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[Pvt. Pirate]

I've never created an arena before and haven't found much about it, although many mention their forts having arenas.
sooo i searched for pictures and mostly found modern arenas/football stadiums instead.

so far i only know that one would need a way to put (fighters and) monsters/enemies into the arena without risking them to break lose again and wreak havok.
this can be done either by having entry chambers disconnected from the fighting ground via drawbridge-gates and placing them into built cages there, releasing them via laver OR having those entrychambers and dropping them in from above, which might prove risky.
also some way of retrieving items and/or cleaning should be there.

what are your preferred designs, what are the technically unnecessary necessities to you?

[EternalCaveDragon]

I haven't created any arenas myself as of yet. But I did watch how Kruggsmash did it in his Futurelanterns series. And the way he did it was to use cage traps to catch the enemies he used for the arena from attacking sieges. Pretty simple unless you wanna get enemies that have trapavoid. And the dwarfs would access the arena from a tunnel below the arena floor. There wouldn't be any other ways in or out of the arena, the walls of which were made out of logs so they weren't easy to climb. The enemies would then be moved (still inside their cages) into a small room suspended above the arena floor and their cages linked to a lever with a retractable bridge in the center (on a separate lever) so the goblins would fall through when it retracted and into the arena.

Looked a little something like this iirc:

 WWWDWWW
 WCCCFCCCW
 WCBBBBBCW
 WCBBBBBCW
 WCBBBBBCW
 WCCCCCCCW
 WWWWWWW

This chamber would be suspended a few levels above the arena floor, so the captured enemies would still be able to provide a challenge to the resident dwarves. You can obviously resize this to suit your needs as far as enemy amount goes, and it's stackable too. Sometimes a captured enemy won't fall in on the first go, but you can always pull the lever multiple times. A retractable bridge is important with this setup since a raising/lowering bridge will simply fling/smack/atomsmash whoever is in there.

Of course, there's plenty of other ways to go about this, and there's also a trick to get captured prisoners out of their armor and weapons that I read somewhere in case you want a super easy round. All depends on what you want out of the arena.

[Pvt. Pirate]

i actually never tried dropping enemies anywhere. wouldn't it be easier and safer to build the cages within the arena and release the fighters that way?

[daggaz]

I would rather build a large arena, and around this on the perimeter, place a number of airlocks.  Inside the outer end of each airlock, you put your caged opponent, be they man or beast or else.  Now you link each airlock to a control room, such that you can add different opponents whenever and however you see fit.  The crowd sits a few z levels up, of course. 

[Pvt. Pirate]

that's what i meant. is it also useful to have means of cagetrapping the enemies inside the arena in case one wants to clear the arena?

[EternalCaveDragon]

Best way to get them to walk over cage traps would probably be to have a pathway leading directly out of the fortress that has cage traps in it that you can open at your discretion. Since if you got them via siege then it's most likely they'll try to leave the map if they can by the time you have them fight in the arena. Alternatively a captured megabeast (a Forgotten Beast for example) will most likely try to path into the fortress itself rather than leave the map. So a pathway leading that direction with cage traps (and maybe giant cave spiders that can shoot webs onto those traps since some if not all megabeasts can avoid them normally).

Or, in case you want to roleplay it a bit, you could also simply let those enemies who win in the arena go free via such a path. Having "earned" their freedom if you will. Or engineer a way to kill everything that might be living in the arena in the case of an especially dangerous FB or Titan winning out. Though if you managed to capture one of those in the first place then it'd probably be little trouble to capture it again. Maybe. >.>