Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, the evil thing worked but nothing else produces viable results. Tried the mesh size on temperature and still got temperate to freezing crap, cold regions barely existing

Sigh

Increase the number of squares in glacier and tundra biomes, decrease the other ones. Weighted mesh only becomes important when you want extremes that wouldn't normally happen together to coexist (like sedimentary and active volcanos)

I added in the orcs but even with them its so goddamn boring!

One of the issues is that a mature DF fort is pretty much invulnerable, barring user error, since a multi-legendary soldier with quality gear can take on a huge number of unskilled, under equipped enemies. Given the number of useless immigrants you get, coupled with moods, and you normally have squads of 20 such dwarves by the "endgame". The pathfinding issues and your magma maze and such just add to that: a device that consistently redirects sieges into magma isn't going to be defeated by any of the races in there, unless we may everyone fireproof. So the solution is to prevent the endgame from happening smoothly (since you can normally get all of that ready by 80 pop when the goblins come). Try this:

Go into the orc entity file, and change PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POPULATION and PROGRESS_TRIGGER_PRODUCTION to 1 (rather than the 2 that they are now) and add [ACTIVE_SEASON:SPRING] and [ACTIVE_SEASON:WINTER]

And regenerate the world. If you wanted to, you could also increase the BIOME_SUPPORT numbers to three each, which would encourage them to conquer territory in world gen rather than just killing everyone on it, as they do now.

That should get you more sieges much earlier, and make it more difficult to get to the end-game invulnerability. Or, it will slaughter your 7 starting dwarves in the autumn of your first year, that's possible too.

Or, if you were really bored, you could copy the orc entity entry and change the [CREATURE:] tag to have the demon/megabeast of your choice (so, [CREATURE:TITAN], for example). Or, do that several times, and then hope that a dwarven civ survives worldgen.

Anyway, one problem with the vent idea is that you could just build a single, large 3x3 tile vent that kept all your air clean, then build a 15 z-level chimney above it, and the goblins couldn't do anything about it.

I think, as someone mentioned, that it should be possible to build an invincible fort. If (as above) you manage to make a magma-surrounded obsidian fortress that is self-sufficient and (now) with a chimney for air, in some sense you deserve to be able to laugh at the goblins as they stand ineffectually outside. The difference is that constructing such a fort is quite a bit more difficult than the current "dig a hole, build a drawbridge" method. I (at least) am going for more difficulty, not insurmountable difficulty.

Can I stop mountains and oceans from becoming evil? They eat up all the evil squares in the world and thus beak dogs and their evil swamps end up not existing and goblins bring nothing with them (don't really know how to solve the troll issue). Also, can mountain range size by limited somehow? All the squares within are wasted and they usually pack the features I would have wanted

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Check out the "____ squares in small/medium regions" controls. Increasing the number of evil squares in small subregions while decreasing the number of evil squares in large subregions will scatter your evil in small pockets across the world rather than in a single massive evil ocean. Same with mountain ranges (and anything else).

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How are bottomless pits formed? Are they magma vents that dry up during world gen? Can they coexist with magma pipes? Regular chasms creep me out but I do need a way to get rid of water. Increasing volcanism might give me more pipes to increase the likelihood of them coexisting but that destroys flux layers

I'm not sure how bottomless pits are formed, but, I've had a lot of success changing the "volcanism weighted mesh" size to 2x2, and then heavily weighting the two ends of the scale (I think I have 45 low, 35 high, and 10/5/5 in the middle), which (I think) makes there be a lot of high and low volcanism squares, with not much in the middle. On the edges of those, you get plenty of flux next to magma pipes.

I think that the solution would have to be a reason for your dwarves to need to go outside. Historically, castles almost never fell to assaults, since they were pretty much invulnerable. Mountain forts would be the same way, I imagine. However, there are things that you need inside that might only come from outside. Traditionally, that was food, but Dwarves have their indoor farms. Imagine these possibilities, though:

Goblins lob corpses (maybe even the corpses of the dwarves that they have killed) over your walls/drawbridge into your fortress, spreading miasma and unhappy thoughts ("Oh no! They desecrated Urist's body!"). Effects could potentially be even worse than the unhappy thought for the friend dying in the first place.

Goblins find your fresh water source and poison it, killing anyone without booze (such as your injured soldiers)

Staying fully sealed off from the outside causes the air to get stuffy (unhappy thoughts) and eventually unbreathable, so you'd need at least some vent... Into which the goblins could put corpses, burning logs, and other such nasty things. Or even just seal it off, suffocating your dwarves unless they clear them out.

Goblins could "bribe" unhappy dwarves to pull the drawbridge levers/deactivate the traps/etc., making it important that you kept all of your dwarves happy during the siege. Bribe amount, and thus required happiness to resist, could go up with time. The traitor would then go pull the lever, let them in, and flee with their family, or something. This might only be appropriate for speaking, non-babysnatcher civs.

And overall, make sieges longer. Real-life sieges lasted years. Goblin sieges should come ready to do the same. I think that the way to break a well-defended fortress would be to introduce enough things that make people unhappy that you trigger a tantrum spiral or a traitor, which would take time. I can see a year or two of being isolated from the world and dealing with constant smoke and miasma as the goblins throw the burning corpses of everything that used to live outside your fortress at you wearing down all of those useless cheesemakers until someone snaps.

In the future, maybe they could even construct their own camp with walls, archers, etc. outside your gates to further harass you, attract their own migrants, and so on. Kind of the reverse of the "embark on a goblin site" challenge. I suspect that that would be in the far future, though.

Uh they arent attacking enough make em more fighty! also any chance of making another race or just making gobbos more fighty also? what about beastmen? I NEED CONSTANT SIEGES- it would just be better to make some special thing you could make that ensures constant sieges and attacks so at a certain point you could just build it and wait for the fun.

Distance to their nearest civ definitely seems to affect their ability to attack you, so you might check where they show up in the embark screen. To help get some close by, you might try increasing the number of civs at worldgen, since it's unlikely that anything will kill them off (so more civs = more orc civs = more sieges). They definitely do attack, though, and are about as fighty as you can get.

In general, the more hostile civs you have, the more sieges you'll get. If you wanted more sieges, you could try making the Orcs more active (adding spring and winter to their active seasons) or creating more non-speaking civs with different active seasons (maybe a winter/spring, spring/summer, summer/fall (Orcs), and fall/winter civ?). I think you want to have many short civs rather than a few long civs so they refresh if you kill a siege off.

Once my current test fort is done (testing if I can get >80 orc sieges, and hopefully if they bring along animals/trolls as well), I'll see if I can think of some well-flavored other civs to throw in. The only problem I can see with constant sieges is that once they start, you'll have no caravans reaching you (I've heard sieges can replace caravans, and even if they didn't, it would likely die getting to your fort), and you'd have liaisons/diplomats dying left and right, which might mess things up a bit too much. As I said, though, I'll see.

I recently embarked on an area with an underground magma pipe. After a bit of digging, I found a warm wall, got the "you have discovered a magma pipe" message, and then... Nothing. The pipe didn't reveal itself, I've just got a tunnel a few tiles into obsidian in Gabbro with a single warm tile at the end. This is in sharp contrast to normally, when it reveals the pipe in all of it's fire imp-filled goodness and allows me to plan how to tap it.

A possible cause for this is that I've excavated part of the area directly above the magma pipe, which might be interfering with the auto-reveal of it.

I can provide a save if it's wanted, though unfortunately not pre-discovery.