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[PopTart]

Back in 2008, someone suggested the creation of quicklime, along with ash, charcoal, or stone, to make concrete. And now we have quicklime! So, being able to make building material (including fancy furniture) out of ash and marble would be great. Having a complete calcium cycle in-game would be great (which would require fuel to make the quicklime; I can't remember if it does in-game). Reinforce the concrete with iron, and now you've got building-destroyer-proof walls--the catch is that walls made out of blocks alone are now destroyable. Walls made with blocks and a small amount of mortar (a mix of lime and sand) could also be destroyer-proof.

Other ideas:

Soda-lime glass: sand + lime. A good option if wood ash/potash/pearlash is unavailable. Produces a medium-quality glass, on par with "clear glass".

Liming the soil in lieu of potash.

Lime plaster (needs hair) if gypsum is unavailable.

Whitewashed surfaces (with "a dusting of lime") become resistant to contaminants before needing repainting. Painting soil walls with milk of lime produces limestone walls over time, which can then be smoothed and engraved.

...and many more!

[Trappington]

Sounds like some interesting applications for quicklime.  I really like how it could provide a mechanism for making certain walls vulnerable to building destroyers.  Should make fortress mode a bit more interesting.

[Orange Wizard]

This all sounds like cool stuff IMO.

[Shazbot]

Plastering soil or constructed walls to create plaster walls which could be engraved would be rather nice.

[Trappington]

Inspiration!!!

As I was thinking about this topic some, I started to realize on of the key issues with DF as it is right now.  The whole idea of DF, at least for people like me, is the story that you build before your fortress crumbles to ruin, as there is really no other objective.  The issue with this is that it is far too easy to make one's fortress impenetrable, and thus avoid all of the loss and tragedy that makes every story good.  Currently, if you want this to be part of your story, you have to intentionally seek out the most inhospitable places in your world, or intentionally leave yourself vulnerable.  While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, it reduces the characteristics that are available to you for the making of a compelling story.  No one is going to be very excited about a fort built in the middle of a good forest with low savagery where every siege is destroyed by traps and the clowns only ever get to play checkers.

So how do we find a way to reduce, if not eliminate the impenetrability of a fortress?  I think that the answer lies in the basic idea of this post along with the possibility of digging enemies in the future.  Not only should every tile, along with constructed walls and bridges, be vulnerable to enemy sappers, the time it takes to destroy a wall should be based on weather or not it is constructed and its composition.  In addition, the time required for mining stone should be greatly increased, which would both balance the strength of enemy sappers and increase the importance of miners.  And what better thing to do than to make mining a more labor intensive task.  Not only are dwarfs a mining oriented race, but it makes all those migrants a bit more useful.

I a good bit of this post is off topic, but the main idea is a salient point, as it would contribute to the usefulness of quicklime as a reagent for making walls stronger.

[Shazbot]

If the ability to patch a wall to be aesthetically identical to its former self is added, digging invaders become much more palatable to the OCD among us. I would imagine a good Dwarven mason could color plaster with rock dust until the veneer was impossible to tell. Plaster and dye could make nice paint as well.

[IndigoFenix]

If you want the game to be more challenging without intentionally leaving yourself open, there are three options I can see, none of them exclusive:

1. Creatures with wall-penetrating attack interactions (no targeting info)
2. Fun vermin effects, like interesting diseases
3. Sabotage from your own dwarves

I prefer using 3, initially prompted by 1 or 2 (though 2 will give you a warning so it's less fun).  My own Return of the Carp God is an example, which uses a cavern dwelling Elder God to telepathically turn one of your dwarves into a hidden cultist, is an example; as is Meph's original hidden cultists on which it was based, which uses a rare caste of dwarf instead.

This sort of thing probably deserves its own topic though.

[PopTart]

Another beautiful thing about wall-penetrating attacks is the way they would fit the philosophy of the game, which is: there are some actions that you take in the game that are irreversible and should only lead to your fortress's demise. In other words, you can't undig a tunnel. (A real example: you can't uncreate wealth. The exceptions prove the rule here.) In the current version, you can put up a wall, which in many ways is as good as undigging. If walls become impossible or at least very difficult and costly to prevent an attack interaction, then every square you dig out is one step closer to ruin.

Another way to look at it is that the earth is your only protection from evil. Although striking the earth is necessary to house and protect your dwarfs, any imprudent digging would compromise this protection. The whole esthetic now changes. Breaching the caverns means knowingly hastening your ruin (and not just from FPS death). Building an above-ground fortress now becomes operationalized as the abomination that it is.