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[orius]

Any good methods for capturing animals from the surface areas for training?  The caverns shouldn't be too hard for capturing, since there are often narrow passages, and I can create choke points to force things into cages.  The surface is harder for setting up traps, since there are many fewer terrain obstacles, and unless you carpet everything with cages, it'll be tricky to get bears/elephants/GDS/etc. into traps.  A downside to cage spam is that they'll either make invasions pathetically easy or you'll have leaders caught in the cage with their squad milling about, and trying to dislodge squads like this often costs me more dwarves than I like.

I've been consdering digging trenches and building walls to force creatures to path towards certain areas, but I'd like to know if there are better ideas.  This game could use things like tiger/bear pits, snares, and other similar traps.

[Naryar]

Dig a moat all around your map, and pepper it with entries with cage traps, including a 3-tile-wide entry for wagons.

[Girlinhat]

Cross Walls.  Build a + shape, leave the center empty, and place a cage trap there.  Works amazingly well.  A 21x21 chunk will gather plenty of animals.

[GhostDwemer]

I use cross walls like girlinhat said, but place raising bridges around my traps so I can be more selective about what I catch.

[KodKod]

It helps to make use of a river too, if you've got one. And not one of those half-arsed brooks, a real dwarfy, impassable river.

A few trapped bridges, with walls along the side, will channel anything that wants to cross into cage traps. This is especially effective if you have your military chase something across the bridge.

[Sadrice]

Wandering animals seem to mostly move along the map edges, so focus your traps there.  I mostly use ditches for funneling creatures, as they're much faster to produce.

[Mitchewawa]

Make a 3x1 hole in a wall. Place a chain at the far end. Attach a cat. Place two cage traps on the remaining squares. Do it all over the map.

This has caught me SO many animals.

[MetalHead]

Since I usually build my walls to enclose massive paddocks on the surface, I build my walls and remove ramps to take advantage of terrain and force creatures/goblins/whatever to pass close to the corners of my walls.

Implementing what may be considered the inverse of the method Girlinhat mentioned, I put trap-crosses like:

       ||
       ||`
====O^`
      `^^^`
        `^`
          `

at the corners for a combination of trapping capacity and increased path coverage.  If you want to catch more creatures per worker trip like this or just cover more area, you can extend the field with additional layers of traps.  In the above example I start with the traps marked with ^ and then expand to the `-marked spaces and further on in layers as desired.  Main benefit I've seen of this concerns the leader-capture bug because his squad will still occasionally mill about a few squares around where he's captured, and more traps leads to his underlings wandering into what's left (although I've noticed that if you wait long enough they charge towards your fort one at a time, so this also depends on your patience and desire for sacrificial victims).

If you want to eliminate the aforementioned bug entirely you often need to collect most or all of the squad (including the leader) in one go.  I came up with an idea but I haven't tested it quite yet (in fact I'm planning on building it after my Goblin Racetrack is complete).  Dig a ditch in a choke-point where you want whatever you're trying to capture to go through, like maybe 5 tiles wide or whatever you feel like.  Build retracting drawbridges across the whole length of the gap (think platforms retracting into the sides) and line the dug-out bottom area with cages (say 7-8 tiles wide and 1-2 longer than the gap itself in case of lucky dodges).  Then build drawbridges at either end with channels under them so building destroyers can't reach them, and have them fold in so that there's nowhere to stand except on the retracting area (bonus: put a roof over it so any particularly unlucky bastard sitting on the drawbridges' base when they raise gets atom-smashed).  Chase/bait the herd/squad you want into the trap, pull up the drawbridges and pull the floor out from under them for a fully-caged group in the flip of only one or two switches.  If modified for, say, a 2- or 3-z drop you might be able to catch kobolds with this too if you have this setup as part of your entryway (the fall will stun and/or injure them, and their trapavoid tag may not work... or at least your war dogs can finish the sneaky little bastard off without having to run it down).

