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[SixOfSpades]

My one fort, Marblehalls, has some strange self-imposed rules, one of which is "Absolutely no military whatsoever untill we're a Mountainhome."

So we use cage traps. A lot of cage traps.

My Units screen has over 19 pages of caged goblins & trolls, as well as a Cyclops, a Dragon, and the war leader of the local goblin civilization.

So I know what I'm talkin' about.

Behold, the Siege Sorter:
          ║
          ╚════════════════════════════════════
          ┼^^^^^^^^┼^^^^^^^^┼^^^^^^^^┼^^^^^^^^┼
          O════════════════════════════════════
outside   ^^^^^^^^^┼^^^^^^^^,^^^^^^^^,^^^^^^^^┼   inside
  the     O════════════════════════════════════    the
  fort    ^^^^^^^^^┼^^^^^^^^,^^^^^^^^,^^^^^^^^┼    fort
          O════════════════════════════════════
          ┼^^^^^^^^┼^^^^^^^^┼^^^^^^^^┼^^^^^^^^┼
          ╔════════════════════════════════════
          ║
The design can be repeated, of course, but works best as a long, straight line. All of the doors are locked against animals (you probably don't want to be wasting your precious cages on turkeys & foxes), but otherwise allow free passage. When a siege arrives, designate [q] all of the doors in the outer hallways to forbid all traffic (but leave the inner doors alone), and building-examine [t] every single cage trap and [f]orbid both the cages, and the mechanisms themselves. (Forbidding these pre-emptively cancels both the "Store Item in Stockpile" and the "Load Cage Trap" jobs that get created when a cage trap triggers--thus preventing your civilians from walking right into a battle zone.) Then sit back & watch.

Goblins will ignore the 2 outer hallways and path to the center ones. If they start to get too close to the end, just slam that last door in their collective face and they'll be forced to try another hallway. Goblins that hang around a captured squad leader can be prompted back into activity by showing them a dwarf: Designate one of the empty tiles [,] to be Channeled, thus bringing a Miner into the goblin's sight range. The Miner will either flee back inside, or (goddamn you stupid dorf) decide to attack the goblin. If he chooses the former, you may need a couple of tries before the dwarf successfully lures the goblin further down the hallway--and into the waiting cage traps therein. If he chooses the latter, hopefully the Miner's innate badassery will save his life, and even if it doesn't, the goblin will resume his (ultimately futile) task of trying to path into your fort.

Trolls will attack the closest viable target they can reach, i.e. the doors in the outer corridors. After they break the outer door down, the next closest victim will be . . . the next door down the same hallway. Trolls arrive in groups of 8, so 8 traps in a row neatly avoids the issue of 1 Troll taking forever to topple a door because he's working all alone. Once the trolls are taken care of, unlock the doors and invite any unattached goblins in.

After the "battle," just un-forbid your cages and the trap mechanisms (can also be used sparingly during the siege to nudge "stuck" goblins with a random hauler, if you don't want to risk losing a Miner).

Q: But what about Trapimmune Building Destroyers?
A: You know it's going to be spending a good deal of time trapped in a very narrow hallway, and you even know the exact tile(s) where it's going to stand as it breaks down a door. Surely a 1-tile cave-in is within your capabilities.

[Gigaz]

What about goblin archers without a squad leader? They will surely kill your bait miner. I have good experience with flushing those out with water, but then sometimes the trolls will destroy my floodgates and cause a watery mess.

[Mitchewawa]

Behind the back doors add raise-bridges; your fort is now immune to trap-immune building destroyers, trap-immune lock pickers and any building destroyer numerous enough to get past the cages.

E: Add another set of raise-bridges in front to allow your mechanics to reset the traps in case the siege outnumbers your traps.

[7KevinRS]

I was inspired by this design and I just started a new fort on a world where I died due to performing clowns.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 

As you can see, drawbridges have already been set up, I'm clearing the area to set up drawbridges on the inside. I'll later make a magma reservoir to flood the thing if things get hectic. The magma will go out by opening drawbridges, into the channeled area, back into the underground reservoir so that I never have to pump from the magma sea. Perfect defense!

[Psieye]

building-examine [t] every single cage trap and [f]orbid both the cages, and the mechanisms themselves

Why not just mass-forbid-designate (d-b-f)?

[Patroclus]

There is a better design, that avoids the problem of mooks standing around their caged squad leaders.  Lets call it the Goblin Motel (Sieges check in... but they don't check out!)

