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[Sunken]

I think one way to work this out is to make digging for everyone, player and non player civs, much more time consuming and difficult, so much so that it wouldn't be considered by the siege troops unless the player is turtling for a lengthy amount of time--where then the siege troops would have to actually set up a sort of camp or little cave and work to sustain themselves (I would also like to see siege camps in general).  So that, if you get tunneled, it's only because you were too cowardly or not a good enough scout or something.

or for less organized molemen, who would be more of a nuisance.

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

[Granite26]

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???

[Atarlost]

Making digging slower for the player would adversely effect gameplay.  They need to be able to dig rapidly for early defense on less safe maps. 

[Sir Finkus]

Making digging slower for the player would adversely effect gameplay.  They need to be able to dig rapidly for early defense on less safe maps. 

Well dwarves are great miners.  Goblins probably aren't.

[G-Flex]

Defense is about more than mining anyway. There's also building walls, and choosing a good location. And there are still soil layers to dig through at first, which is good for at least temporary quarters before mining through the rock, which should certainly take much longer.

Of course, in realistic terms, you should maybe be able to get a little help from your civ itself in some cases. After all, if you're the king, and a bunch of your men are trekking out to found a trade outpost for your civilization, but it needs to be in a dangerous or war-torn area, you'd probably send them with some escorts or guards or something at first. Point is, the civilization (and local group) would plan it a bit better than the Oregon Trail seven-unescorted-guys-on-a-mission thing we've got now.

[Granite26]

Making digging slower for the player would adversely effect gameplay.  They need to be able to dig rapidly for early defense on less safe maps. 

I dunno... shouldn't less safe be.... Less safe?

Do you think being able to plant your wagon where you want it would be a good fix?

Maybe some form of sending out a military force (in adventure mode) to clear out a spot first?

[Chthonic]

Maybe the fortress-founding expedition could spend a few points at embark to hire some mercenaries if the player is concerned about the safety of the map at startup.  When year's end rolls around, the mercenaries depart with the trade caravan.

[Granite26]

Maybe the fortress-founding expedition could spend a few points at embark to hire some mercenaries if the player is concerned about the safety of the map at startup.  When year's end rolls around, the mercenaries depart with the trade caravan.

I like that...

Or just fake it with a 100pt 'raid' that starts the map without any creatures non-civ, non-semimegas on it (they're pushed to adjacent squares and migrate back in normally)

[RandomNumberGenerator]

There is another option here that has not yet been considered. Know how when you build roads, you can make a 10x3 road for only 13 blocks, instead of 30? What if the same thing could be done to plate walls? Say, use a steel bar to reinforce 10 walls in the fort. Reinforced walls would take much longer to dig out, so the player could react.

[Atarlost]

Defense is about more than mining anyway. There's also building walls, and choosing a good location. And there are still soil layers to dig through at first, which is good for at least temporary quarters before mining through the rock, which should certainly take much longer.

Walls are useless if the enemy can dig under them, and that digging is through dirt, not rock.  In flat maps there may be no rock reaching the surface, which means your upper levels have to be in dirt. 

[Aquillion]

Making digging slower for the player would adversely effect gameplay.  They need to be able to dig rapidly for early defense on less safe maps. 

Nevermind that.  Making digging slower and more difficult for the player would simply be annoying from a management standpoint, since it would become much more frustrating to order something dug out and to then assign what you want built in there -- you would either have to watch the slow, irritating digging process, or go do something else and hope you remember to come back in time to continue without wasting too much time.

It's just bad gameplay.

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

I disagree with this line of reasoning.  The vanilla game shouldn't force players to maintain a standing military in order for their fortress to be survivable; players should have a range of options available for how they design and run their fortress, without every fort requiring a massive military to patrol every hallway.

I think it's fair to expect that relying on a clever, well-designed fortress with no military should always remain a viable option, at least in the right locations, without players having to modify the game to make it possible.  It might be harder, but it shouldn't be impossible.

[neek]

1). It would be stupid to make sappers and diggers siege showstoppers. The point is to add them as a challenge for the so-called impenetrable fortresses, and to provide Fun, but not to let Fun happen all the time.

2). If they're digging through soil, then the point of "building walls" is also to build underground walls where they'll be stopped. As long as there's soil, you should be building foundations to your upper-level walls or your existing structures. This seems like a reasonable defense.

3). Moreover, I doubt sappers would invest the energy to dig downwards. I don't think they're going to path for that. The issue that I have with enemy diggers is their pathfinding: How will they determine the most direct way into your fort? Right now, multi-z-level pathing is bad enough as it is when there are multiple ways into the next z-level (with stairs) as opposed to the simple outside terrain with ramps. More than likely, we're looking at simple diggers: They go one z-level down, and then forward, adjusting for rock outcroppiryings (because they have to move fast). I have a feeling they won't path their digging to farther than it has to go.

I'm in the frame of mind that a). This should provide a fun option (thereby, being an option-enemy sappers and diggers should be configurable in the Init file), b). Fortress design should always be a consideration (as Aquillion has stated), and that there should be options for characters to build Forts that rely on cleverness rather than brute force, or whatever alternatives there are to brute force. There hasn't been a game in a long damn time where not killing everything is an option that's as equally viable as wholesale slaughter; it's nice to see a change.

[Edit] As an afterthought, digging shouldn't be slowed down for the player. Yeah, there are ways of handling this: Give dwarves a natural boost to digging (or define natural digging modifiers in the RAWs reflecting racial strengths, which may apply to other skills too); slow down the speed of enemy diggers (because the stress they have to work with and the care they have to make); have the tunnels they dig be special types of constructions that can be filled in (also something you can [d]esignate.); whatever. In the end, however, the player shouldn't suffer, but your enemy shouldn't have legions of Legendary miners either to spare on sieges.

[Granite26]

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

[Vester]

It takes them a full day to fire eight crossbow bolts. That's not too fast at all.

[Granite26]

It takes them a full day to fire eight crossbow bolts. That's not too fast at all.

If you're at all interested in the time stuff, I thought THIS was a good discussion about it.  There's a little bit of bickering in the middle, but in all it's a good statement of a bunch of different people's attitudes on the different cycles and timescales (year vs season vs day).