Bay 12 Games Forum

So, the Liaison from the dwarven capital in my game appears to be a goblin.
Likewise when I examine the list of nobles, the General is a goblin, as is one of the Baronesses...

I'm just going to guess that either this is a bug, or the Dwarven capital in my world has been conquered by goblins?

Yes, I guess I just keep foolishly hoping that the metal helmet I'm wearing might *DO* something, but I guess that's a stretch.

You may need to install more coffers Coffins in the hospital zone Morgue. Crutches Crippled dwarves take up a lot of room.

There. Fixed that for you.   

Had a nice secure fortress. No trouble to date. No snatchers or anything.

Decided to expand the outer wall to encompass some more pasture space, and mostly did so without risking integrity, except for one phase of the project that was going to last about 1 minute.

Ambush! Vile tree hugging elves and their #$%@ giant war-tigers explode out of no-where.

I then discover moments later that not only are my surface walls compromised with 1/2 my dwarves in the open, but I forgot to affix an emergency hatch on my newly dug second access tunnel. No squads available yet except for the miner militia. Now we're really having fun.

I've been playing DF for quite a while, but for several games now I have been completely unable to lure invasions to my fortress.

What are the minimum pop/wealth levels at which goblin ambushes and invasions occur, and is there any information I can review that would indicate if they are too distant or extinct and will never come?

I like combat heavy games, but it's frustrating to play for 10+ hours only to slowly realize that you'll never be attacked, even though you've embarked in what appeared to be highly hostile areas.

Playing in .19 at the moment, so for all I know every goblin on the planet starved to death a century ago.

Playing in adventure mode suggests that battle-axes and swords are both pretty good de-limbing tools.

However, surprisingly enough picks turn out to be REALLY good de-limbing weapons, at least against mid-small foes such as goblins. Quite good weapons overall too, as they aren't as easy to mitigate with armor as the axes and swords are. Best yet, your mining skill seems to be used as the primary weapon skill, though I'm not certain to what degree this carries over between adventure mode and dwarf mode.

Bad weapons for de-limbing are any blunt weapon (which includes whips), and most pointy weapons such as spears and pikes - those can sometimes remove very thin extremities such as hands, but not much else.

One weapon with stats suggesting decent de-limbing potential are Scourges - but I've never really had an opportunity to test them, so I can't say with any certainty. I'm not sure if they have enough penetration depth.

Most effective style? Usually to run around callously crippling legs/feet with a pick or whip to immobilize everyone and then taking your time finishing each of them off by strangling them to death to get up to legendary +20 fighting in a few days time.

Most fun style? Probably running around with a battle axe or longsword, charging in like a madman to bowl people over and then lop their heads off in glorious one-shot kills that spray arcs of blood across several meters of battlefield.

To give you a slightly better sense of the costs involved in an A* search and how they proliferate when spaces are open rather than confined, imagine that you are trying to reach a rock 10 spaces north of your current position, but in three completely different spaces:

1) You are at the end of a 1-space wide, 10-long corridor. At the other end is the item you want. In this case A* will find the object in exactly 10 steps, which is as good as it is ever going to get.

2) You are at a 4-way intersection with the corridors going off 20 spaces in all directions. The item is 10-spaces north. In this case you are going to find the object in about ~40 steps (A* has to search down all 4 corridors at once - it usually doesn't make any assumptions about what direction the object is in!)

3) You are standing on the surface, with nice green grass in all directions. The item is 10 spaces to the north. In this case basic A* is going to find the object in approximately ~400 steps - it has to search the entire square volume around you in concentric fashion before it finds the object! This is why a large starting embark area can have such dire consequences for pathing. Srlsy. 0_o;

Now, there are A* optimizations that can allow for much faster searches in some conditions like the open field, such as favoring steps that move towards the object, and making ones that move away from it more expensive, for example - but those search optimizations are making assumptions that might make other searches much MORE expensive, so there are usually trade-offs for this kind of thing.

There are also multi-layer A* concepts where the entire search space is broken up into large sections of 'geometry' that can be stepped through extremely quickly to get close to where the target is, but these implementations are quite complex and can take up a fair amount of memory to boot, so I have no idea if they are used in DF.

In a game like DF where the paths are frequently convoluted, I suspect that A* makes relatively few assumptions - but you'd have to ask Toady about the details.