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[Zep]

So I got my first siege in my third winter, and was looking forward to seeing the carnage and how well my defenses held up. The invading goblins managed to kill a lone lumberjack near their insertion point, which was bearable. I set every single order I could to 'stay they hell inside and don't collect ANYTHING period anywhere'. The only thing I didn't do was go to each dwarf individually and turn off their collection labor order.

So as my soldiers get into position and prepare for war, most of my dwarf population decides... Hey! Lets go outside and get some item from that lumberjack!

They pour out of my fort, each time one cancels due to goblins, another inside triggers the suicide rush outside to pick up some unnamed object. I lost over fourty dwarves to goblin archers because of this and just shut off the game... its impossible to play like this. They totally ignore all the stay inside orders and happily march over their dead friends into the waiting goblins. (Version df_22_110_23b)

Awesome game, but whatever triggers this behavior makes playing absolutely pointless. I could of gone and turn off collection labor menus, but I'm not going through 150 menus to do this. Is there anything I could of done to save that fort?

[randomjgj]

quote:Originally posted by Zep:
<STRONG>Is there anything I could of done to save that fort?</STRONG>

Yeah, I feel your pain:
http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=7&t=000414

The only thing I came up with was to lock the doors...  It didn't make them any less eager to go outside though and that was just a small raiding party, not a siege.

[Pacho]

There are two ways:  Lock them in, or draft them all and command them to go inside.  They'll still go to wherever they were going when you drafted them (I think), but at least the casualties will be much less.  Siege operators should have no hauling on whenever a siege comes.

[Rollory]

Yeah, I found this particular aspect of the game annoying enough that I've stopped playing until something is done about it.

[Angela Christine]

In the center of my fortress I've got a complex with farms, food processing and storage, a dining room, and a small barracks, and a well all connected by internal doors (once inside a dwarf can reach any part without needing to go out to the hallway.  When a siege comes I recruit all the non-combatants into a squad, and station the squad inside the complex.  Once most of the dwarfs are inside (it seems to be impossible to get them all to go anywhere) I lock the doors to the hallway, and then ignore them.  They have enough food in there to last far longer than any siege.  If it looks like it might run low I can release the farmers from the squad, turn off all of their hauling jobs, and hope they do some farming.  There aren't enough beds in the barracks for everyone, but it doesn't really matter if a few dwarfs have to sleep on the floor.  It is by no means perfect, but it works fairly well.

I've also tried keeping a lockable "front door" and simply locking the dwarfs in during sieges, but this doesn't work very well.  It keeps them in, but generates many job cancellation notices as the dwarfs keep trying to go out and get the gear, but then can't find a path.  I think all the path finding errors even slow down the game, making the darn siege seem to last longer.  

Drafting them into the military automatically turns off all hauling jobs, so there are less pathfinding errors.  There are still some, because they want to go take a break in the statue garden, or look in their chest, or go visit a different well to get a drink, etc.   :roll: It's better than having them all try to run out to get the dead guy's bloody shirt though.

[Frugal]

I tried drafting all my non-combatants... but they all wanted to go pick up equipment from outside.  Odd thing is I can't figure out what they wanted to grab.

After losing a few I just sent out my elite military and they did surprisingly well.  Lost about 10 dwarves total from that siege.

[Darkfall]

Yeah, this is still a major problem.  It doesn't even have to be a siege; I had a couple dwarves get killed by elephants and then the entire population of my fortress kept charging into the elephant massacre to try and recover the dead dwarves' gear, causing even more dwarves to go running down there since there were more corpses and gear, and it just turns into an endless slaughter.  Ordering dwarves to stay inside doesn't work, and in some cases, even turning off hauling jobs doesn't work since the dwarves are trying to get that gear for themselves.  The only way to stop the lemming charge is either to kill the enemy or completely close up your fortress.  And closing up the fortress results in a lot of error message spam and also prevents you from trading, etc.

There really needs to be something like a designation for "don't try to get anything from this area" so that you can define a warzone as someplace that dwarves shouldn't try to go get crap from until the situation ends.