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[PecosBill]

I know, I know.  It's already something that's planned some day.  I just have to type this message so that I don't explode.  You don't really have to read it if you don't want to.


I love this style of game.  Dwarf Fortress.  Evil Genius.  Dungeon Keeper.  Tropico and Sim City are at least in the same neighborhood -- basically any game that involves building and fending off....something.  In Evil Genius it's attacking government forces and in Sim City it's....er... economic doom, I guess, but the point is that the biggest fun of building stuff is having something in the game try to destroy it.


I just wish they would be a bit more competent in their attempts.


This is one element that Dwarf Fortress tends to be fairly lacking at as well.  I find myself intentionally under-securing my forts simply to give the incredibly incompetent sieges some chance at causing death fun.

It all feels a bit silly when I can raise one drawbridge and secure my fort for the rest of eternity.  I feel a bit deprived.  Like, what?  My legendary adamantine statue artifact isn't good enough?  These goblins can't be bothered to bring a siege engine, or to tunnel their way in or something?  Just, "Oh, a drawbridge, well, we give up then.  We didn't really want your enormous piles of bone decorated rock crafts anyway, and we had plenty of solid gold chairs back at home.  We'll just sit here for a bit and then leave."

It hurts my feelings when nobody tries very hard to destroy me, after all that effort I put into repelling them.  They never even saw the bit where I could seal them into a room and then flood it with lava, or the long hallway of spikes, or, frankly, my crack team of speardwarves who had been training for literally years just to repel an attack.  One little drawbridge and it's like they just don't care anymore.


Things I would like to see:
* Ideally, the game understands the entrances to your fort, even if you have done something to temporarily change them, like raising a drawbridge.
* Attacking forces will seek to enter through this path, and have various methods of countering whatever is in their way.  This could include rams for walls and gates and the ability to bridge moats and pits.
* Attacking forces may alternatively decide to dig their own entrance.  This should be a slow activity, since they aren't dwarves, and I realize it may be upsetting to see someone digging holes in your nice perfected landscape but I think it should be an option.  If you don't like it, then hopefully you've trained a nice military to sally forth and kill them with.
* Attacking forces have some ability to detect and disarm traps.  Not guaranteed or anything, just that an endless hallway of traps may not be a great barrier to an attacking army that brings a lot of engineers (or thieves or whatever).


Basically, the main thing standing between me and complete fulfillment with this game is the fact that while I can build so many awesome constructs, there isn't really anything that shows up to try and kill me in any particularly competent manner.  It only REALLY gets ugly when I intentionally leave holes in my defenses, which always feels....cheap (or perhaps traitorous).

[Soralin]

I agree completely, as it is, sieges can be completely stopped by just a wall or a channel, or a drawbridge, or heck, even a door in many cases.  In fact, I made a list in an earlier thread of quite a few ways that a siege could be stopped completely by: Penetrating the Impenetrable Fortress

Basically, a siege should have some means of getting through practically any static defenses, given enough time.  Breaking down or tunneling through walls, floors, bridging moats, using ladders to scale walls, etc. etc.

Although once you've done that, and fixed all of those things that can just stop a siege without them being able to do anything about it, you can take it a step further.  Say for example where you say they can recognize the entrance to your fort.  You could take that further, have them try to pathfind into somewhere inside your fortress, but give each action some movement cost based on how much time it takes or such.  So, instead of just looking for an open path, there might be a certain cost for breaking down a tile of wall, or bridging a tile of moat, or tunneling through a tile, etc.  So if you have some huge solid steel maze of death out front, but there's a location where they can get into your fortress just by digging through a tile of sand and through a flimsy wooden floor, they could find that, and attack that way instead.

And the great thing about that, is that you could add in costs to the system to make the AI much smarter.  Say for example it adds a pathing cost around where anyone died in any previous sieges.  The AI might not be able to recognize some elaborate trap, but it can keep track of the fact that every single person who has entered a certain corridor in the last couple of sieges has died there.  Which would increase the cost for pathing that way, and so the AI will start taking other paths instead.  So, instead of sieges always marching into your trap of death again and again forever, after a few times, they would start naturally taking other paths, finding ways to get around it, or other ways to get in, probing the weaknesses of your fortress, finding the locations where they can most easily get in, that doesn't end up in death.  Which essentially means that the AI would learn, it would be constantly trying new approaches and clever ways to get into your fortress, from just some simple modified pathfinding.

