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[pushy]

Fire Turrets?

Will caged Fire Imps placed on the roof of your towers shoot fireballs at invaders or something?

Caged fire imps, being caged, won't do jack shit. Because they're aggressive, it is possible to use fire imps in fortress defences (albeit a defence that will also attack your dwarves, given half a chance) but because they can't be tamed it's pretty damn fiddly to get them sorted out.

[Soadreqm]

Oh, and related to fire imp defence: if you contain an aboveground grassy area from the rest of the world, toss a fire imp in there, and finally toss something else in there, I think the resulting shrubfire will kill anything and automatically dispose of the bodies. Better yet, have the imp behind an iron grate and a floodgate acting as a shutter mechanism, so that you can control the fireballs.

Based on guesswork, for now, not experimentation. I'm trying to build it myself right now.

[Skanky]

If they are anything like giant cave spiders, they need a valid path to their victim before they will attack.

[numerobis]

Shadowlord/Grumman's idea is much better than KoE's. Sorry, KoE.

I disagree.  Both ideas require a relatively unlikely thing (imp is right next to grate when the flow pushes through) to happen repeatedly.  But in the Shadowlord/Grumman construction, those events are not at all independent: first, the imp is next to the first fortification and gets pushed in.  If it moves right away, it's guaranteed to move back to the magma pipe, which is good.  But if not, the flow will push the imp into the middle fortification.  Now the imp can't move, so the  imp is pushed through and on to the other side, and this holds no matter how many fortifications you have in a row.  The KoE construction allows the imp to move away from the successive grates, so it's more reasonable to assume independence and thus exponential decrease in probability.  Doubling up grates in the KoE style would probably be optimal for sideways channels.

As I mentioned earlier, and someone else did also, you can also just drop the flow through a floor grate and have a guaranteed filter.

One thing to note: I've never seen an imp walk even 20 tiles down an unguarded magma channel.  My forts tend to be quite far from the pipe, 100-200 tiles away, which makes it basically impossible that an imp would get the idea to walk all the way to the forges (it also takes most of a year to get the magma to the destination, but more recently I realized that if you make the channel 2 zlevels deep until just before the forges, there's a huge speedup until first light -- takes just as long to fill the channel, but the front moves much faster).

[Grumman]

Shadowlord/Grumman's idea is much better than KoE's. Sorry, KoE.

I disagree.  Both ideas require a relatively unlikely thing (imp is right next to grate when the flow pushes through) to happen repeatedly.  But in the Shadowlord/Grumman construction, those events are not at all independent: first, the imp is next to the first fortification and gets pushed in.  If it moves right away, it's guaranteed to move back to the magma pipe, which is good.  But if not, the flow will push the imp into the middle fortification.  Now the imp can't move, so the  imp is pushed through and on to the other side, and this holds no matter how many fortifications you have in a row.  The KoE construction allows the imp to move away from the successive grates, so it's more reasonable to assume independence and thus exponential decrease in probability.  Doubling up grates in the KoE style would probably be optimal for sideways channels.

Not being independant is exactly why my idea is better. It ensures that the only way for the imp to progress is for it to be pushed into an occupied square twice in a row, without the imp moving in between. If the imp is capable of moving before the second push occurs, it will only be able move back out of the fortification, while in KoE's structure there's a 50% chance that it will go deeper into the defenses. Both structures can be defeated if the imp is pushed more frequently than it moves, but only KoE's can be defeated if the frequency of pushes is lower than the frequency of the imp's movement.