Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm pretty sure that it means there's nothing at that site. To check, export a fresh round of legends data and check it.
Edit: To clarify, it means that there's nothing at that site that you were looking for. For a raid, it means that there was nothing to steal. For a pillage or raze, it means that there was no one to kill.

Even when the map screen says the site still has people? I've had that before. They go, they rampage immediately and they come back but no one dies and no fights are had.

One of the things that isn't that huge about this, but I still find exciting, it's the possibility of sending items into the hills as well. Depending on the system you can get rid of your lag-inducing "garbage" items quickly by sending that stuff away into the hills, and just request a sock of you really, really need one for any reason even if there isn't any. You still have the item but it's not lagging your fort with extra pathfinding anymore, best of both worlds.

At least I HOPE you can do that, I'm not a hundred percent sure. Even if that doesn't work you can still get rid of extraneous animals and migrants that way by telling them to get lost over there in some hole in the ground nearby. That should already do something for lag.

Quote from: Bumber on April 05, 2018, 11:28:59 am

Quote from: PatrikLundell on April 05, 2018, 02:46:55 am

Quote from: snow dwarf on April 05, 2018, 01:42:13 am

I'm honestly interested if trees grow back branches.

Since cutting the tree at any major branch/trunk level cuts down the whole tree, the answer is no. See the post two posts up:

But what about fire?

Fire doesn't cut trees. It burns twigs and can kill the tree, but I haven't seen fire kill major branches without killing the whole tree. If the tree isn't killed twigs are regrown (and, in the case of trees growing in terrain flooded by buggy magma pools, the magma can periodically set fire to the twigs, which set fire to the moss... It was quite messy). I can't guarantee that it doesn't happen that branches die without the tree doing it, though.

Fire does seem to deal unusually with trees, I know for certain setting fire to the surface leads to an absolute crapload of cave-ins, and I'm not sure if they're collapsing branches, leaves, or entire chunks of tree.

One of my dwarves was infected with lycanthropy (were-badger).  I had him in a room in the hospital with a locked door.  For two months, he did nothing but sit on his bed.  Even when he transformed, he just sat there, so I didn't take any further steps to contain or eliminate him.  Got up to fix some lunch, but didn't pause the game.  Came back 10 minutes later.  "Why is my dining room painted red now?  What's with all these job cancellation warnings?"  I paused and found the were-badger had broken the door, then proceeded to slaughter his way through the dining hall, the workshops, and the barracks, before apparently running off of the map.  Out of 90 dwarves in my fortress, only 12 were alive and uninjured, and half of these were children.  I had over 30 injured survivors, but a quick check with DFHack confirmed my fears - all were infected.  I abandoned the fort rather than endure the inevitable tantrum spirals before werebeasts devoured the few healthy survivors.

If you restart in that same world make sure to pick a different civilization, unless you want a werebadger as one of your immigrants.

!!Science!! is a little too big for just one fort, so really you'd need to design around specific things you want to test, be it one experiment or one phenomenon.

Since this is raiding that's being tested out, however, what you'll need is a fortress that'll be able to support a large enough military for multiple ops at once, and be able to survive the ensuing sieges that'll surely provoke. So, probably most of your migrants being conscripted immediately and a very solid metalworking industry somewhere that has iron and flux, as well as a very, very defensible position, probably with a lot of traps because kobold sieges aren't a thing and by the time you're getting anything like a forgotten beast or titan you'll probably have a designated raiding team that's good enough to handle it; from my own experiments, pillaging is quite the training regime.

Perhaps tactics also affect how much killing/fighting needs to get done to accomplish an objective, and bad tacticians need their squad to kill a LOT more to achieve the same objective... and maybe a failed attempt at stealth means a really bad tactical position to begin a battle with, it'd make sense to me at least, it essentially becomes a pillaging attempt where they don't get to pick where they start with and the defenders get every advantage now that they've surrounded them.

Only explanation I'd have, at least.

True enough, live training is rather obscenely effective compared to combat drills, teaching or even sparring. I suppose the question comes partly because we don't quite get a feeling for how much fighting does go on in these battles other than the numbers, you never really know if those nine goblins that died in the clash actually put up a fight or just got bisected one after the other, or if that one named goblin was a strong combatant that matched your soldier blow by blow or was merely a footnote. Or the time, either, the travel times seem to be the only relevant times, with the actual pillaging happening in a relative instant (I think. I have a vague feeling sacking and burning sites takes longer, enough to be observed, from the times I've tried it).

Goblins also seem to suck at tactics, because recruits that were dabbling tacticians outsmarted them every time. That might also have something to do with it, might let the squad stick around longer murdering things and thus get more experience.

On a sidenote, I'd like to express appreciation for the fact the pillagers are smart enough to steal clothes that actually fit; not one case of -small troll fur glove- even with the extra size difference. In retrospective it seems a bit silly but I honestly thought that could have been a problem.