Bay 12 Games Forum

There are some pretty serious balance issues with the new version that will make late game sieges quite unlikely or at least a very rare occurrence. If you want some sort of ongoing challenge I suggest embarking on the intersection between a normalish biome and a haunted or terrifying one.

If you want an easy embark, pick a non-evil biome.

One thing you should keep in mind is that you will likely be hit by a very early game bandit attack so be prepared for that. After that initial bandit attack it should be pretty much smooth sailing with only the occasional werebeast or mega fauna attack for the rest of time. Late game sieges are possible but don't count on one showing up.

Embarking right next to a necromancer's tower will also improve the challenge level.

I definitely agree with the sentiments of this suggestion thread. We could certainly use some solid late game challenges. Of the OP's suggestions the ones I liked a lot include the natural disaster style events. Some of them might be quite difficult to implement such as volcanism, but disease outbreaks could use many preexisting mechanics.

I've always thought we could use some late game threats that can circumvent our invulnerable halls of death in some manner or another. Simply improving the AI of intelligent and civilized attackers would go a long way to providing this sort of challenge. Even something as basic as having a goblin avoid stepping into the same hall of death where he witness his buddy die moments earlier would make a big difference.

Another way to make the AI less predictable and easy to exploit is to make it so a squad of enemies could employ one of several possible pathing behavior patterns instead of using the same one every time. One behavior pattern could be to hold back and patrol the surface to cut off the fortresses access to outside resources and starve them out like in a real world siege. Another could be to try and path into the fortress via the quickest route possible. Another pathing behavior could be to try and path into the fortress but via intentionally circumlocutory routes. Just by adding a little variety to how units approach pathing to your fortress will go a very long way towards preventing some of our cheapest and most ludicrous abuses of enemy AI.

Another possible addition to the arsenal of large, organized armies could be battering rams or massive siege beasts that have a next tier building destroyer ability that could target any construction including bridges, constructed walls etc. How cool would battering ram siege elephants or cave dragons be.

Giving enemy engineers and mechanics the ability to attempt to detect and disarm traps would also make sense as something a late game organized siege force might employ.

As many others have brought up, digging or undermining tactics would GREATLY increase how dangerous a late game siege force could be.

Adding an incorporeal attribute to some of the more powerful and rare night creatures or as a possible forgotten beast ability would truly give us a reason to fear the night and the deep dark places of the world. Basically the ability would let the creature path and pass strait through solid objects such as walls and floors.

There are a lot of good ideas in this thread. I would absolutely love to see some natural disasters or more impacts from our weather. Even something as simple as adding lightning to rain storms that occur in the tropics or the warm months of temperate biomes would be neat. Lightning could start fires, or even hit a really unlucky dwarf. If Toady was feeling particularly detail orientated he could have the lightning leave behind fulgurite.

Quote from: thvaz on July 24, 2014, 03:29:41 pm

I think you are ignoring how complex the calculations are. It is not something as simple as "this has 80% chance of piercing, that has 20%". As far as I know, there are many factors involved, like the skill of the shooter, the distance from the target, the material of both the bolts and the armor, and the angle the bolt hit the armor, and probably some more I ignore.

edit 1: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=6262 is fixed for next version!
edit 2: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=6870 is fixed too!!!

Given those bug fixes, I suggest everyone wait and see what the ranged weapon balance is like for 0.40.05.

Also: yay! research pays off with a bug fix!

Thanks for all the work you've done on this.   

IMO a better solution than digging invaders would be enemies that could disarm traps - orc/goblin mechanics, as it were.  After all, in most fantasy settings they are the "techy" steampunk races.  It would be cool if once the knew there were traps, they could try to disarm them, which would of course take time, and you could try to cover with marksdwarves and so on.. and it wouldn't be nearly as game-breaking as digging invaders.

I think that enemy AI for intelligent races could definitely benefit from having at least a few different counter tactics in their bag of tricks to keep them from acting like lobotomized zombies. It makes sense that some brainless zombie or giant bug would charge right into the same hallway of death that it just saw 40 of it's buddies get torn to shreds in moments earlier but its ridiculous for a creature of at least dog intelligence to make the same mistake.

Trap disarming would definitely be a good addition but I also think that longer term siege methods such as digging, undermining walls and wall destroying battering rams have their place as well. I don't think just any old group of punk bandit goblins should be able to come along in year one and start using advanced tactics like battering rams and undermining against an early fort but rather that these are the sorts of options that would be available to late game sieging armies led by high ranking military leaders. As the game is right now, goblin sieges that show up after about year 2 or 3 simply have no chance what so ever of posing a real threat to fortress that has bothered to build some defenses. Once a fort is decently established, the only threat the goblins actually pose is to your FPS as they choke your CPU to death with troll fur loin cloths.

Since sieges are now tied to the living world and aren't just conjured out of thin air, it means that they are going to have to be rarer and or smaller occurrences than in the past which means that something needs to be done to make them tougher, particularly in the late game. In my last 2012 fort the game was throwing well over a hundred and fifty goblins and trolls at me per year. Aside for killing some cats and dogs and maybe a stray fisherdwarf they stopped being any sort of real threat even with such large and frequent attacks. In this new version there is no way the game can throw that many goblins and trolls at a player in any sort of sustained manner.

Neat, danger rooms actually live up to their namesake now? My guess is that the dwarves basically died the death of a thousand paper cuts. The injuries were probably not that severe but were likely repeated over and over then some got infected.

From what I can tell there are FAR less attacks in the new version of the game during fortress mode. I think this probably constitutes a bug or at least a serious balancing issue since it appears to be very wide spread behavior.

It's definitely easier.  Sieges don't auto path, neither do undead, to their nearest pathable target. (as building destroyers, opposed to all life, etc)  They appear to use visual perception only to determine if they should attack something, which is ... well, problematic for a few reasons.

Unless something significant changes with this perception/pathing combination, 40.x will always be a cakewalk compared to 34.11.  And squad leaders are still bugged to hell, so when the squad leader dies, the squad just stands around like an abandoned cadet review until the season changes and they all leave.  That bug has been there for so long, it's painful, and yet... it remains unfixed.

When the enemies don't blindly path into the fortress on a suicide run, I actually find them harder to deal with. In the older version I could literally destroy thousands of goblins without having a single military dwarf ever lift a finger since they would just pile into the corridor of death that my neophyte mechanic built in year one.

I think that until real enemy siege AI and digging is implemented that it is actually a pretty decent feature/bug to have at least some of the enemies just wander around the surface looking for dwarves to attack rather than doing the brainless B line through our static defenses.

Unless you set up camp in an evil biome or next to a couple of necromancer towers with the new and improved undead to kick your dwarves heads in then I would have to agree that fortress mode is much easier now aside for new bug born challenges.

I haven't played enough forts to be certain but my last fort in DF 2012 was getting massive goblin sieges 2 to 4 times a year. In the new version I have been attacked by about 5 to 10% as many goblins including mixed bandit groups. The main reason I haven't noticed it that much is I have been embarking near necro towers and on evil biomes and the undead have kept me quite busy.