Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Catharsis]

Played another fortress with this mod. Settled on an island with only dwarves and white tigermen. Started in year 5, a giant came in year 10, and white tigermen arrived in year 11 (6 of 9 were without names, so you're probably right about that, although of the 9, the only named were 3 wrestlers, but that's probably just a coincidence.) Also, just to note, all were armed and armorer except the wrestlers, who did not have armor on (intended?) One thing I did notice that was strange was that in two instances the tigerman charged each other, but I reckon this is some side effect of crowding that causes the tigerman to charge at someone who is within his path instead of his intended target, since they did not attack each other otherwise.

Glad I saw some action though, was about to call it quits for this world after 5 years but thankfully that giant showed up (the white tigerman squad showed up moments after it was slain.) That said, my fortress wealth is only at 500k, with 63 dwarves (capped at 50, excluding births), and 6 years isn't that long of a wait anyway. However, I was able to arm and armor 5 dwarves in full masterwork iron gear and train them to (mostly) all legendary combat skills within that time, and they made extremely short work of the squad, suffering not only no causalities, but also no wounds. This was only the first squad though so I will be sticking it out instead and I'll report more on how the war progresses.

Also, here is some combat text from the siege:



That's gotta hurt.

[darkflagrance]

Five years sound serious, but I'm glad the invaders managed to come in the end. I'll be following your progress as you post more!

Tigermen should have the lowest progress triggers, so this implies that even at the earliest a fortress will have to wait several years for an invasion.

I suspect the wrestlers, being historical figures, picked up wrestling and decided to come naked. I guess that's their decision.

The iffiness of invasions is why I generally recommend allowing multiple civs access; that way even if one falls prey to an unpredictable bug in the current version, the others can provide some...gutwrenching entertainment.

[Catharsis]

Was going to wait a bit longer before I posted, but there are a few oddities here that need to be shared anyway.

Shortly after my previous post, in early 11, one of the dwarves in my fortress took the position of king out of nowhere, and I assumed the worst. This was confirmed when I checked legends, it seems the tigermen have claimed the original fortress of my civilization, killing the queen and everyone else. This aggression will not stand.

As I was preparing my king's quarters, year 12 rolled around and with it another siege.



Well, that's... interesting. Seems all the animals have names and none of the tigermen do. Also, the horses were not mounted, but simply fought alongside the invaders (in fact one of them is a recruit... not sure how that works.) Was a little worried at the sheer numbers, but my five axelords made quick work of them, slaying all tigermen and dogs, leaving only a few of the horses to escape, whilst suffering no casualties or injuries.

[darkflagrance]

Damn those tigermen! Curse their filthy furred ways!

This looks like War Troll behavior. Tigermen didn't use to do this in older version of DF - they used to mount their available animals instead of bringing them. It looks like this is associated with the updates to goblins that caused them to bring bigger sieges. I think I will fiddle with the use animal tags, if I can - but I don't think this is too undesirable yet. The animals get assigned names most likely because of updates to the invader code when this behavior was introduced to apply to non-entity invaders, and it likely does not apply to non-notable invaders due to a bug.

edit: looks like these tags cause this behavior

Code: [Select]

[COMMON_DOMESTIC_PACK]
[COMMON_DOMESTIC_PULL]
[COMMON_DOMESTIC_PET]
Replacing them with

Code: [Select]

[USE_CAVE_ANIMALS]or

Code: [Select]

[USE_GOOD_ANIMALS]
[USE_ANY_PET_RACE]Should disallow horses and war dogs - and trigger unicorns and jabberers.

[Meph]

I know you don't want to be dependent on dfhack, but I just wanted to let you know that scripts exist that can assign specific animals/creatures to civs as mounts, warbeasts, minions, etc. It's possible to give tigermen war-tigers to ride and tiger-ogres instead of trolls; give hellfire imps some troops of balrogs or demon-dogs to ride, etc.

[darkflagrance]

I know you don't want to be dependent on dfhack, but I just wanted to let you know that scripts exist that can assign specific animals/creatures to civs as mounts, warbeasts, minions, etc. It's possible to give tigermen war-tigers to ride and tiger-ogres instead of trolls; give hellfire imps some troops of balrogs or demon-dogs to ride, etc.

You are right Meph. I feel that part of my design philosophy for Fortress Defense is keeping the diverges from vanilla necessary to make the mod work relatively minimal, and only add what's necessary while using as many basic assets as possible. I like a mod that's low maintenance to install and use, and for that reason I try to stay clear of dfhack. I'm not sure the additional features would be worth the increased installation complexity. But this does not hold true for branches of Fortress Defense not maintained by me - anybody is free to make those changes themselves, if they desire.

[Meph]

Just wanted to let you know.

If you like to make a list of war-animals, mounts and minions (goblins have trolls) for each race, I might be able to supply those. No extra work for you, but people that like to play Fortress Defense + Fortress Defense Pets, could drag&drop it into their files.

[varnish]

I'm so glad to see this being worked on again. I'm trying out a fort right now, and will hopefully have something interesting to report.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I've just completed 5 years with this mod (0.40.xx experimental) and I guess it's time to report.
Playing the complete install. Basic worldgen: Large world, Very High sites, beasts and savagery. 250 year history.
That left all the races intact, there was even 1 Dwarf civ left (out of 5) with a healthy population of just under 2000.

