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[coldmonkey]

Nope.

anyways for defense you've got the normal way and the special way (reminds me of Sun Tzu quite a bit...)

The normal way is fortifications, marksdwarves and melee dwarves, and possibly tame war animals or tame large predators.  Defend sieges the medieval way. Charge enemy ranged squads with melee dwarves. Go all Vauban on fortifications, moats, archer towers, build castles, pillboxes, bunkers, whatever. Just make sure your enemies cannot go more than 1 tile close to your fortifications, with moats mostly.

The special way is traps, both simple weapon/cage traps and devilish Bond-like death devices. Drowning chambers ? Magma chambers ? Cave-in traps ? Putting tame dragons on pillboxes and see them burn everything that isn't an elite ranged soldier ? Dropping gobbos 25 z-levels and see them decorate the cavern with body parts ? !!Lignite floors!! ? Minecart shotguns or minecart railguns ? Encasing enemies in obsidian ? The sky's the limit !

You can of course mix both. I prefer the first way because it is more glorious, but the second way is generally funnier. Good for evil laugh practice as well.

And in the spirit of Sun Tzu, the greatest defense is of course to keep a low population and produce only what's necessary, so no-one will care to invade you.

[joeclark77]

And in the spirit of Sun Tzu, the greatest defense is of course to keep a low population and produce only what's necessary, so no-one will care to invade you.

Cage traps is more reliable.

[Remuthra]

And in the spirit of Sun Tzu, the greatest defense is of course to keep a low population and produce only what's necessary, so no-one will care to invade you.

Cage traps is more reliable.

Often I like more of the first, with plenty of cage traps. Deeper in the fortress the prisoners can then be subjected to the elaborate death machines.

[Hyndis]

The  Magma Hammer Is built over a volcano. Water drips from above in 7 places in the center of the U-shaped catwalk and the cave in's knock invaders into the volcano where they sink, burn and disappear. Nice and clean. Also the entrance, magma hammer chamber and/or outdoors can be flooded with large amounts of magma.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Two levels down is a by-passable bridges drop pit and a constructed floors on supports drop pit; here shown trapping elves for slaughter.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Magma can be pumped all the way down to the depot and fill the drop pits as well.

Also that dwarf has about 4k kills.

Oh hey, my magma hammer design! Nice to see it in action.

I never actually built a magma hammer myself. It was purely a theoretical thing that existed only in my head. However I've got a thorough understanding of DF physics and gameplay by this point, so I don't actually need to build something in game.

As fun as the magma hammer is, I just had a lot more fun having my dwarves fight in glorious hand to hand combat. My fortresses are full of warrior-poets. They're out on the battlefield slaughtering infinite invaders from a dozen hostile civilizations laying siege, and then decorating their weapons and armor with the bones and metal of slain enemies.

In order to funnel all invaders to the battlefield of honor and glory, I wall off the entire edge of the map with retracted drawbridges except for a somewhat narrow path that leads right into my fortress. There is then nothing between my fortress and the invaders except for a large dwarven army. No fortifications, no traps, no engineering marvels. Just dwarven steel held in dwarven hands.

Its also a great way to manufacture artifacts. These aren't artifacts made by a mood, but instead artifacts that earn their status through endless battle, decorated with pages of bones and metal of slain enemies, and having earned their name through decades of endless warfare.

[vjek]

Oh, the hammer works.  I'm going to be building a test fort in the next day or so to prove out it's effectiveness against a clown invasion.

I'm using a minecart repeater to get the release rate of the water to exactly the right number of ticks.  A steady flow consumes too much magma, and of course, not enough doesn't give you enough cave-in explosions.

If that works out as expected, I'm going to try to build an artificial one, next.  That is, expose the SMR sea and build my own pump-refilled-magma shaft and see if that works as well as a real volcano.

[Hyndis]

A mine cart would be ideal for the flow. Just make sure you're dumping the water through a floor grate. Floor grates cannot be destroyed from below. If you don't build a floor grate, then the demons can simply fly up, wreck all of the machinery for the magma hammer, and then cause mayhem elsewhere.

When I first proposed the design mine carts did not exist but you can set up a very fast repeater mine cart using track rollers and ramps which is perfect for a magma hammer. Keep that thing moving at crazy fast speed and have it dip down through water to fill up. Then use a no friction track stop to dump off the water through a floor grate onto magma. I was thinking bucket brigade in my original design or water pumps designed to push out a very slow flow of water as to not overwhelm the magma surface.

The entire thing could be turned on and off with the single pull of a lever. Once its set up its entirely automatic until the lever is pulled to turn it off, and thats a good thing as mine carts flying around can be extremely hazardous to dwarves.