The basic idea is to have a set of long narrow bridges that lead somewhere enticing to the gobbos -- to inside your fortress, or to a chained up dog behind a window, for instance.  The bridges retract, and are linked to a pressure plate and a lever.  The bridges are over a sealed room with an exit blocked by a raised bridge.  (Because flying goblins can land on the top of the walls, build it underground, or go another Z level up and put a roof on Z=2.

Code: [Select]

Z = 0 (sealed room)
.OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
.O.....................O
RO.....................| -> raised bridge blocking exit to cages (or row of weapon traps, or whatever)
.O...................O.O
.O...................O.O
.O...................O.O
.O.....................O
.O.....................O
.O..................O..O
.O.....................O
.OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Z=1 (bridge level)
 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 +                     +
R+BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB +
 +                   + +
 +                   ^ +
 +                   + +
 + BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB +
 + +                   +
 + BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB -> to your !!milkshake!! (that brings all the goblins to the yard)
 +                     +
 +++++++++++++++++++++++

O = wall
+ = top of wall
. = floor
B = retracting bridge (6 bridges, 2 x 1 wide, 10 long per row)
| = raising bridge (set to raised)
R = ramp (Z0 comes in from outside, Z1 comes up from Z0)
^ = pressure plate (linked to all 6 retracting bridges)


When a siege arrives, seal up the other entrances to your fortress.  Goblins will path over the long winding bridge, until they hit the pressure plate.  A few steps later, the bridges retract, and the goblins fall down unharmed into the Z0 sealed room.  The bridges reappear, more goblins go out, repeat.  (It is possible to have this stop with a goblin standing on the pressure plate, with no further path, at which point he just stands there going hurr durr and the bridges don't come back.  Having a lever you can pull to re-raise the bridges avoids this problem.)

Once you have all the squads in the bottom room, you can do whatever you want to them.  You can open the raising bridge, letting the goblins path into your cage line or goblin grinder or kill zone or whatever.  You can fill the lower room with water, drowning them all. 

The nice thing about this setup is it avoids having any squads retreat or get caged until they're all in the sealed room, allowing you to entice those cowardly generals/civ leaders forward until there's no way for them to retreat any more, and collect every last piece of goblinite iron or copper gear to melt.  And if they do rout and start to run, you can easily arrange it so the only escape route is to go forward, instead of backward.

Just be aware that you will still be under siege until you break all the squads, so dont set this up without some way to deal with the sealed room.

[Talvieno]

Very nice... Clever, takes out enemies, and has no real use by itself... You get an A in dwarfiness.

[Loud Whispers]

I see a lack of flooding

Still, nice processor.

[Dust]

what about necromancer siegers. my last fort was lost because of one and i had roughly 200 cage traps between them and the only entrance to my fort but it wasn't enough.

I really need to make military a higher priority but meh i was going for a megaconstruction involving putting a cap on the volcano and a huge obsidian tower to be dropped into it after luring in the clowns and trapping them inside, so i got a bit sidetracked.

Anyway at the end of the day: cage traps: nil / necros: 1 / fun: infinity

[Findulidas]

Anyway at the end of the day: cage traps: nil / necros: 1 / fun: infinity

Having the corpses and refuse in the fort behind double doors, getting rid of it in lava/under bridge helps a lot against necromancers.

Another trap you can have is grates linked to lever which opens up a 9 z fall. Down there you can connect the hole to a flood and have the end smoothed/fortified so that the water flushes the crap outside of the map. This will probably work well against zombies and stuff thats permanently coming. Perhaps against some larger more dangerous monsters as well. A 9z fall is sure to seriously damage most monsters anyway. The key is not having any water down there when they fall down and opening it up when they are down there crawling around.

[beefsupreme]

What I've always done is have long, winding hallways that double back on themselves like this:

----------------------------------------
                                                       |
----------------------------------------
|
-----------------------------------------

with a kitten behind a glass window at the end of each hallway to lure the goblins down. The goblins can't hurt them, but trolls unfortunately get to them and kill them. Still, I get about 20 goblins per kitten, so it's a decent trade off.

[i2amroy]

A potential replacement of the miner idea could be to have a slight twist before the final door with a kitten behind a window. So if you spread out the lines a bit you could have room for a kitten behind a window that would draw goblins in but would be far enough away that the trolls would still go down their individual paths.

So it would look something like this

Code: [Select]

══════════════════
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Wc
═══════════════^┼_
══════════════════
Troll pathway here
══════════════════
══════════════════
Troll pathway here
══════════════════
═══════════════^┼_
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Wc
══════════════════This design should work identical to the previous design (with the exception that the trolls now go down the middle instead of the outside), but the goblins will be able to see the kitten behind the window and not require danger to a miner.

