Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Suggestions => Topic started by: IndigoFenix on August 09, 2018, 07:06:00 am
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Communication by pigeon is at least a thousand years old and could make communication between areas much easier. It could be a standard creature tag, like [HOMING].
Rather than use the magical messenger birds of fantasy stories, you could order birds that have nests in particular areas, and use them to send messages quickly to those areas. Similarly, by raising your own birds and exporting them, you could get messages of far-off events faster.
Or you could just use magic to send them wherever you want.
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Or moles. Dwarves, especially living underground probably have some kind of animals which can make use of a worldwide connected cave network.
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Dwarven Postage System (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=122060.15)
Pigeon Messaging System (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=143014.0)
There was at least one more, but I can't find it at the moment.
Personally, I don't think dwarves should have such a system unless elves develop it first.
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I expect elves would be prime candidates for the magical "send animals wherever you want" while dwarves and humans would use a more realistic system.
I don't see mundane moles as being used for long-distance communication, but some fantastic or generated creatures could have the same tag. Interestingly mole rats do have a magnetic homing sense similar to migratory birds, but in their case it is more for navigating their tunnels in the dark rather than long-distance travel.
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Elves would surely make use of arboreal communications (not so fanciful! (http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet)) with obvious the capability to make 'trunk calls'...
Humans, having provably adopted early iterations of RFC 1149 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149), here on roundworld, should certainly have some form of primeval IPoAC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers) established on dorfworld.
The bearded buggers with their love of levers might have a Semaphore system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_line) overground (with enough hilltop sites built up) or just a spooky-action-at-a-distance lever2indicator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooke_and_Wheatstone_telegraph) thing if they're able to initially trek the distance with the components needed.
Goblins? Well, they've probably got communication daemons of some kind.
With an established diplomatic relationship, inter-species communications could be via 'loan' terminii to one kind of communications method (or bothmkinds, according to direction of traffic) or by bi/multilaterally-founded settlements which use a sneakernet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet) interface between the two or more systems provided by the home civ. If things run smooth. (The Dorfish link might easily suffer from Sock Error, etc.)
If all that is too easy, then of course a tree-link could be rooted (up!), crossbow bolts can pierce the sky in huge quantities, vile forces of darkness can obscure lines of sight (while distance itself might make quantum leverage disentangle, or just let loose the gremlins) and temples might be built that disrupt the dispersal of diabolic dispatches.
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I can get behind homing pets in general.
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It's more interesting from a lore-perspective than an actual mechanic that the player sets up and handles.
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As long as its vermin birds, there's plenty of bats & cave swallows to hand to dispense and send off in a messenger's stead as long as there's some form of access to the surface.
Large birds alone i feel are as cheaty & vunerable as just using messenger dwarves, you can probably comfortably send a bird-man or a messenger mounted ontop of a large bird/flying creature to do the same job if one is availible, while vermin birds are discreet with a chance they might not arrive due to circumstance, they can also fly through obstacles other large creatures can normally not pass.
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Some suggestions on which animals could be messengers in this old thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=143014.0
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Would we have to feed them, and will they give other products (meat, feathers, eggs)?
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Or...you know...
Messengers.
Homing pigeons are unreliable. They get killed, they lose the message, and sometimes they decide they want to mate more than delivering the message. Also homing pigeons have one bigass drawback ; they can only deliver messages between two places and will never ever be able to learn a third one.
Basically what you do is you teach the pigeon he can find food at two places. When you need to deliver a message, you just stop feeding it, and it will naturally go to the other place.
So to train homing pigeons you need to transport them physically between the two places you need them to go between. Why not just send a guy, especially since the distances between places in DF are just not that big ?
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Also homing pigeons have one bigass drawback ; they can only deliver messages between two places and will never ever be able to learn a third one.
Technically, they can deliver messages between anywhere¹ and one place. Though they'll fly that again (maybe faster) if returned to the same departure point, they can also be sent to any other point of departure (or just let loose from any point in the middle of a journey) and let 'home' receive messages from all over the place.
The fact that 'home' is effectively constant (and the need to ship them to 'away' points to then use them) is a logistical issue that has been dealt satisfactorily with, here, since maybe 1000BC, though it is an important consideration.