Best part is that if you want an ENTIRE siege caged for some fun in your colosseum/arena/death race its easily rigged so that after a group is snagged your haulers cart one wave off and bring fresh cages for the next batch provided you have enough cages.  If someone else uses this please let me know how it works, as I hope to use siegers as both entertainment and training with a rousing game of Ballista Dodgeball.

[khearn]

One thing I've done to try to avoid the leader-in-a-cage problem is to have a hallway like this:

Code: [Select]

XXXXXXXXXXX
XX^^^^^^^XX
^^^........ <- Goblins enter this way
XX^^^^^^^XX
XXXXXXXXXXX
X - wall
^ - trap
. - floor
The leaders will usually path in a straight line down the middle, but the followers will wander around a lot and get caught in the cages along the sides. Then the leader gets caught in one of the traps at the end.

But this doesn't solve the problem on the surface so much. Maybe using walls (or channels) with openings to channel them into a cage corridor like this:

Code: [Select]

.........................
...........W.............
...........W.............
...........W.............
...........W.............
...........W.............
....WWWWWWW.WWWWWWWWW....
.........^^.^^...........
.........^^.^^...........
.........^^.^^...........
.........^^.^^...........
.........^^.^^...........
....WWWWWWW.WWWWWWWWW....
...........W.............
...........W.............
...........W.............
...........W.............
.........................

Kind of an expansion on the cross technique.

[Sadrice]

(bonus: put a roof over it so any particularly unlucky bastard sitting on the drawbridges' base when they raise gets atom-smashed).

A roof is not necessary for that.  That is one of the major drawbacks of raising bridges, there's no way to make it impossible to get smashed by them.

[SharkForce]

A downside to cage spam is that they'll either make invasions pathetically easy or you'll have leaders caught in the cage with their squad milling about, and trying to dislodge squads like this often costs me more dwarves than I like.

can't solve the first problem (easy invasions) for you, but have you considered just putting spikes around the cage trap, attaching a lever, and setting it to be pulled repeatedly when you feel it is necessary?

[Uristocrat]

Cross Walls.  Build a + shape, leave the center empty, and place a cage trap there.  Works amazingly well.  A 21x21 chunk will gather plenty of animals.

I like to put traps at the edges of the + too, because I have had enough critters path around the entire thing without going through the center for it to annoy me.

[Garath]

can't solve the first problem (easy invasions) for you, but have you considered just putting spikes around the cage trap, attaching a lever, and setting it to be pulled repeatedly when you feel it is necessary?

confirmed to work. Rather labor intensive to set up though, since you need to spike all tiles in about a 3 tile radius

[SharkForce]

can't solve the first problem (easy invasions) for you, but have you considered just putting spikes around the cage trap, attaching a lever, and setting it to be pulled repeatedly when you feel it is necessary?

confirmed to work. Rather labor intensive to set up though, since you need to spike all tiles in about a 3 tile radius

i would think that if you only particularly care about killing some of the goblins, and don't care if the rest simply flee, that 3x3 would be overkill. or heck, if the rest of them will start to move inward as you slaughter the rest of them, so much the better (huh... now i have an urge to design a freestanding structure that channels creatures, then find a way to make an impassable, unbreakable barrier around the edge pop up at a moment's notice... powered by a goblin-triggered pressure plate in the middle of the whole thing).

maybe if i made a ramp down to the structure, then covered said ramps with drawbridges that raise up when triggered by a pressure plate attached to a NOT gate?

[martinuzz]

the prehostoric hunting technique of using trap fences works in DF just as well.

I remember fondly, back in the days when DF was still 2D, the magnificent trap fence I had built, herding elephants through my fortress for easy cage retrieval.

simplified diagram of catching elephants on a 2d map

Code: [Select]

...=...WWW      = river
...=...WWW      B bridge
.E.B.....W      W wall
WWW=WWWWcDF   E elephants
...B.....W      c cage traps
...=...WWW      D door
...=...WWW      F fortress proper