to harvest tower cap logs, but nonetheless it MAKES SENSE that a fortress with such resources would be harder to kill by siege. (Consider how hard it is to take by siege a fortress with a port. This would be something on the same lines).

[Slogo]

More variety in the way goblins attack could make for an easy solution to breaking sieges too or possibly other types of sieging races. Essentially out of 3 ways 'into' a base (flying/swimming/walking) only one is used and goblins don't have building destroyer until they have trolls.

So what about this (all the following can substitue goblin for a whole separate race).

1. A new type of goblin with buildingdestroyer:1. Still easy to kill but can open the way for others.
2.* A new type of goblin that can swim very well and has building destroyer. These goblins would be able to avoid drowning chambers to an extent (the chamber would have to fill 100% to work and even then they could break down a door to get out).
3.* A new type of goblin that can fly (use a flying mount). These would be able to penetrate walled off outdoor areas. Again some or all with building destroyer.
4. Goblin ambushers that come with sieges and have TRAPAVOID + can't be seen until something stands next to them.

*These hinge on the pathfinding also being updated as I know sometimes flying creatures will still be stopped by a channel


Also...

1. Carved natural fortifications should probably go away. They should just be the constructed variety instead (or at least function like them) so that they can be destroyed. This would also prevent draining off the side of a map as an 'easy' draining mechanism.

2. A new type of Trap 'status' for creatures, especially large ones. Better than TRAPAVOID some large creatures (trolls) should have TRAPDESTROY where they destroy any trap they trample over.

3. Allow underground sieges to come from underground rivers, bottomless pits, magma pipes (from magma creatures of course). So using such features carries a risk with it. Plus how cool would it be if a horde of flying pit horrors comes up to attack your fort.

I'm sure some of this stuff is planned anyways but I think they could be some 'easy' to do ways to help make sieges more interesting rather than going right into complex changes to the game.

Also it allows for escalation. Maybe the first 5 years of sieges you'd only see goblins and some trolls. Then the swimmers start coming, then the fliers.

[Hyndis]

The next release already has persistent attacks from down below, similar to the 2d version.

[Slogo]

I haven't really been following the new version to to much so my mistake but scratch one off the list I guess.

[Pilsu]

Above ground farming shouldn't automatically require watering. That said, too much rain would lower crop yields dramatically so some years famine could be a very real possibility. No chance of that underground as watering is controlled. Little danger of starving even with above ground crops if the fort produces a surplus for export


Harvesting should not grant Grower XP. This makes no sense and discourages letting anyone but the farmers do it. There should be a new labor assignment for it next to the rest of the hauling labors. Allows better control over who does it and stops the nobles from sullying their hands on the fields

What exactly does Grower skill entail anyway? It has a dramatic effect on the crop yields but doesn't seem to be based on reality in any way. Personally, I'd remove Grower skill entirely. Bear with me here, this would effectively

• Reduce crop yields
• Require more farming space
• Cater to realism
• Give a livelihood to Peasants

As you said, most of the population at the time consisted of farmers. Only a minority of the population specialized in a given trade which is currently not reflected in the game. Not to mention founders, local artisans and armies will eventually be picked from the population pool, having all purpose fodder for customization would be useful. I'd extend this to other labors that don't really benefit from extensive experience such as milling, milking and threshing. More controversially, pump operating, wood burning, maybe plant gathering (herbalism would be separate and serve a different purpose), woodcutting (on second thought, foraging and woodcutting speed would certainly go up with experience. Just not so much. Needs diminishing returns) and furnace operating as long as metal quality is homogeneous. Manually assigning the dwarf's color and labor title would handle differentiation between them


Let's not go overboard with farming realism though. Perpetual poverty isn't fun to play

Don't waste your time with musing about swimmer goblins. First of all, holding your breath when a chamber rapidly fills with water won't do you much good. Currents will throw you around and panic and complete disorientation is all but certain. Not to mention bashing down doors underwater is a physical impossibility. Good luck trying to even run, let alone muster the strength to bang through even a wooden door. Haven't you ever been in water? And I might add, wooden doors are more formidable than you think. Only thing you're going to break by kicking it is your foot most of the time. Any weapons with crit bonus would be useless against them