(The food-trick is slightly different. Feed them at 'away', don't feed them at 'home'. They'll fly to 'away' when released from 'home' hungry enough, then fly 'home' when released from 'away' sated enough. At least until and unless they happen to find food elsewhere, and that's easy enough to happen to create a 'disloyal' pigeon who will then be detrained back to a standard many-to-one pigeon, and maybe not even that if it ever willingly or unwillingly goes AWOL and stops going 'home'. )
¹ FCVO 'anywhere', but here on Earth a distance of 7,200 miles was 'homed' in 24 days, so it's possibly a long (feathered?) tail on the probability of success.
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Yeah, so that's even worse, since you need a guy to come and bring the pidgeon back, defeating the whole purpose in small universes like dwarf fortress, where you don't need to send a lot of messages and every place is within walking distance of a dwarf.
I guess my big question is ; why implementing homing pidgeons ? I guess it gives some flavor to the game, but it wouldn't fill a need in gameplay - not a need that a normal, dwarfy messenger wouldn't
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Yeah, so that's even worse, since you need a guy to come and bring the pidgeon back, defeating the whole purpose in small universes like dwarf fortress, where you don't need to send a lot of messages and every place is within walking distance of a dwarf.
I guess my big question is ; why implementing homing pidgeons ? I guess it gives some flavor to the game, but it wouldn't fill a need in gameplay - not a need that a normal, dwarfy messenger wouldn't
Pigeons are relatively safer than humanoid messengers because they are fast-moving rat-sized flying targets making them that much harder to catch/hit.
It's also much easier to spot a disloyal pigeon than a traitorous intelligent humanoid.
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Pidgeons are slow moving targets that are the bottom rank of the food chain for anything that flies. Sure flying may sound great until the local bald freedom decides to have a snack and there goes your important message asking for urgent reinforcements.
Besides, you will need someone to carry the pidgeon back anyway, so there's no safety point even for dwarves. Maybe, maybe you can use them if you are besieged, but wouldn't adding dwarven messengers the first logical step before adding the skyrats?
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Pidgeons are slow moving targets that are the bottom rank of the food chain for anything that flies. Sure flying may sound great until the local bald freedom decides to have a snack and there goes your important message asking for urgent reinforcements.
Besides, you will need someone to carry the pidgeon back anyway, so there's no safety point even for dwarves. Maybe, maybe you can use them if you are besieged, but wouldn't adding dwarven messengers the first logical step before adding the skyrats?
Try shooting down a pigeon in flight using a bow or crossbow.
And then compare that to hitting a messenger...
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Pidgeons are slow moving targets that are the bottom rank of the food chain for anything that flies. Sure flying may sound great until the local bald freedom decides to have a snack and there goes your important message asking for urgent reinforcements.
Besides, you will need someone to carry the pidgeon back anyway, so there's no safety point even for dwarves. Maybe, maybe you can use them if you are besieged, but wouldn't adding dwarven messengers the first logical step before adding the skyrats?
Try shooting down a pigeon in flight using a bow or crossbow.
And then compare that to hitting a messenger...
Use a trained falcon instead.
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When times are good, ship pigeons out. The guy shipping them can do double-duty as a messenger, both ways (and, if between allied settlements with the same provisions, carting pigeons both ways) and have make-work messages sent by pigeon just to exercise the system and stop stuffing the settlement(s) with holidaying pigeons, if necessary. If things hot up, foot messengers go missing (with or without successfully releasing "help, I'm being attacked by the vile forces of *ARGH*~~~~" alerts to the skies) you can start to fall back on it for real need, as opposed to being totally out of options.
(It's something that could happen, but I still think that under hard-coded racial characteristics there'd be different unique flavours for each society's settlements to adopt, and under the hyper-procedurally-generated future it'd be many different possible options, at least which handy and compatible creature each civ chooses to use as its message carrier.)
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Falcons might work for intercepting regular messages, but it’s cheaper to keep pigeons than falcons so the defender can in an emergency just let *all* the pigeons loose with “HELP!” messages and the interception requirements start looking less like Hans The Clever Eagle and more like a flak battery
Seeing as the caverns are open all the way between any fort and the mountain home, dwarves in worlds where they have an underground-friendly pigeon equivalent have a particular advantage here
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Seeing as the caverns are open all the way between any fort and the mountain home, dwarves in worlds where they have an underground-friendly pigeon equivalent have a particular advantage here
Cave swallows?
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Seeing as the caverns are open all the way between any fort and the mountain home, dwarves in worlds where they have an underground-friendly pigeon equivalent have a particular advantage here
Cave swallows?
