Another idea for something to spice up traps, levers, and mechanisms.
Alarms would be built from mechanisms, linked up to levers or pressure plates, and would give emergency directions to dwarves when they go off. They could have several options set to define their behavior:
Clear-off alarms would send all dwarves away from the general area around the alarm, useful for keeping them out of a room you're about to flood, collapse, or seal off. Perhaps the area over which to keep dwarves out could be defined like a room or some-such.
Gathering alarms would cause all dwarves to drop what they're doing and gather around the alarm. They could be set to local or global, maybe, and if more than one went off at once then dwarves would just gather at whichever is nearest.
These alarms could also be set to apply to only civilians, only military folk, only one specific squad, or everyone.
Even children listen to alarms, although of course they'll never be military and won't listen to military ones.
Possibly they could also be set to force dwarves with combat skills to go to active military immediately? If it was set like this and assigned to only one specific squad, of course, only that squad would be activated.
So, you could have an alarm linked to a pressure plate near your front door that only applies to one small squad, activating them and calling them over to investigate whenever it's tripped, for instance. Or you could have an alarm that activates and gathers every single dwarf in your fortress with military training in case of a real emergency. Or you could have one to gather everyone into a single safe room in case you need to pull the master flood switch.
You could order your dwarves to shut off or turned on your alarms manually via a command on their 'q' screen, without having to go through a lever or pressure plate. Of course, they would have to run over to do this, but they'd ignore 'clear-off' alarms to reach it (since otherwise you could be stuck with no way to turn one of those off...)
[ August 26, 2006: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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Topic: Alarms. (Read 616 times)