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[fanatic]

Elven Liason: "If you end this horrific extortion with no loss of elven life, we promise to never again try to trick you into cleaning our dirty laundry by pulling our loinclothes apart into "cloth" in bins, and instead bring savage beasts to trade."
Dwarf Leader: "Dirty laun--?  I KNEW IT! URIST!!! Pull that  Lever!!!"

Nah this aint gonna work... =D

[SquidDNA]

You could workaround this by leaving holes in your defenses which patrols periodically pass.

[Conflict]

-Destroying natural resources(Overfishing during sieges, deforestation during sieges, setting the forest ablaze as they leave, etc.)

Out of your suggestions (all in which are good), I liked the last most. Longer a siege lasts, the more resources that'll be drained away from your fortress. So even if you manage to at long last kill the invaders, you'll find your land temporarily stripped of life.

[Hyndis]

I just leave the main gate open 24/7. It is only very rarely that the main gate is closed.

Also the gatehouse, just inside the main gate, is also guarded 24/7 by 1 squad of dwarves, with 3-4 additional squads on defend burrow on the surface. Anyone who tries to sneak by the main gate is spotted by the guards, and then the other 3-4 squads come running to kill things. Its a very effective and mobile defense, and it also means that at all times there is a path into the fortress.

[Doodle]

Large armies should definitely have more than enough capability to decimate an unprepared fortress without needing to barge their way in. Poisoned water supplies really come to mind, and if invaders come in through the underground, then they'd have a good chance of getting to your water supply whether you pull it from the underground or from a nearby river. If/when waste makes it's way in, they might even do this unintentionally by using the river as a latrine.
But killing off the local wildlife, eating the fish, soiling or drinking up all the water, hacking down trees, and trampling the plant life to smithereens while also stamping the ground until it's harder to farm all sound like reasons to shove an army off even if they didn't have a chance to make it into your fort.

On top of that, the newer updates do hint that in adventure mode at least, your average town will usually be a bit more regulated as far as people coming and going in order to keep tabs on potential thieves or monstrosities trying to pose as travelers to sneak in inconspicuously.
While goblins undoubtedly have plenty of ways to pose as a caravan to ambush you or start the invasion from your depot trojan-horse style, if the player could inspect the contents using the town watch at some kind of checkpoint before they're let into your fort, it would still let us keep the element of surprise without forcing most players to just opt straight to magma as their primary means of diplomacy.

[NW_Kohaku]

Large armies should definitely have more than enough capability to decimate an unprepared fortress without needing to barge their way in. Poisoned water supplies really come to mind, and if invaders come in through the underground, then they'd have a good chance of getting to your water supply whether you pull it from the underground or from a nearby river. If/when waste makes it's way in, they might even do this unintentionally by using the river as a latrine.
But killing off the local wildlife, eating the fish, soiling or drinking up all the water, hacking down trees, and trampling the plant life to smithereens while also stamping the ground until it's harder to farm all sound like reasons to shove an army off even if they didn't have a chance to make it into your fort.

The problem with that is that, generally speaking, dwarves CAN completely hermetically seal themselves off from the rest of the world.  If dwarves already have their farms built and completely within their walls, then trampling the soil means nothing.  If they kill the fish or wildlife, no matter, livestock and farms take care of that.  Even if you could burn down the trees (they are actually fire-proof currently, and actually make nice fire-breaks), you can generally set up tree farms inside your fortress's confines.  The only thing that might possibly need replinishing is water, and you can store enough water to last you decades or even centuries if you build big enough cisterns, thanks to the generally low amount of water a fortress can survive on.  (Even that doesn't work if you specifically embark on a brook's source, and wall the water generating tiles in with the rest of your fort.)

[Hyndis]

A better approach would probably just be that a siege generates unhappy thoughts. The longer the siege goes on the more those unhappy thoughts accumulate, such that if you never deal with the siege you're at risk of tantrum spirals.

No digging required. The goblins just camp outside your fortress, blockading it, and presumably also taunting your dwarves by yelling beardless insults at them. Anger and resentment rises within your fortress until eventually the problem must be dealt with due to so many unhappy dwarves at being locked inside a fortress for seemingly forever.

This gives a strong incentive to not allowing goblins to set up camp outside indefinitely, while at the same time allows the player to ignore goblins if he/she prefers, though you will probably have to have a very legendary dining room and maybe a mist generator to keep everyone happy through the siege.

[TaintedMustard]

A better approach would probably just be that a siege generates unhappy thoughts. The longer the siege goes on the more those unhappy thoughts accumulate, such that if you never deal with the siege you're at risk of tantrum spirals.

No digging required. The goblins just camp outside your fortress, blockading it, and presumably also taunting your dwarves by yelling beardless insults at them. Anger and resentment rises within your fortress until eventually the problem must be dealt with due to so many unhappy dwarves at being locked inside a fortress for seemingly forever.

This gives a strong incentive to not allowing goblins to set up camp outside indefinitely, while at the same time allows the player to ignore goblins if he/she prefers, though you will probably have to have a very legendary dining room and maybe a mist generator to keep everyone happy through the siege.

