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[Asmodeous]

I don't know if this is already reported, and I apologize for my screenshot being after the fact and not during but I was busy trying to save my fort. Anyway, where you see the wall, it is being rebuilt after tearing it down to get rid of the crazy fortifications my masons carved.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As you can see by the carnage and the rather large number of caskets (all of which are full) something went wrong. What happened is the northern wall (where it shows) when the fortifications were carved into it were carved so that I could not fire out, but the aggressors could fire IN. So when the Ambush arrived, it was... well it wasn't pretty, but it was a duckshoot. After some initial scrambling I moved my dwarves outside and took them down, but not without great cost (12 dwarves and a whole lotta wardogs!) to my fort.

The interesting thing here is that the Western wall (the one by the drawbridge that goes North-South) was carved correctly so my marksdwarves could fire through it, but the NORTH wall (the one that goes East-West) was carved so that you could fire through it N-S but not S-N.

Is this a known bug? Is there something specific I did that made the "Carve Fort" logic take a crap?

[torne]

Fortifications affect all directions equally; there's no such thing as a direction they're carved. Units which are adjacent to fortifications have no penalty to shooting through them, but the penalty increases the further you are from the fortifications. Usually people dig a channel in front of the fortifications, which keeps invaders at least one square away.

[Asmodeous]

...well that does not at all work like I would expect arrowslits to work. Editted topic name to reflect, carry on.

[Thief^]

How would you expect your guys to be able to fire through arrowslits from miles away, but your enemies not be able to even though they're standing right next to them?

[Asmodeous]

They weren't miles away, they were 2t away. The unexpected part was them firing back through without difficulty, as from all arrowslits I've ever seen carved into anything they are wider on the interior and narrow to slits so the archer can stand close to it and have his forearms and bow in the widened-nook to fire through the slit, making it incredibly difficult to fire both directions through the arrowslit. They are, for most all intents and purposes, 1-way unless there is no one remotely near them, in which case firing through them would be useless anyway.

Edit: Better put, if you've never stood next to either side of an arrow slit in a stone wall, I assure your that from the exterior your field of view is FAR MORE limited than from the interior due to how the slits are carved, in order to aim through it you're going to have to get close enough that a trained archer can rip you apart even if he's 5-10' back by the time you get there, and if you DO manage to get there, his next arrow, so long as he hits the slit, is going to be embedded in your skull, because from his PoV you will take up the entire gap.

[Thief^]

They only widen like that to keep the wall thick (for stability of the building against catapults, rams etc), the archer still has to fire through the slit hole itself, he can't just hit the sloped bit and have it go through. You have to be right up against it to stand any chance of firing through, on either side. If a bolt ricochets off the sloped bit (say, because the marksman on the inside was standing even only a meter away) the arrow/bolt would likely be destroyed, and if not would have slowed down so much as to be non-lethal. If he did manage to hit the slit itself, an attacker trying to fire through on the other side would be dead, but it's ludicrously unlikely, and it also works the other way.

The attacker up against the arrow slits has the same field of view as a person inside and up against it would, and if anything can get his bow/crossbow closer to the arrow slit itself than someone inside and fire through quite easily. You should try it.

EDIT: This actually means that someone up against the outside of an arrow slit would have a larger target to aim at than a person on the inside at a distance from it. The person on the inside has to hit the slit from several meters away, the person on the outside is essentially unaffected and is aiming at an entire person from the same distance.

Fortifications are much more effective if they aren't at ground level...

EDIT: Forgot to mention that in wider walls the slits widen on both sides, and that older ones tend to just be straight gaps with no sloped bit. The Christian-cross-shaped ones are most common around here, and quite a few of those are just flat holes with no slope.