I embarked in the most Fun looking location I could find. A long, long way from the other Dwarf sites with neighbours of: Fiend Spiders, Badgermen, Raptormen, Tigermen, Warwolves, War Elephants, Pandashi, Jotunar, Frogmen, Hellfire Imps, Dark Stranglers and Goblins. There were Humans and Elves around someplace too apparently, but they never turned up in the five years of play.

Year 1: Quiet. Population 27 by the end of Autumn

Year 2: Werehorse attack in Spring. Turns out to be a War Wolf. Werehorse Warwolf. Hmm. Interesting.
            Population 69 by the end of Autumn. Gave traders massive profits and sent millions in tribute to mountainhome.
            FB attack. Giant Bee. 1 Dead guard. Mayor lost a hand. One chap with advanced rot in the lung - seems to be OK.

Year 3: Spring migrants bring the population to 91. Attacked by a giant. FB in the caverns in Autumn and then...
            Winter Goblin siege! Yay! 10 goblins. Swordmaster wiped them out. Military training OP...?

Year 4:  Spring - Dark Strangler Siege! 9 monkeys and a kobold thief caught in the crossfire.
            Summer - War Elephant thief failed to sneak into the fortress was chased by one of the crossbow squad...
                            who ran into a Goblin Siege! 35 goblins and 9 trolls.
            Autumn - Bit of a break to give loads more gold to the traders to encourage bad people to come visit.
            Winter - White Tigermen Siege!!! Bit of an anti-climax, they showed up and left right away.

Year 5: Spring - Frogman thief. Not falling for this one again. Leave him be and sure enough...
                        Dark Strangler siege! 31 Dark Stranglers. The swordmaster strolled out to meet them
                        ...and ran into a Pandashi Ambush! An ambush, in .40.24!!?? Wonders never cease.
                        Approaching the Pandashi and.."A horse has sprung from ambush!". Um...OK
                        Altogether about 50 Pandashi were hidden out there and two evil horses. They all ran away
                        when they saw the swordmaster approaching.
            Summer - Great Fiend Spider Siege! 10 spiders. Unstoppable forces of evil and..."I was attacked! How shocking!",
                           "Gruesome wounds...begone fear". Not quite as scary when they start talking. Interestingly the siege included
                            3 Great Fiend Spider Crossbowmen. Luckily they seem to have left their crossbows at home.
             Autumn - Goblin siege! 42 goblins
             Winter - Dark Strangler siege! 39 Dark Stranglers.

And that's where I left it. Basically an attack every season starting at year 2 winter. Hopefully the Spiders are coming back in force next year. No hellfire imps, Badgermen or Jotunar yet.

[darkflagrance]

Thanks for the report Shonai_Dweller! I'm glad to see that my mod was successful one more time in delivering !!FUN!! Encouraging the otherwise shy sieges with offerings of gold to the rng should be an effective approach, due to the tags tied to production and trade on the FD races.

It seems so far that enemies never come with sieges within the first two years, but boosting population and trade can have them come as early as the third year? I haven't been able to do enough tests to know whether all civs within range will eventually come, or whether bugs will each some armies en route. I'll look at Great Fiend Spiders and see what their tags are making them do, but their speech capabilities do make them cutely reminiscent of the spiders in The Hobbit.

I assume the Spiders gained crossbow skill from knowing how to shot web.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Now that I'm at war with spiders, monkeys, tigers and goblins, I'm going to retire this fort and start a new one nearby. We'll see how fast the baddies turn up when you start in an established war zone.

[Immortal-D]

So this is where all of those !FUN! visitors in Masterwork come from.  I hope the world-pathing or whatever bug gets addressed in the next patch so I can see all of these critters again.

[Shonai_Dweller]

How much did you modify the production and trade tags in this mod?
I assume it's still suffering from the same pathing bug that vanilla has, but I had more goblin attacks playing this than I've ever seen before. Makes me wonder if fixing the bug will have much of an effect at all.

[darkflagrance]

How much did you modify the production and trade tags in this mod?
I assume it's still suffering from the same pathing bug that vanilla has, but I had more goblin attacks playing this than I've ever seen before. Makes me wonder if fixing the bug will have much of an effect at all.

Trying to post from a location with terrible, terrible internet. I've lost this post multiple times, so I'll give a quick summary of what I attempted to post the last two times:

I did not modify goblins. Their behavior might be indirectly related to Fortress Defense civs however, perhaps by encouraging a war footing in world gen or similar. The Fortress Defense civs themselves have progress triggers from 1 to 3, so that they arrive earlier than goblins; they could potentially be triggering the pathing bug on themselves because they come sooner, and thus sparing goblins. On the other hand, people have reported that goblins from time to time do make it to forts on schedule as well, so you might just be experiencing natural variance.

When work is not choking me with a wet dishrag, I need to look up the specifics of the pathing bug on mantis, assuming it's listed there at all.


http://mail.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=7739 is the pathfinding bug. Toady claims to have fixed it in August.

This is a related bug: http://mail.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=8754

[Shonai_Dweller]

Interesting. Might just be my choice of embark then.
Goblins apparently finished off my fort less than a year after I retired it. Must send in an adventurer to take revenge.

No sieges in first two years of the new fort. Elf and Human caravans showed up though. Wonder why they never came to the last place? It's only just down the road with all the same neighbours. Pathing bug?