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[GrimmSweeper]

I've been preparing a lame-ish lava flood defense for a couple of in-game years (interrupted every other season by seiges). I have a channel that wends its way to the front of my fort where several channels outside would keep it fenced in once I prepare a floodgate and unleash FIREY DOOM. That's the plan, anyway.

There are 3 floodgates on this channel:
- one halfway from the lava fields to the chasm to keep pesky magma men from coming down and destroying my carefully planned defense.
- one a little past the chasm aquaduct for redundancy
- one connected to the cave river via channels

Now, I had put the last one down in order to initially flood that channel with water. It would allow me to build stone bridges instead of having to reinforce with steel (of course, logic rears its head now to tell me I could've done the same without it and closed the 2nd floodgate instead, go me!). However, I had forgotten to cover all sides with channels so that no rampant flow would stick around and keep my channel flooded. Meaning that once I closed that floodgate, it didn't drain. :/

So I steam-cleaned it by opening the 2nd floodgate (after preparing my bridges). This purged all the water. Except that now those same channels would not transmit the water from the cave river to the 3rd floodgate. I have had to dig a new channel (and drown another stupid dwarf) to get water to run down the lava channel.

That's not all. At one point, during a seige, I had inadvertantly trapped some lava in between the 3rd floodgate and the cave river.  Because lava flow still existed on both sides (from the floodgate one-tile flood), the empty channel code it generates when a floodgate closes had nothing to work on, so nothing happened.

Here's the crazy part. I re-closed the floodgate and it sent the "empty channel message" down each individual channel it was connected to INCLUDING the main lava channel. My lava was draining away... all the way to the lava fields, leaving me with a useless channel in the midst of a goblin siege.

[Zengief]

a screenshot would be nice to aid your explanation.

[darknight]

yea, I had a problem with my present fort, when trying to run water to initialize a lava channel. I ended up with a short odd flood, when the water reached the gates at the magma river followed by a quick crash to desktop. I had to go back to the latest save, and then NOT connect the two channels. So I now have two gates and a small hall, that are blocked off by statues to avoid any problems or memory lapses. But I worked around it and still got my steam defence working, tho not as I intended. I'm down to only one of the three gates I built at the magma river tho. I never ran into magmen before this. I've already modified my plans for my next fortress.

Still ran into problems with "race the train" desease tho, both times I turned on the lava. Thankfully it was mostly animals that died. 9 The first time and 8 the second is still a bit much tho. Specially when in two invasions, my total losses were one farmer, two wardogs, and a cat. (14 out of 16, and 32 out of 36 dead on the goblin side, with 12 dead humans that got caught when the second invasion showed up.

[Toady One]

I can't say I'm following this, but it seems like the lava that got "trapped" between anything where one of those things isn't the magma river should have been cleared because it isn't sourced.  So in general, there seems to be some problem with the sourcing.