It seems an obvious substitute, but would a cave swallow have the advantages of a homing pigeon while flying through the caves? A pigeon has the whole sky and other flocks of birds to keep it from being spotted. Cave swallow hurtling down a tunnel towards you is kind of hard to miss.
Something small, quick and intelligent so it knows when to hide or take an alternative path would probably make a better messenger. Like a dwarf. Or a gorlak, I suppose.
Foot messengers are easily blocked from leaving castles by surrounding them. Caves just need a new hole, they're harder to contain so there's less need for animal messengers and probably little speed advantage. Until smart mole-like digging critters become a thing anyway.
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Homing gorlaks.
Yes. Please.
Dorfs must build a gorlak catapult. This will overcome all the drawback of the inferior homing pidgeon method
Oh man I can't wait to see the face of a hunting hawk trying to intercept a homing gorlak.
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Of course all this will have to come after runners are implemented, which will have to come after there are more meaningful ways of actively interacting with a world aside from raiding. Edit: Apparently messengers are already a thing. I haven't played fort mode in ages.
But once that's in, it would make sense for the "send message to location" screen to have both a list of sapient runners as well as the option of sending a message by homing animal, provided you have one trained to the particular area you need to send a message to. Depending on the animal chosen this might have different strengths and weaknesses, like speed, ability to bypass terrain, and the mode of interception being used. Maybe humans and elves train falcons but goblins don't.
Also, you're forgetting the obvious anti-falcon choice: giant homing pigeons.
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I thought the obvious anti falcon choice was a mountain-high firebreathing dragon.
But alas, discretion is more a objective of vermin messengers. Else how are metal barred in prisoners supposed to recieve sneaky messages if the large creatures fall into traps instantly and die.
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I was going to mention the giant hawks as a counter-counter but I must recognize when I'm beat
That said messengers are pretty limited right now are they ? They can request tribute or return of stationned out fortress dorfs if I'm correct ?
I'd say the communication system needs to find a larger purpose before it's extended ; I'd prefer things to go deeper than wider, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to find alternative for messengers as they are, right now, serving one niche purpose.
Then when you can engage in diplomacy or communicate meaningfully with other holdings/ kingdoms, homing animals would be a good idea. Maybe a special training for animal ("train as a messenger animal") could be implemented as a reaction for animal trainers, then I can subvert my enemy's expectation by sending my homing turtle during siege. It might be slow but they surely wouldn't expect that (if they havent played Fallen London that is).
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That said messengers are pretty limited right now are they ? They can request tribute or return of stationned out fortress dorfs if I'm correct ?
I'd say the communication system needs to find a larger purpose before it's extended ; I'd prefer things to go deeper than wider, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to find alternative for messengers as they are, right now, serving one niche purpose.
Messengers can recall dwarves, but they can't demand tribute. Im still a little bit dissapointed with Toady that i can't really interact so much with my forced administrators, especially since it tends to take away my most advanced organisers and usuallly the leaders of the squad.
You have to force them into tributary status before conquering them to get the 'occupied tributary' settlement (two seperate trips), even so there's no further options from there to halt the flow of tribute if you no longer want it or interact with your puppet overseer making sure the site stays in your hands, it could really do with some expansion. They don't even get a mention in the Civ screen.
Then when you can engage in diplomacy or communicate meaningfully with other holdings/ kingdoms, homing animals would be a good idea. Maybe a special training for animal ("train as a messenger animal") could be implemented as a reaction for animal trainers, then I can subvert my enemy's expectation by sending my homing turtle during siege. It might be slow but they surely wouldn't expect that (if they havent played Fallen London that is).
It'd be helpful while you're landlocked in a siege, which is exactly the kind of scenario where youd not want to waste dwarves running to the map edge, but instead put your chips on the table and risk sending out a pidgeon the invaders would start shooting at, one bolt could kill it but its such a small object it would take a elven grand-master bowman to achieve it or a lot of luck and convenience.
Flashing blue (some sort of color or symbol) visibly so you can see its progress and also see incoming messenger vermin sent from abroad with declarations of war and help requested.
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I thought the obvious anti falcon choice was a mountain-high firebreathing dragon.
Kind of makes the message a moot point, doesn't it?
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I thought the obvious anti falcon choice was a mountain-high firebreathing dragon.
Kind of makes the message a moot point, doesn't it?
If the enemy has that kind of resources to dedicate to shooting the messenger, I'd say resistance is futile...