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[Strategos]

Hello, I've been going at this fortress for two ingame years, and I'm becoming more weary of ambushes and invasions destroying my fort.

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on defensive structures, walls, bridges and what not.

My Entrance level:

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1 Z-level below the entrance (sorry for the sloppy image posting):

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And Finally 1 z-level above the entrance:

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Let me know what the best plan of action would be 

[Ninjamestari]

Weapon traps are great if you have copper / iron, and you'll get a skilled weaponsmith
Build a drawbridge that can seal your entrance tunnel, and fill the tunnel with weapon traps. When goblins run through the tunnel, close the drawbridge and they'll run back out and through the traps again.

btw, how did you change the graphics? Looks much better than the normal DF graphics.

[daggaz]

Pretty sure thats the Ironhand graphics pack, tho its hard to be sure with the picture sizes..


Speaking of small sizes.. wheres your fort lol?  But seriously...  the entrance hallway should be longer, much longer.  It should also be only 3 tiles wide (for caravans, assuming your depot is inside your fort), in order to minimize the need for traps.  Then just as stated above, fill it with traps.  A few weapon traps,  a 3x3 of cage traps, some more weapon traps..  dont be shy.   Then some drawbridges that close to seal off the tunnel, connected to switches deep in your fort, I prefer to put mine in my dining hall, it seems they get pulled very quickly from there.  At the end of the tunnel, you can put your trade depot, and the barracks.  Now your military is always on hand to deal with intruders and protect caravans.   Make sure to put some more drawbridges and locking doors between this area, and your fort proper, just in case shit goes south.   Finally, tie up some dogs *or other pets* in the entry hallway, to sniff out thieves and such. 

Later on, you can think about expanding... I like to dig a trench on both sides of my entry hallway, then put in a wall of fortifications behind the trenches, and a tunnel behind those, from which my marksdwarves can pepper any goblins who try and linger.  You can (and should) also begin to build elaborate mechanisms of death and magma, which are sure to destroy your fort and melt the fat off your own dwarves at least twice as often as they destroy any megabeasts. 

As for the outside.. remove the upramps on your hills, control where the enemy can come from, and provide for safe lumber and plant harvesting/farming areas for your more adventurous dwarves. 

[tj333]

My usual problem with a fort on a hill side is I miss a section whee the enemy can walk opnto my walls or stand above the fort and shoot my dwarves full of arrows. I am not sure but it looks like you might be in danger of that as well.

I would also chain up some animals near the entrance of the fort to catch thieves. For a more useful approach you can search the boards for how to make animal watch towers or put them behind windows/fortifications.

[knutor]

Line an unramped moat or cliff with stone fall traps. 

Or be crazy and,  flush your entrance way, using fars to protect your pumper.  Flush them into a danger room.  Then ya never have to deal with the clumsy unorganized chaos that is the squad menu, cages or mass pits.  Link pump to a windmill.  Trigger stopper by a kitty on a pressure plate.  When kitty flees, plate goes down, and the the river is released!  When danger room pressure pad is 3/7, open the barred off map drain.

Reset with an upstream lever and pet haul a fresh kitty onto the plate.

[Garath]

i dont know which version or mod you use, but at least in df2010 there are no carts with the traders, and thus no need for a hallway bigger than 2 tiles wide

[NonconsensualSurgery]

i dont know which version or mod you use, but at least in df2010 there are no carts with the traders, and thus no need for a hallway bigger than 2 tiles wide

It's still a good idea to include provisions for traffic going one way, traffic going the other way, and traffic sitting around with a stupid look on its face in the middle of the walkway. Three tiles wide is good practice for important areas.

However, my entryway is usually much, much longer. It allows for more space for marksdwarves and more time for large mechanical traps like knutor's kitten-activated flooder to fire.

[Liber celi]

in df2010 there are no carts with the traders

...
Yes there are?

I'm using .25 with a few small mods and i get visited by cart-driving humans/dwarfs every year, except if there is no 3-tiles wide access to the Depot, in which case they only bring mules (without the old "Their wagons have passed your inaccessible site"-message, I think).

[kardwill]

in df2010 there are no carts with the traders

...
Yes there are?

I'm using .25 with a few small mods and i get visited by cart-driving humans/dwarfs every year, except if there is no 3-tiles wide access to the Depot, in which case they only bring mules (without the old "Their wagons have passed your inaccessible site"-message, I think).

Nope, no cart in vanilia DF. I never saw a cart in any of my .25 forts, anyway. Maybe your carts come from one of the mods?

[blaize9]

Ya i have also found that they don't bring their caravan wagons any more.

[i2amroy]

Ya i have also found that they don't bring their caravan wagons any more.

Correct. It's bug number 197 and is rather well know at this point. Currently it's not even possible to mod the game to get wagons to show up, the problem lies in the hardcoded stuff. So you may have been getting wagons, but if you are you are definitely not playing in 31.25.

[Sutremaine]

If you keep a wagon-accessible depot (check with 'D') you can force the caravan to appear in certain places, which allows you to heavily guard that one area (liaisons will still spawn anywhere though). If the entire map edge is spawnable and the only entrance is right at the map edge, it spaces out enemy squads because of the varying distances they have to travel.

Three-wide corridors also allow you to paint a high-traffic stripe down the middle. This compacts traffic into the middle of the corridor and leaves the edges free for dodging.

[Garath]

could you explain more about forcing a caravan to arrive at a certain place instead of random? It could help keeping them save from ambush

[Triaxx2]

Unfortunately, it seems that unless you have the 3 tile entrance, they'll always call it in accessible.

It's possible, that if there's only one path to the Depot, that the caravan will arrive there. Using Raised Bridges to create walls where you can't normally build them will let you seal a path to the map edge.