Lastly if you restrict your dwarves to a burrow that does not include the traps then you will be spammed a bit with cancel messages but your dwarves will not go out to change the cage traps until the burrow alert is removed.

[Hyndis]

I use a dodge trap to knock invaders down just 1 Z level into a collection pit. There is a ramp up from the pit to the narrow walkway, but wooden training spears keep knocking them down into the pit repeatedly. At no point is the path ever broken, so they will continually attempt to path into the fortress and fall off of the ledge into the pit, climb out of the pit, fall back in, climb out of the pit, fall back in, etc.

Then from there I have a few options;

I can seal the pit off entirely so no one can climb out of it anymore. That just gives me a box of goblins. They will keep indefinitely since they don't need to eat or drink.
I can open up the floor of the pit and let them fall 20Z levels onto solid granite.
I can open up an exit from the pit which leads to a huge hallway filled with nothing but cage traps.
I can open up an exit from the pit which leads right to my barracks filled with armed, armored, on-duty dwarves.

[SixOfSpades]

What about goblin archers without a squad leader? They will surely kill your bait miner. I have good experience with flushing those out with water, but then sometimes the trolls will destroy my floodgates and cause a watery mess.

Actually, I've had good success using civilians to prompt goblins (even archers) back into action, and that's without even using Miners. (One of my Butchers did get a copper arrow lodged firmly in the fat of his lower body, but all that really did was prompt the complete success of the very first time I used a hospital.) The key is to move your civilian just into the goblin's sight range. As for water, I want to use it, but as I'm consistently hovering at around 20 FPS, I don't want to risk dropping into single digits. And my design ensures that no trolls could ever reach the floodgates anyway.

Behind the back doors add raise-bridges; your fort is now immune to trap-immune building destroyers, trap-immune lock pickers and any building destroyer numerous enough to get past the cages.
E: Add another set of raise-bridges in front to allow your mechanics to reset the traps in case the siege outnumbers your traps.

There are trap-immune lock-pickers? Yeah, I considered having fail-safe drawbridges in back, but decided that I liked the idea of panicky Masons building an emergency wall right behind the door that's currently being pounded on by a bronze colossus. And wouldn't the bridges in front get taken down by trolls? I'll throw away cheap gabbro doors for free, but I get antsy about people disrespecting my bridges.

building-examine [t] every single cage trap and [f]orbid both the cages, and the mechanisms themselves

Why not just mass-forbid-designate (d-b-f)?

Ummm . . . because I tend to do things the hard way? I dunno.

There is a better design, that avoids the problem of mooks standing around their caged squad leaders.  Lets call it the Goblin Motel (Sieges check in... but they don't check out!)

Very nice, as it does indeed grab & contain everybody (except in the unlikely circumstance that the goblin going hurr durr is the very last goblin, giving him access to your milkshake), although it doesn't exactly solve the problem of "slacker" goblins hanging around their caged leaders, as you'll still have to either poke them, or wait for months for them to lift the siege (which I personally find quite annoying).

what about necromancer siegers. my last fort was lost because of one and i had roughly 200 cage traps between them and the only entrance to my fort but it wasn't enough.

I've actually never had a necromancer, as I've yet to upgrade to DF2012. Is every zombie (or fragment thereof) a building destroyer? That's pretty much the only thing that can completely clog the design in my post above.

What I've always done is have long, winding hallways that double back on themselves like this:

I'm afraid that that's an inferior design, because it limits vision. I've actually never used the true Siege Sorter at all: It's the kind of setup I should have made. Instead, I've got (4 iterations of) a long, narrow, doubling-back hallway like you showed, and the main drawback there is that if you have a slacker goblin hanging out near a turn, you have to send your civilian dwarf almost right next to him. I'd much rather have a clear line-of-sight and a good 20 tiles between the two units.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

There are trap-immune lock-pickers?

Then I take it you don't have a plan for kobold invasions?

I did something similar in v31 to make a fort with a tremendous number of caged goblins (for creature logic purposes)-- but that was when kobolds were all dying of starvation in year 4.  I used bridges and plate/hatch combos though.  Less oversight required.  Ended up with close to 500 caged gobbos, nevermind the ogres and camels.

I think kobold invasions make a purely trap-based design a thing of the past (except as a sort of personal challenge-- it's doable to make a kobold trap, just more work than it's worth).  If you have an accessible entrance, you need a way to kill kobolds.