I didn't take any screenshots i'm afraid, but yesterday the fort was vanquished finally after 17 years. Sieges weren't the cause, essentially there was so much death in my fort that migrants stopped arriving and my population stagnated, so i ended it with fun - disbanded the military and then unwalled to let the clowns come in from below.
Some feedback on the mod, although bear in mind it's from the one long playthrough only. I had those worldgen issues originally and genned the world with the orc language files removed to get the embark i wanted, and on the embark screen i had beastmen, gnolls and orcs as nearby civs. However in-game proper the orcs never showed up, despite replacing the language files after world gen. That's probably my fault for screwing with the files, and so i can only give feedback on the gnolls and beastmen.
Early game the sieges were just right for me, i think the first one arrived after the first migrants, and i had to hold them off with my 2 man militia, losing one. It was a good challenge. I noticed the sieges rarely coincided with goblin ones also, which i liked.
Once i got a dry moat up around year two and popped a drawbridge over it, it pretty much negated the sieges entirely. Ocassionally someone would get left outside before the bridge came up, else they weren't too threatening. Perhaps some kind of flying ability for one of the races would help that?
Then i got my steel industry rolling in year three and had a decent full-steel 5-man axedwarf squad, and the sieges actually became more like meat deliveries. It seemed the dwarves were butchering the mounts/animals from them, unless it was just local wildlife collateral damage.
I had some slowdown issues as the years rolled by (4.2GHz 2500k cpu). Sieges got up to around 60-70 enemies each time at least, and the area around my moat and bridge was a sea of corpses, bloodstains, bones and clothing. I don't know if it's possible but you might want to prevent enemies dropping full sets of clothing/armor. At one point my game had over 22 thousand items according to dfhack. I had to d-b-c then d-b-d the entire outdoor area of the map, dropping me back to around 10k items. On the same note it seemed impossible to have 50+ haulers manually clean the corpses+items in the 2-4 months before the next siege occured. I had to use autodump.
It went on like that for over a decade, every few months my militia went out and destroyed the 4-5 spawned groups (each about 15 units) that constituted each siege.
I liked the ambush squads of 7 enemies inbetween the sieges, it kept things interesting when i went out on the map to chop trees and claim steel/iron/silver weapons from the bloodbaths. Not sure if it was intentional but i would often get one ambush from beastmen and then another ambush on the other side of the map from the gnolls at the same time, making me split my militia to handle both.
Overall i found the mod pretty awesome, it added a lot more action to above-ground life in the fort. I guess the bullet point summary for how i think it could be improved would be:
- flying enemies
- less armor/clothing dropped by enemies
- tougher+fewer enemies in later sieges, since the game engine struggles with all the pathing otherwise, plus the challenge level doesn't scale well with a forts military improvement (ie. it becomes a no-risk meatgrinder).
- perhaps some occasional super-bosses?
Thanks for all the work on the mod, it really livened up my game, especially in the early years. Great job.
As a side note, how did my fort stop receiving migrants? Well, i forgot to change the child pop caps in d_init, so by year 10 my fort had 110 adult dwarves and 120 children. I decided to burrow all the children outside my moat, half of which obliged and got locked out there for the next 70+ mob siege wave to chase around. I repeated it for another 50 children the next season. You'd be surprised to hear that the parents reacted poorly to it, and half of them went insane or melancholy despite my fine food, silver furniture in everyones bedroom and an exquisite dining room. That dropped my pop from 230 to 65 in a year. I was looking forward to my 200 pop of productive dwarves building up with migrants now, but instead got migration waves of 2, then 3, then 1, then nothing. Lesson learned - set your child caps before reaching max population, that is, at embark! Also, abandoning 100+ children to sieges in a single year might give your fort a bad rep.