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Author Topic: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness  (Read 1660 times)

Shaggy Frog

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Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« on: November 11, 2018, 11:20:39 pm »

A ~100-strong goblin army sieged my fort and was chewed up by weapon traps. Pretty standard stuff for me, and I've been playing this game for years.

As my dwarves cleaned out the various bits and pieces of what was left over, each one was getting overwhelmed with negative thoughts from seeing all the carnage. Started throwing tantrums, depression, etc. The typical spiral kinda stuff.

I haven't seen a problem like this before. Just started playing with the latest version (0.44.12).

Has something changed in the latest release or is there a better way to manage the cleanup? Or am I just doomed?
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« Reply #1 on: November 12, 2018, 03:35:28 am »

Yes, things have changed radically. Look around the forum and you'll find lots of threads about the issue of (failing to) meet dorf needs.

0.44.12 is playable, as opposed to 0.44.10 that was even more extreme.
- Some dorfs are doomed: there is nothing you can do to save them once in the downward spiral. They'll either go insane or get stuck in permanent depression (with the associated tantruming, oblivious stumbling, etc.) if mooding has made them immune to insanity. The only cures are dead or exile (which is a new option hidden away in the unit itself).
- The strength of needs is higher, and too many of them cannot be met (bumblebee mead, family for dorfs who hate the concept, etc). Careful management can get most of them to get by.
- Some dorfs are very sensitive to death, and a single corpse hauling session can be enough to send some into an unbreakable downward spiral, while others can be saved by taking them off corpse hauling duty ASAP (and, obviously, keep the corpses out of view of those dorfs as a minimum, and all preferrably: I atom smash corpses).

There's a LOT more. Scan the forum.
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Shaggy Frog

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Re: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« Reply #2 on: November 12, 2018, 01:12:42 pm »

I'm fine with atom-smashing corpses, if that's what it takes, but you can't have bridges atop of weapon traps, so someone's gotta haul each of those corpses in front of a bridge somewhere...

I suppose I could just haul up the drawbridge, wait for the siege to time out (so annoying -- miasma and cave adaptation, ho!), and hide the depot behind its own bridged wall (so the caravans don't drop in and get slaughtered)...

Is any of this going to change/be fixed? :(
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therahedwig

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Re: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« Reply #3 on: November 12, 2018, 01:23:29 pm »

I'm fine with atom-smashing corpses, if that's what it takes, but you can't have bridges atop of weapon traps, so someone's gotta haul each of those corpses in front of a bridge somewhere...

I suppose I could just haul up the drawbridge, wait for the siege to time out (so annoying -- miasma and cave adaptation, ho!), and hide the depot behind its own bridged wall (so the caravans don't drop in and get slaughtered)...

Is any of this going to change/be fixed? :(
Yes, it is one of the big items to be tackled in the bugfix cycle after the villains are done and in, though it needs a lot of experimenting because it is at it's core an issue of balance and systems not working. (It is natural people would freak out at dead bodies, but it is also not fun in any way toward the player to make it impossible to recover from this)
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Bumber

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Re: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« Reply #4 on: November 12, 2018, 04:13:09 pm »

Have you considered... !!Magma!!?

It has the benefit of preserving iron.
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Xyon

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Re: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« Reply #5 on: November 12, 2018, 04:53:06 pm »

If you don't mind running a water system, could you use running water to wash the bodies from the kill floor into a repository or something with an atom smasher? Just a thought.
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Miles_Umbrae

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Re: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« Reply #6 on: November 12, 2018, 06:48:45 pm »

If you don't mind running a water system, could you use running water to wash the bodies from the kill floor into a repository or something with an atom smasher? Just a thought.
I've only seen living and reanimated beings affected by moving water.
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Hyndis

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Re: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« Reply #7 on: November 12, 2018, 09:55:51 pm »

Negative thoughts are everywhere. Dwarves will dwell on negative thoughts forever. Positive thoughts and fulfilling needs is hard to come by and the value of positive thoughts is very low compared to negative. There's almost an inevitable downward spiral to insanity and madness. Its like a Call of C'thulhu game.

There is one way to get around this, but you must be proactive. You need to get all of the trauma out of your dwarves immediately. This means frontloading trauma until they don't care about anything anymore.

Have a large melee military. Get right up in the face of a siege. They'll see so much death so quickly they wont care about anything anymore. This makes them immune to the effects of seeing corpses for the rest of the game. Another option is to quantum stockpile corpses and create a burrow over the corpse pile. Have everyone idle in that tiny burrow. They'll chat with friends, make new friends, strike up romance, all while shoulder deep in corpses.

