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Author Topic: What the heck causes visitors to suddenly be hostile targets for your people?  (Read 3108 times)

Walkaboutout

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Seriously, this is a royal pain. It's happened to me before for understandable reasons (like attacking a visitor who was a werecreature before he turned for example).

But this time, I had a goblin siege, and lots of elven and human visitors waiting to come in to the sealed fortress. I unsealed, and released the soldiers, and broke the siege. I watched the combat logs pretty carefully. There were no instances of hostility between visitors and fort soldiers until the siege broke. My troops retired back towards there barracks, and my civilians headed outside to clean up the mess, and next thing I know I'm being spammed by interrupted tasks, caused by "elven scholar" and "human bard" and such, and my soldiers will now attack them on sight.

This is an unrecoverable mess. In my past experience what will happen is that, for a period of time, eventually, they'll stop fighting with the visitors. But after some time passes, again for no reason I can determine, hostilities will suddenly resume. What happens then is a tavern full of my civilians, and of visitors, will break into lethal combat (this is no alchohol induced brawl, to be sure), which results in sometimes dozens of deaths, and traumatized citizens who all end up in red arrow territory, and basically tantrum spirals the fort. ARGH!!

Is there some way I can avoid these damn spontaneous hostilities, you know, other thannot ordering the attack of a known werecreature who is still in his human form and visiting (totally MY doing that), or by disallowing visitors and sealing the fortress up forever, which is just silly and no fun.

P.S. Keep in mind, I think it's related to the military activity itself, because if I wait for this siege to depart on its own, and then unseal the fortress, all of the visitors flood in and no one gets into any fights, nothing goes hostile, etc.
« Last Edit: July 13, 2019, 08:13:15 pm by Walkaboutout »
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Deus Machina

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My best guess is that the attackers are actually part of the guests' civilization. Probably conquerors in the case of goblins; I'm not sure if goblins under human or elven rule will still lay siege.
If not that, then at least at 'peace' with theirs. Since goblins are never really at peace, they're just otherwise occupied, and werecreatures can come from anywhere.
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TheEqualsE

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In my fort it was every time there was a siege.  A few humans in the tavern would suddenly go hostile.  It was never the whole tavern always just a few guys.

My solution is to put the tavern in the front of the fort or by its entrance and make a fortress members only meeting area inside the fort from now on.  Also helps against pesky were creatures appearing in your tavern, which also happened.
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PatrikLundell

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I know of two "legal" reasons:
1. 'Infiltrators", i.e. groups (sometimes huge) of visitors arriving together searching for an artifact. One of them leaves while the others remain, the one leaving immediately returns stealthed and hostile. As soon as that hostile artifact hunter is engaged (either while fleeing after being detected, or as a result of it attacking), every infiltrator goes secretly hostile, i.e. some flee in terror, some proceed as if nothing happened, and some attack, while still PRETENDING to act as nothing happened, while civilians typically flee from those hostiles (they're hidden to the player, but apparently not to the dorfs).
2. Members of enemy civs can visit the fortress if they're members of performance troupes, and I suspect they may become hostile when their buddies attack (and they'll inform their civ of the traps they've encountered when they leave peacefully).

However, there was a bug that caused mayhem as soon as sieges occurred a number of versions ago. That was caused by over zealous "enemy" detection (like somebody being a descendant of a bandit) that somehow triggered when sieges occurred. That bug was fixed, but there have been a small number reports similar to this one.
I think they may sometimes be tracked down to a single individual going hostile, with the rest being loyalty cascade related (e.g. if the one going hostile comes from a civ that some other visitors' civs are at war with, the visitor factions then engage their "enemies"). Getting rid of the "volatile" visitor may block the fighting from starting (using save scumming for identification, and possibly also the DFHack "exterminate him/her" to kill the offender before the offense).
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