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[Ginseng]

Is it possible at all to wage war with other factions, if so can you invade their strong holds?  

[ussdefiant]

probably possible to piss off goblins and kobolds into attacking, at least. Attacking them comes along after the Toad gets around to programming it.

[Toady One]

Not that you need to piss them off.  The others are piss-offable.  And yeah, you can't take it to the streets on the enemy yet.  You can just defend yourself and dig in, and push them off when they siege.

[Aquillion]

How will attacking the enemy fortress work, though?  Will you just send some dwarves off the edge of the map with some basic strategy choices and get a report saying whether they won or lost a little while later?

Will time stop in your fortress so you can manually oversee the attack?  Or will your fortress continue on autopilot even though you're not there?

Or will it pop up some insane split-screen thing so you can watch the fight without leaving your fortress?

Hrm...  a more reasonable version of the above might be to leave the player in the fortress, but give them constant updates on the battle's progress via whichever noble handles military strikes.  ("Our attackers have reached the inner citidel!"  "Dwarfy McDwarfson has been killed in combat by so-and-so!")

The player could then issue general orders (retreat, accept enemy surrender, take no prisoners, etc) based on those reports.

Of course, you probably already have an idea of how it'll be done...

[JT]

I imagine there would be a "local view" where you could look at your fortress and then a "strategy view" where you look at the world map (just like the travel system in Adventure Mode) and issue movement orders to whole squads.  Squads advance towards the destination, and if they encounter resistance along the way they enter into a battle and a messenger arrives soon after to tell you all about it.

That's how I would do it, anyway.

[Toady One]

Yeah, it's something like that.  I guess the Core/Arc/Req entries don't explain it all, or are hard to locate in any case.

We were thinking that at first, when you are around baron sized, you'd send out small patrols.  With these, you could intercept kobold raiders, search for kobold caves etc., issuing orders from screen somewhat like the adventure travel part.  If they are attacked, you can either zoom to the area or just let it handle itself.  Zooming to the area is complicated, because it's hard to have several games running at once -- for simplicity, we were thinking of having these combats occur in a sort of "meanwhile" frozen time, and then you go right back to your fortress as it was.  If you have a small squad, you could either control it like you do now, or control it something like adventurer mode.  We were thinking of allowing control of a single dwarf or a party of dwarves here.  It kind of violates the "no direct control of dwarves" principle of dwarf mode, but it would be fun.

As armies get larger, things can become more interesting, with multiple squads being sent off and some possibilities of tactics and so on.  You could raid nearby kobold caves to stop them from stealing your items once and for all, etc., using more dwarves than you could muster in adventure mode, equipped with steel, etc.

Aside from the "zoom to area" part, this is all actually pretty easy to code I think.  It's not much different from what's already in the game.

[JT]

I would say that it would be best to have a realtime combat system where you can't control dwarves personally.  After all, your dwarf commanders know what they're doing!  (Even if they don't.)  Who is the player to tell them how to wage war?  Surely not some omnipresent, omniscient entity with the ability to review the whole map at once!  Besides, the player watches the dwarves sleep.  If that's not creepy, I don't know what is.

I would definitely recommend allowing you to actually monitor the battles, of course (a time-capsule doesn't break much fiction), and showing full battle spam in any given "outside-the-fortress" battlefield so you can pay attention to how your troops are doing, but I would still have to say you should have a mostly hands-off policy on troops in the field -- these dwarves don't have radios, and besides if you had manual control you'd be far superior to the AI, meaning you could probably wipe out a whole fort with far inferior numbers.

A big portion of strategic fighting would likely involve alliance with other dwarf clans, to be capable of getting the numbers necessary to perform assaults on foreign territory.

The diplomat says, "Then it is agreed!
The Dwarven Halls of Grukgruk will provide 100 soldiers, consisting of 30 axedwarves, 40 sworddwarves, 10 marksdwarves, 15 pikedwarves, and 5 speardwarves.
However, Her Regency insists that we shall not bring all troops if you do not also commit at least the same number yourself."

[Toady One]

He he he...  a pike dwarf.  TALL.

I mostly agree -- I just thought it might be amusing for some people to control a small patrol and attack the kobold caves manually.  It's like adventure mode, with the knowledge that every little thing is influencing the survival odds your fortress game.  Not that there are survival odds.

edit:  I guess the battle spam could also be made more palatable by combining it with use of the one-step [.] key, instead of running through a bit and having to press more a lot, or having to read combat details after the fact.

[ August 13, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]