Since we were talking about traps, I will show some pictures from year 2 of my 'challenge' fort. I lost a lot of orcs in that battle with the dwarves, so I have to regroup a bit and use traps.
On the plus side, the defeated golems are nice for decoration.
The drow will come in just a couple months, in the winter, so I quickly put in a gauntlet of weapon traps. Here is a layout I like to use when we have, as here, still a pretty decent militia capable of finishing off wounded foes. I use relatively light weapon traps with only ~3 weapons, although good weapon and mechanism quality is key. The point is to wound practically all of them but not chop them up into bits that would otherwise clog the trap. The pain and other disabilities then gives your militia a huge edge of course. You can see the bloody swaths here where the Drow army hits the barbed wire.
OK, now that we have more time to prepare, lets get to the good stuff. The first step is to have the Raiders try to score a Magma Source blueprint by raiding dwarven settlements. It is a fairly rare item so we really have to commit to crank out weapons and xebecs, I get a bit lucky and score one on the 5th raid attempt (average would be 8 ). In the meantime I also start on some magma-safe materials for various projects. The steel pipes in particular are required for building the Source.
The magma source basically provides two building blocks: the ability to fill tanker carts with magma (or water), and the ability to fill workshops with fluid. Of course there are so many ways to weaponize this: ramming the enemy with magma filled bladed cart; filling an elevated tower to pressurize 'magma landmines'; dumping alternately magma and water from elevated tram rails to obsidianize a field; leave exploding workshop as a surprise for building destroyers; etc. Here I'll just show two simple ones.
Here's a basic magma trap. The wall is just there to guide creatures in. The trap has three components. (1) a pressure plate set to 'trigger on creatures'. (2) a magma barrel. (3) a support linked to the pressure plate.
To arm it: First take some flasks to the Magma Source to turn them into Portable Magma Containers, and then bring those to deposit the magma here. Three flasks will fully prime a small barrel with nine 7/7 units of magma. Second, build a couple floors on Z+1 that are only balanced by the support, and will fall and crush the barrel when enemy triggers the pressure plate.
If you use magma safe flasks they're reusable, otherwise (i just learned now ^^) they melt after one use. Usually, I make this kind of trap lever- actuated to prevent firing on a yak or even wasting the charge on a single elf, but I wanted to show/test how it could be converted to a pressure plate version.
Here are some 'boiling oil' style magma wall defenses. This is a pretty crude version, consisting of simply orc-powered magmasafe pumps fitted into the wall. One level down are empty 3x3 rooms that act as magma reservoirs, which are fed by a tram system. Once the system is set up, most of the tramcart actions are automatic and rearming the weapon is as simple as adding a magmatanker to the track and executing the appropriate number of 'Fill magmatanker' reactions (manager works fine, although keep an eye on it if you run more than 1 or 2 routes at a time).
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Topic: ☼MASTERWORK☼ Orc Fortress v0.2.0 "Two Year Challenge" (Read 4930 times)