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[Lockem Shoto]

I have a few questions, so in order to hopefully have them answered I'm stuffing a bunch of them in here at once, so I'm sorry if this topic seems a bit cluttered. Most of it is just logic/experience based ... not so much help for controls. Basically, I've spent 15 hours on this one part of fortress mode creating a labyrinth that invaders have to go through in order to get to the opening of my underground fortress. It didn't interfere with my forest industry (I LOVE cutting wood for some reason - finding metals other than domilith [think that's you spell?] when billions of layers of damp clay/soil beneath you sits there is annoying ... especially if you have to keep pressing space in order to unpause every little spot of damn soil you find). The labyrinth was small in volume in terms of x*y but it had a lot of surface area. Kinda looked like a small intestine now that I think about it. I set up stone traps around each corner literally every 4 squares. I read through some sort of Dwarf Fortress wiki and found that goblins walking by it should in fact get hurt by it.

1) Why did the goblins waltz on in so easily?! WITH ALLIGATORS AND TROLLS! I know that the stones probably wouldn't have hurt the trolls, but I was honestly hoping that the stone traps would remove all of the goblins. My 30 dwarf army armed with wooden axes and crossbows with wooden bolts didn't stand a chance...

2) Did I need to leave room in for some sort of pressure plate? I swear stone fell traps could work easily once set down...

3) How do you people pick and choose who to draft into the military without mistakes? What I've experienced with randomly drafting is that you pick from a list where suitable candidates are, but when you select a dwarf from another squad, that dwarf is removed from the last squad and placed into the new one. Is there a way to easily pick and choose without having to write down names on a separate sheet of paper? I've been trying to find the names of said dwarves, but a lot of the time my eyes keep straining from looking and I end up only finding 2 of the dwarves. That inevitably makes me want to rely on traps alone, but I know I can't do that with only some stone and thousands of units of wood...

4) I lied about the controls-how-to questions, but this only just crossed my mind. I heard that you could create pits in Dwarf Fortress, but I could never figure out how to do it. I would have done this and had a draw bridge to keep invasions out and my crossbowmen shooting across from it if I knew about this. The only problem is that most of the tutorials I've found in video form have been in an unfamiliar skin, so I could never differentiate between some of the graphics. I understand that I probably could make a staircase and create tunnels upon tunnels through the Z-axis of this 2D world, but I have no idea how to force a cave-in so that a hole appears.

5) Do elves always get mad and leave when you show wooden products to them? I remember something about beauty, but I haven't gotten a chance to create wood crafts/totems to give to them.

6) In connection with question 4, is there a way to force people down holes?

EDIT: I JUST saw that little questions thread. If a mod wants, I'm fine with this topic somehow getting shoved into that thread ... >.< My bad, I can't seem to delete it.

[MaskedMiner]

1) Damage of stone traps are affected by weight of the stone. And yeah, stone traps are kind of unreliable because of that.

3) Either you remember their names, give your military dwarfs nicknames so they are easy to remember or get some utillity program that makes managing easier.

4) By channeling.

5) Yes. Also items which require wood to be created like pearlash.

[rhesusmacabre]

1) I'm not sure if I've ever seen a stone trap kill anything. They mostly just soften things up or slow them down.

2) Stone traps work independently, but they need to be reset after they have been triggered.

3) When scrolling through the list of candidates, it tells you (top right) if the dwarf is already in a squad. It took me ages to notice that. Using Dwarf Therapist to identify the best candidates is quite helpful, but this is still fairly long-winded.

4) Channelling (d►h) is used to dig downwards.

5) Yeah, it's very easy to accidentally offer them a wooden bin or something.

6) It depend what you mean. Captured enemies can be dropped down a hole by allocating it as a pit (i►p).

[Sphalerite]

Stonefall traps are nearly useless for defense.  They work once, then need to be manually reloaded by a dwarf.  They don't reliably kill anything, especially anything in armor, so it's not surprising that the invaders walked through them with little damage.

[agambadi]

1) As everyone's told you, stone fall traps are pretty bad, use weapon traps with 2 or so weapons made out of low grade metals like copper, this can maim and even kill creatures like goblins quite easily and it's cheap to build.

2) No regular trap requires a pressure plate to activate IIRC.

3) I draft anyone who isn't highly skilled in a useful profession and isn't already in a squad

4) use channel (h) to create a trench and then go down a z-level and use remove up stairs/rap (z) to remove the path in and out of the trench, repeat for as many z-levels as you wish.

5) Elves are really pissy about wooden products, no matter what quality it is.

6) Creatures will sometimes attempt to dodge hits by moving to a tile adjacent to the current one, if the tile they move to has nothing on which to stand they will fall down.

[i2amroy]

1) Stonefall traps  are pretty useless.
2) No
3) I tend to give everyone in my squads the profession "1(2,3,4...) Squad" then I simply pick the dwarves with the matching squad number. Make sure you put the number first so that the game doesn't "shorten" the number out of the profession in order to get the dwarf and their name to fit on the military select screen.
4) (d)-(h), and then (d)-(z). Be careful that you make sure that your dwarves have a way out of the pit after you make it though, or they'll die inside of there trying to get out.
5) Elves hate wood and wood byproducts (even their own ones ) and will always leave if you try to offer or trade any to them. Be glad you aren't here in the 40d days, back then they wouldn't take anything made from trees or animals.
6) Place a retractable drawbridge over the hole, build a lever, and then connect it to the drawbridge. Then simply pull the lever to send anything on the bridge tumbling down into the hole. Note that this won't work on extremely large creatures though.

Usually the little questions thread gets used more often by people with a single small question as opposed to several larger questions. It's up to you really if you want to post in that thread or make your own, after all, questions are the purpose of this entire sub-forum. And this place is mostly self-moderated since the only real forum mods are Toady and Three-toe and they are generally busy actually developing the game. If you really want to get rid of a thread just lock it (bottom right corner of the screen IIRC) and it should drop off the front page fairly quickly.