Print

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

[Sir Finkus]

It wasn't part of the original discussion, but I'll go on record as saying I think dwarves dig way way too fast (I think they do everything except walk way too fast, but digging is especially bad)

Living in Moria that took 100 years to dig is much more impressive than Moria we knocked out in an afternoon (or two years).

I know I'm in the minority though

Moria was a lot bigger than any dwarf fortress I've seen.

[Atarlost]

Timescale's a problem for that.  If you can run a fortress for a hundred years the timescale would have to be so fast everything but digging would be insanely slow. 

[Vester]

It wasn't part of the original discussion, but I'll go on record as saying I think dwarves dig way way too fast (I think they do everything except walk way too fast, but digging is especially bad)

Living in Moria that took 100 years to dig is much more impressive than Moria we knocked out in an afternoon (or two years).

I know I'm in the minority though

Moria was a lot bigger than any dwarf fortress I've seen.

Also, they dug too deep.

[Granite26]

Moria was a lot bigger than any dwarf fortress I've seen.

I dunno... put the grand hall in bottom right side of a 5x5 map as a whole square, it could easily take your dwarves a month to get from the top left secret entrance to the bottom right, especially if it was narrow winding paths rather than a straight shot.

How long would it take to dig out that grand hall?  a month, maybe?

[Sunken]

Precisely. As long as digging is made inconvenient slow enough, the player will always be able to prevent damage to his precious fort by being proactive against the besieging force.

Fix'd???

Well, no, I meant inconvenient - or more properly, costly. In other words, if digging is always going to be the very last thing besiegers try, then that gives the player ample time to forestall the attempt - no matter whether digging itself is fast or not.

As for Aquillon's remark that players should not be required to have a standing army in order to deal with invaders as a result of this - that's not really at issue here. An army sally is only one way you could deal with the problem of forestalling an undermining attempt. We should be engaged in thinking up more of them. This is suggestions, after all - when one suggestion seems to lead to detracting from player enjoyment, the proper response is to amend and supplement it, not to retract it - right?
Possibilities other than a standing army have already been mentioned: tricking the invaders to walk into a trap, diverting water into their holes, surrounding your fort with magma, allowing the construction of extra-hard walls.

There was also the objection that they could come at you from anywhere, but one could come up with remedies for this too without having to station guards everywhere. Make digging sounds evident and possible to pinpoint, for example (dwarfs maybe have extra acute hearing for this kind of thing). Also, it may be easier to just find the starting point of their tunnel and root them out that way. Medieval armies, I hear, used to dig parallel tunnels to the enemies' undermining tunnels and then break through and kill them.
The above will all be more practicable when/if the game requires tunnelers to dispose of the dirt and rock, as that makes the attempt even harder to conceal and the point of attack more easily guessed (since the labor increases with the square of the tunnel length, then).

The above details aside, basically I believe that tunneling enemies could be done right, but they would require some extra functionality in order to not be just intolerable (kind of like traps work now, but the other way around...). Especially being able to hear where there's tunneling going on.

[Candlejack]

Or, just dig out the area around your fortress, suspending it in the air.

[Sir Finkus]

Or, just dig out the area around your fortress, suspending it in the air.

Air isn't nearly as fun as magma.

[Quatch]

About vanilla not necessitating an army, it would seem that Toady wants you to have something of a standing army via the fortress/royal guard.

The core sampling mechanic is a neat one, I'd think that the perfectionists would want this in their forts anyhow. Better than using Reveal. Also, breaching monster pockets while coring sounds really neat, a way to have underground ambushes.