That should probably depend on the individual dwarves' personalities and/or position in dwarven society. Nobles should be particularly incensed if goblins have established a significant presence on "their" land, possibly generating a mandate to end the siege, with legal consequences for high-ranking military dwarves if the mandate goes unfulfilled. Of course, dwarven justice needs to be improved for that to matter.

Dwarves who have spent a significant amount of time in the military should also be angered, perhaps taking it out on innocent dwarves or even the nobles themselves in a kind of coup d'etat. Ordinary working dwarves with no strong desire to see the 'honor' of the dwarven race preserved by ensuring their lands are free of goblin infestation should not be especially bothered as long as their needs are being met and no one is being killed. More patriotic dwarves should act in much the same way as warrior dwarves, possibly leading to physical altercations (i.e., Urist McJingoson the weaponsmith and Sakzul McHippiedwarf the clothier are discussing politics at the dinner table, when Urist punches Sakzul and knocks some of his teeth out, leading to his imprisonment, which angers both his family and other patriotic dwarves, who feel that the goblins are more important than locking up brawlers).

That's more long-term stuff, though, and by that time, goblins will likely have added sappers to their ranks, making 'turtling' less effective anyway.

[Pilsu]

There's any number of ways to get around this. Animals requiring food, making pastures important. Making dwarves dependent on meat lest their morale and work efficiency plummet. Making medicine an aboveground crop or only available from caravans. Making the stockpiles spoil. Requiring ventilation. Increasing water consumption. You can't really poison the entire underground water supply but it could be low quality water in general and have a tendency to cause disease.


In the end, sieges weren't beaten by a bunch of morons charging out of the castle. Saying that turtling shouldn't be the strategy of choice kind of misses the entire point of sieges. Making the enemies ignore your fort by casting teleport with a pickaxe wand wouldn't really contribute anything but turn the entire game into the arena mode. But whatever, we should just start deleting threads that mull the same things over and over. Nothing you do can make the game challenging, especially now that we have infinite magma.

[Starver]

Nothing you do can make the game challenging, especially now that we have infinite magma.

Exept trying to drain the infinite magma away.

[Muz]

Oh, I know! The goblins would dress up like elves and then pop out of their elf skin when the humans let them in!

[billw]

I reckon the challenge should be derived from the fact that, although there is a way to avoid any single problem, there are so many contingencies that need to be planned for that you inevitably neglect one. Obviously, tunnelling siegers entirely de-voids a large selection of defensive constructions that people have fun making. The siegers making assault tools (ladders, grappling hooks, rolling towers, etc. Think assault on Helms Deep) makes much more sense, and gives the player a proper route of defence. It makes fortification layout much more important, your marks-dwarves need to be positioned to have overlapping fields of fire at the potential assault locations etc.

The Trojan caravans sounds great, but only if there is a counter-measure. I reckon the player should be able to set up a guard house with an 'airlock' between two gates, station a squad there and have them inspect caravans. If a caravan is caught with invaders in it, they will pop out and you have to fight them. I'm sure you can think of plenty of ways that could go down. From an game play view: the player creates a burrow that is enclosed with two entrances, and a few mil dwarves assigned to defend it. A caravan enters it at one end, the mil dwarves automatically start a "inspect caravan" task. This either passes without incident, or unleashes all the gobbos or pissed off elves or whatever.

[Pilsu]

Guard personalities should affect their effectiveness at finding enemies. Lazy, sloppy guards would be easily distracted and would let some invaders through. I could see the traders offering soldiers stationed nearby gifts and drink, just laced with poison if they're hostile. The player could set laws that guards are prohibited from accepting such gifts but that'd make some of them angry and, being people, they would occasionally disobey orders. Also gives the justice system more to do, should you survive.

I could also see the goblins doing legitimate trading for a while to establish trust. Guards that are familiar with the particular traders or even friends with them would be much more likely to just let them through. Should the player order strict searches and his men obey due to dutifulness, it'd irritate legitimate traders over time.

[NW_Kohaku]

Guard personalities should affect their effectiveness at finding enemies. Lazy, sloppy guards would be easily distracted and would let some invaders through. I could see the traders offering soldiers stationed nearby gifts and drink, just laced with poison if they're hostile. The player could set laws that guards are prohibited from accepting such gifts but that'd make some of them angry and, being people, they would occasionally disobey orders. Also gives the justice system more to do, should you survive.

The more that we make personalities important, though, the more that this game really does need some sort of Dwarf Therapist-style ability to sort dwarves according to what sort of personality traits that they have. 

After all, if we essentially punish players for picking dwarves with lazy attitudes for certain jobs (and if there is no counterbalancing benefit for lazy dwarves, or at least no trade-off for having dilligent dwarves), then this becomes a matter of punishing players for not always picking the most dilligent dwarves as their guards.

Even something as simple as a search that would cull the units list of any dwarves that do not have certain traits, like how the trade screen or legends modes can cull the list through using matching of names, we would be much better off finding dwarves with desirable personality traits.

[Solace]

Mmm, you could also have it so that the siegers wouldn't just get bored and leave straight off either, instead they could start building some basic infrastructure... then less basic infrastructure... and before long you have a goblin tower sitting on top of your fortress. Even if you could leave it alone, that'd be a pretty big insult/temptation...