Bay 12 Games Forum

In this post I would like to present my ideas for the upcomming military & siege stuff. And also hear your ideas. English is not my first language so sorry if anything is badly phrased.

I am assuming here that armies will be entities moving around on the map. Made up of military squads as the smallest unit. I think there should be a chain of command, using a modified version of the villains system and allowing enemy agents or assassins to interact with it. Maybe something like:

Squad leader < Officer(Commanding 5-10 squads, also a squad leader himself) < General (Commanding the entire army and has a personal squad he commands as his bodyguard unit) and maybe a sort of commander in chief, commanding all armies of the civilization. This could be the ruler by default, or a separate position. The commander in chief could be leading an army as a general personally or just stay in the capital, sending messengers with orders to his generals in the field.

Food, water and morale could be tracked, though it may be easier to do so in an abstract manner. Moving armies would need to have acces to water sources and get food from supply caravans of their civilisation, or forage for food.

Armies should be able to send out squads, diplomats and agents on missions. In adventure mode, the player could be hired for missions. Missions could include:

Squads: Scouting to find enemy settlements, agents, squads and armies. Foraging for food. Raiding less protected enemy settlements. Intercepting enemy scouts and raids. Skirmishing enemy armies. Attacking enemy supply caravans and foraging squads to starve them.

Diplomats: Negotiating the surrender of enemy settlements or making them pay one time tributes so you don't attack them (Like people in the middle ages paid vikings to leave their territory), sending information/orders back and forth between allied armies and settlements, convincing enemy armies to retreat/surrender/make peace.

Agents: Spying to get information on enemy armies, assassinating enemy position holders, using villain mechanics to turn enemy generals/officers, spreading rumors in enemy army to lower morale, sneaking in and destroying enemy supplies.

I also think it would be cool if armies could set up camps while not moving. Either while waiting for orders or during a siege. Using tents, digging trenches and setting up temporary wooden fortifications as roman armies used to do. Especially for sieges I think it would be cool if armies would set up a camp just outside of a settlement and attack in waves. I think the idea of longer lasting sieges was mentioned before and this would help. Both attackers and defenders could send out squads to raid eachother as well as agents and diplomats to do the things described above. Also defenders could try and send out messengers to call allied armies to lift the siege, as it often happened in real wars.

Finding clothing and armor is a big problem in adventure mode. Especially when you play animal people, which I like to do. I assume that future updates will introduce ways to craft or buy stuff but a quick solution for now would be to allow players to resize clothing and armor they find.

Assuming that future versions of the game will allow you to have children in adventure mode, I would like to make a suggestion for making descendants of adventurers playable. Using the same system with which you select retired adventurers perhaps? This would give the player a lot of interesting options for adventure mode. For example, if you play a king in adventure mode and continue with his oldest child and heir when he dies. Or, with the myths and magic update, you cold follow a powerful bloodline of wizards. There are many things that could be done by making the descendants of your characters playable and it would make adventure mode more meaningful by allowing multigenerational stories to emerge.

Hello everyone,

As far as I understand, the current plan is to release DF without adventure mode at first, then release adventure mode at a later date before returning to work on the villains update. I want to suggest releasing adventure mode together with the villains update, as this will include a lot of content for adventure mode and considering that adventure mode isn't as fleshed out yet, I, as a fan of adventure mode think that it is important to make a good first impression on new players.

I don't exactly know what is planned for future army mechanics but I just watched a video about spies in the roman military and had an idea that could work for dwarf fortress and could relatively easily be done with already existing mechanics. The idea is to give armies the abillity to send out agents, similar to how squads can be send on missions. These agents could then perform a number of tasks, like locating enemy armies and estimating their size, gathering information about specific people like generals, assassinating generals, sabotaging armies to slow them down or destroy their supplies to make them starve.

So as far as I understand, currently charge attacks just make you slam into an enemy in addition to a normal attack. My suggestion is, to make the charge effect the attack, depending on your current speed. For example, while charging, the penetration value of your attack could be multiplied with your speed value. This would of course primarily benefit weapons with high penetration like spears or pikes and would also work great with mounts in the next update, making a cavalry charge adequately strong.