Edit: Although a lot of this is already covered in stuff to add from the http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html page:

mproved sieges

    * Eliminate remaining edge-of-map exploits
    * More highly trained attacking soldiers when approprate
    * Many trap exploits are handled above by requiring more to produce a trap, things like cage traps should make more sense vs. large creatures etc. (respect strength/ability vs. material, large cages might be separate object)
    * Coming up with a plan to overcome pathing obstacles to reach fortress innards
          o Ability to dig (optionally, default on)
          o Ability to build bridges/ramps
          o Ability to use grappling hooks/ladders/climb
    * Learning from mistakes if first attempted assault plan fails badly
          o For instance, if many siegers are killed, caged, etc. in a given hallway, they shouldn't generally go that way again, even if that means building/climbing/digging
    * Siege engine improvements depend on state of boats, lifts/moving fortress sections, since these should all use the same framework

[Jayce]

Traps like cage traps need to fail now and then based on quality,as for the drawbridge flying units should cross it.

[Mckee]

Not to be a buzz kill, but I've seen all these suggestions before. Sieges need work, we all know that and I'm sure Toady does too. Its part of the development notes as far as I know, so please don't post redudant suggestions. There are plenty of threads that actually deal with the specifics and pros/cons of each of your ideas, if you want to contribute, please do so there, rather than with another pretty pointless post.

[Aramco]

Traps like cage traps need to fail now and then based on quality,as for the drawbridge flying units should cross it.

Yes, glass cages should not hold dragons in.

[PecosBill]

Regarding Soralin's suggestion about adding costs based on where previous siege members have died, that's definitely the way to go.

Basically I think there needs to be a "siege path cost" layer to the map, invisible to the player.

On a fresh map, every square has a siege path cost of, say, 500.  That is, for purposes of pathfinding, it sees every square as costing 500 to move through.

Every time a dwarf steps on a square, the cost of that path (from the perspective of siegers) goes down by 1.  This is how the "true path" through your fortress would be found.  Even if you raise drawbridges and lower gates or even build walls, the cheap path shows the true way.

Siege pathing, rather than viewing a wall as a barrier, would simply treat it as an expensive movement option.  For example:

* Gate = +100 cost
* Wall = +200 cost
* Pit = +50 cost per tile
(etc)

And, as Soralin mentioned, whenever a siege member dies, it raises the cost of that tile (it may be best if this is a permanent increase to the minimum in addition to raising the current cost).

For example:
This tile has a siege movement cost of 1 because it's a heavy traffic area and lots of dwarves have walked through there.
A sieging goblin dies there.  50 points are added to the pathing cost of that square and 15 points are added to the adjacent squares.  Additionally, these points are added to the minimum value of those squares.  No matter how many dwarves tramp through in the future, the minimum siege pathfinding cost will be 50 for the spot where the goblin died.

This minimum value may deteriorate over time, though.  Perhaps every season lowers the minimum costs by 3 points as the details of the last raid are "forgotten".



Raw (unsmoothed) rock and dirt I think I would treat as the following:

Dirt bordering an open tile = 600 movement cost
Dirt with no open tiles bordering = 1200 movement cost

It may not take that long to actually dig through, but we are trying to simulate the fact that siegers don't necessarily know how far they need to dig through raw dirt in order to reach your dungeon, and thus they would prefer to not try.  We don't want the pathfinder to realize that it could breach your dungeon by digging through 3 tiles of raw mountain to reach your kitchen.  So digging around a deathtrap will be seen as an option, as will digging through a thin exterior wall, but the high pathfinding cost will mean that given your steel maze of death or 4 tiles of raw dirt, they will probably try your steel maze of death first, until deaths add up enough that they feel inclined to try digging, or some other entrance.

[3]

Regarding Soralin's suggestion about adding costs based on where previous siege members have died, that's definitely the way to go.

This is pretty much precisely what is already on the books, albeit in a simplistic manner. Note the very bottom of the upcoming features list.

Edit: Wait, ignore this, didn't see his edit. But my point stands anyway.

Actually, here's another thing: You'll have to remember to make sure to keep things in perspective. An individual siege party, if wiped out, won't be able to report the nature of its failure. Some civs will have an organised battle plan prior to attacking, some will just do whatever comes naturally, some (specifically humans, at least in vanilla) will sit around for ages and watch. Some leaders/generals will learn. Others won't. Will the leaders of the siege itself stick to any plans made in previous attempts? Is this a per-civ thing, or a general ethical thing, or a personal thing?

[Jake]

Another idea occurs to me. Back in the 2D version, any trap that a neighbouring civilisation's diplomats passed when visiting would be ineffective if that civilisation subsequently invaded. I don't know if that's still true, but that behaviour fits thieves, snatchers or even proper spies equally well. In fact, for kobolds or some sort of outlaw caste, it could end up being common knowledge in every civ that some master thief knows a way through the allegedly Impenetrable Wall of Pointy Death that your fortress has built up.