Either you successfully inoculate them to further trauma or they're broken forever. The dwarves who break should be expelled from your fortress. You can expel them to one of your holdings if you want to try retrieving them later. Send them off for a few seasons and summon them back with a messenger, and hopefully they will have somewhat recovered.
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« Reply #8 on: November 13, 2018, 03:38:57 am »

If you don't mind running a water system, could you use running water to wash the bodies from the kill floor into a repository or something with an atom smasher? Just a thought.
I've only seen living and reanimated beings affected by moving water.
You obviously haven't played on an ocean embark trying to recover stuff moved around by the surf... (I once made the mistake of deconstructing the embark wagon that stood in the surf area, and the cancellation spam resulting from that has made an impression).

@Hyndis: I disagree. If you adjust your expectations and accept that some dorfs are going to be lost no matter what and you play with some care (taking stress cases off corpse hauling, etc.) you can run a fairly normal fortress (until it's killed by crash bugs), but I certainly would like stress to be tweaked, in particular with regards to social, food, and prayer needs.
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Saiko Kila

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Re: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« Reply #9 on: November 13, 2018, 03:21:20 pm »

Negative thoughts are everywhere. Dwarves will dwell on negative thoughts forever. Positive thoughts and fulfilling needs is hard to come by and the value of positive thoughts is very low compared to negative. There's almost an inevitable downward spiral to insanity and madness. Its like a Call of C'thulhu game.

My absolute top three are:
1. dead and deaths of some randos
2. rain
3. rotting clothes

1. is top killer of happiness. Dwarves often relive a bad thought related to a dead guy, be it a giant or goblin, even if said giant was killed a few years ago, and they actually were far away from the place of death (but that isn't a problem for a psychic, right?). But they are also horrified by new deaths or dead bodies, again and again, even though any sane human would desensitize itself quickly (to remain sane and active in face of danger). Dwarves do have a habituation of sorts, which was implemented by Toady as a way to deal with this problem, but this works on another level and time scale than needed.

Problem 2. seems to affect severely only some dwarves, but is surprisingly powerful for them, and can bring happiness down much faster and lower than witnessing deaths. Strange that they still like waterfalls. Isn't a rain just a big waterfall?

With 3. you can deal with, but only if you make all stuff. I don't (why would I want to make socks if they are not required?). For some reason dwarves won't throw away rotting clothes, even if the lack of such clothes gives them no negative thoughts at all. DF really needs some standard armour/get up for civvies. This can be worked around using military interface, so it's not as bad as possible, but totally unnecessary.

Also, I like comparison to CoC. If not for dfhack, my games would be like a session of CoC.
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gchristopher

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Re: Cleaning up from siege results in massive drop in fort happiness
« Reply #10 on: November 14, 2018, 10:36:59 pm »

If you don't mind running a water system, could you use running water to wash the bodies from the kill floor into a repository or something with an atom smasher? Just a thought.
I've only seen living and reanimated beings affected by moving water.
You obviously haven't played on an ocean embark trying to recover stuff moved around by the surf... (I once made the mistake of deconstructing the embark wagon that stood in the surf area, and the cancellation spam resulting from that has made an impression).
This bears a little more complete explanation, because building systems to flush items via water flow is possible, but very difficult due to limitations in the way flow is implemented.

Wiki article on water flow

There are two ways liquids can move, teleportation (water pressure), and "flow" (my word choice) when water moves downward or sideways to an adjacent tile with a lower level of water. That flow is what can move creatures or items, and only exactly one tile at a time. Pressurized water (like a long pipe full of water fed by a large cistern above) looks like it's flowing, because water is streaming out the end, but the tiles in the pipe are not aware of any water movement, because the water is actually teleporting from the top of the cistern to the end of the pipe.

Item movement is possible, e.g. if you have three tiles horizontally and dump/pump 7 units of water on the leftmost one, you might see a sequence of water levels like:
700
610 (items in the left tile might move to the center tile)
520 (items in the left tile might move to the center tile)
511 (items in the center tile might move to the right tile)
421 (items in the left tile might move to the center tile)

Since there are only 8 possible amounts of water on a tile (0-7), it can be complicated to set up a reliable, directional gradient of water levels that will move items somewhere more convenient. As the system empties, some backwards motion is almost unavoidable in horizontal sections, since you'll see water level patterns like 121 at some point, where the 2 can move left or right at random, and is likely to bounce around between the three positions until it flows away or one of the 1's evaporates.

If you ever fill the entire area up with 7/7 of water, item movement won't happen until some of it starts draining.

For me, this usually means that the item transport distance is limited to a few tiles, maybe from a trap hallway through a row fortifications directly adjacent to the hallway.

None of that really solves the psychological problems, since you still have a pile of FPS-damaging invader bits to deal with, only one hallway over. I'm glad Toady circled back to make psychology matter again, but it could use some more thought on the details of the mechanic.

I encourage trying magma as a solution, just for the Fun of such an exercise, though!
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