Print

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

[KVC627]

I like traps as opposed to using the military.  I've used overwhelming weapon and cage traps, and have now decided to try pressure plates.

So on my current fortress I have a 6x3 bridge which retracts, over a water pit connected to a pressure plate.
When building the plate I choose 1 use and creatures trigger. I also choose 1000 as the trigger point,
as low as it would go... and connected it to the bridge.

When my first siege finally came, the goblins walked right over the damn pressure plate and nothing happened.  Thankfully a caravan had just arrived and the spear dwarves kicked ass and I lost only one Fisherdwarf.

Clearly I screwed up the bridge building...but how?

wwwwwwwwwwww
bbbbbb  c
bbbbbb    P
bbbbbb  c
wwwwwwwwwwww

w=wall  b=bridge c=cagetrap = P=pressure plate.

I first built the bridge then the plate and then connected them as I would a lever.  Do I need more plates?
I thought about building 3 but that seemed to contradict the Wiki entry about pressure plates...

[Sphalerite]

First:  bridges have a 100 step delay between when they are triggered by the pressure plate and when the actually retracted.  It is likely that the goblins walked on to or even past the bridge before it activated.

Second:  bridges have a weight limit.  This is not a cumulative weight limit, rather any one creature over a size of approximately 1,200,000 will prevent the bridge from activating.  Goblin sieges often arrive riding mounts which are over this size limit.  A bridge will not activate if a full grown draltha, rutherer, elephant, or other very large creature is standing on it.  If your goblins were on mounts, that could have prevented the bridge from working, if the mounted goblins were walking across the bridge when it tried to retract.

[KVC627]

This was the first siege, and consisted of about 15 goblin lashers.  100 steps easily passed and no retraction.  I captured 2, my traps killed my 4 and the 3 spear dwarves from the caravan killed the rest after they all pasted the bridge..And they were not really bunched together, they were more in 3 waves, from chasing my Fisher and his hunting dogs.

[Sphalerite]

Why did you make the pressure plate 1 use?  While that shouldn't have prevented it from triggering the bridge, it should have made the pressure plate deconstruct after the first time it was triggered.  If the pressure plate is still there, it didn't trigger, which means that you may have set the triggering conditions for the pressure plate incorrectly.  Did you change the maximum size as well as the minimum?  For what you want to do, you'd want to leave the maximum at max and set the minimum as low as it will go.