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[StreetPizza]

Hey there, Dorfs and Dorfettes. I have a question.

My typical fortress defense involves a hallway with weapon traps on every square and not much else because I'm a lazy bastard, but it's not particularly effective if I want carnage. Yes, it can ward off an attack, but only by killing a few goblins, at which point the rest of them get wise and back off.

I want to stop that from happening. I want to kill them all. (geez, that's not gonna sound good out of context)

By the way, my typical fortress entrance looks like this:

Outside
|^^^|
|^^^|
|^^^|
|^^^|
|^^^|
|^^^|
Inside

^ being, of course, weapon traps.

So, what can I do to increase enemy casualties, assuming I can only work with weapons and mechanisms and want it to be mostly automated (because, as stated above, lazy bastard)?

[Person]

The main things that would do it would be filling every trap with 10x serrated steel/adamantine discs. Might want to include some blunt weapons here and there though too, in case a necromancer comes by. However! Automatic weapon traps tend to jam eventually, so unless you manage to make a repeater linked to steel/adamantine menacing spike traps, the trap will stop working eventually. Unless of course, you're fine with having to clean it out every now and then. Optionally, you could set up a magma flood system since the above two materials are magma proof. Then, any limbs stuck in the traps will burn up(unless your invaders are magma immune for some reason). Just make sure the mechanisms are magma proof as well. Of course, if you can flood a place with magma, you could use it for other defenses as well.

Edit: If you want to kill them all, seal off the path behind them, leaving your fort the only option. Bridges or floodgates are a good way to do this if they're not building destroyers.

[Wrex]

Make sure they can get inside before the traps fire. A spiral using a dog as bait is probably one of the better ways of doing so, with traps on every tile.

[wolfwood296]

Make sure they can get inside before the traps fire. A spiral using a dog as bait is probably one of the better ways of doing so, with traps on every tile.

i was just going to say the same thing

if its possible deactivate all the traps until the all or most of the enemy is on them them unleash the traps

[StreetPizza]

Ooo, I'm liking these ideas. I don't have a fortress up right now (playing adventure mode at the moment), so when I set one up, how would I deactivate the traps?

The bridge/floodgate idea sounds great too. I'll definitely try that one next time.

And can youse guys show me a diagram of how the dog bait spiral would look? I'm interested in that one too.

[lcy03406]

Code: [Select]

Outside
|...|-------|
|...B.......|
|bbb|-----..|
|^^^|    |..|
|^^^|    |..|
|^^^|    |..|
|^^^|    |..|
|^^^|-----..|
|...........|
|...|-------|
|^^^|
|^^^|
|^^^|
|^^^|
|^^^|
|^^^|
InsideOpen the bridge B until all the goblins are in the maze, and raise B and open b.

[Kie]

I don't know if this is what you particularly want, but what I do is have a single hall of traps. And next to those traps, I dig 10+ down pits. Then I have the miners dig a staircase from the bottom to lead all the way back up to the beginning of the hallway. No goblin ever gets through.

[itg]

I like to use a long hallway of cage traps. You don't need high-quality materials or skilled workers to produce them. Each trap is a guaranteed "kill" (except against trap avoiders, of course), so with enough traps, you can absorb an entire siege. Usually I disarm the prisoners and pit them into an arena to train my recruits, but if you don't need the training you could be far more sadistic creative.

[Samohan25]

If you want full automation I guess the simplest solution would be to make a corridor with a raising bridge at both ends, with some form of pressure plate system half way in (or just however far in you think it should be for all the goblins to be inside before the plates are triggered). The pressure plates toggle the bridges however, so we need to add some form of latch. Uristocrat made one at some point that you can find here http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Uristocrat/ROUPP

With that system all you need to do is link the pressure plates in your hall to the hatch in the latch, then link the plate in the latch to both of your drawbridges. To reset it you need to attach a lever to the gear assembly in the latch, once the siege is dead pull the lever, wait for the water to drain and then pull it a second time.

EDIT: Made the picture, although it isn't excessively clear

[Vodrilus]

For maximum goblin capture, you could resort to something like this:

Code: [Select]

Side profile

^ (1)
X^
XX^
XXX^
XXXX^
XXXXX ---> (2)

Legend
^ dodge-me trap
X wall
(1) This is the actual goblin capture device. It's basically a terraced dodge-me trap with practice weapons etc, the top row being the actual route to your fort, and each trap row has a path to the higher one, giving the goblins a false impression of being able to run to your fort (or run away).

(2) This is a route to your fort (or also outside?), to be opened once you have a desired number of goblins in the capture device. Simultaneously, you should close the dodge-me path from the main entrance. This pathway will then lead to the actual traps, forcing all goblins to go through them regardless of whether they are attacking or running away.

(On second thought, you could just turn the capture device into a drowning chamber... or a magma bath.)

[Gukag]

If what you really want is to maximize casualties over a small aproach then a single tile wide wide hallway opened with a moat of lava or water on either side under it the way to go, aka dodge me trap. Most of the enemies will dodge the weapon traps and end up falling in your moat. Best if you can drain it of course to recover "goblinite". I've never really played around with pressure plates so I try to cut off sieges manually with raised bridges at appropriate places in the trapped hallway.

[Oaktree]

I get my best results with having a long entrance tunnel with the first 3/4 untrapped.  Let a few goblin squads get well inside and then just close the outer drawbridge.  At that point the *only* route for the goblins is through the traps.

Since goblin siege squads tend to straggle with the leaders well out front you have to have a bit of lead before chopping the leader up and making them want to retreat.  So the longish untrapped tunnel lets them get in before you shut them in and no traps prevents one from making the leader want to run before the rest of his squad is inside.  (And I've discovered with mounted goblin squads that wounding the leader's mount can often have the same effect.)

Another anti-retreat mechanism is putting hatches over open space with a pressure plate on the *inside* of the path that are wired to open the hatch when invaders step on them.  Sort of a one-way path.  However, this design has two shortcomings; First, you need to install enough that the goblins don't manage to trigger them all at once so that the other goblins outside lose path towards the fort.  Second, the building destroyers will stop to destroy the hatches and thus will eventually destroy pathing as well.  (The general solution for the latter is installed some lever-activated spike traps outside the hatches and thus spiking the building destroyers when they stop to pound on the hatches.)

Not automated unless you work with more pressure plates and things such as repeaters.

[vjek]

I've built a variety of designs over the past 9 months for automated defenses.

The easiest so far, and the fastest I've seen so far, is the "magma door" defense.

The design is simple.  Here's a top down view of the primary entrance hallway:


WWWWWWWWWWWWWW
GGDGGDGGDGGDGG
WWWWWWWWWWWWWW
GGDGGDGGDGGDGG
WWWWWWWWWWWWWW
GGDGGDGGDGGDGG
WWWWWWWWWWWWWW
GGDGGDGGDGGDGG
WWWWWWWWWWWWWW


W = wall
G = floor grate
D = door

in the Z levels below this, under the entire 14 x 7 is the drain for the magma
in the Z level above this, above the center 8 doors, are channeled paths downward which are filled with pressurized magma

Goblins (or whomever else) walk/fly in and when they open either of the middle two doors in their chosen hallway, the magma flows immediately from above, and down through the grates to the drain below.  Some magma also flows to the sides, and is contained by the other doors.

I'd be happy to provide a demonstration save, just PM me.  My most recent build of this system has netted 2300 casualties in 18 years.

A retractable bridge-floor on the same z-level as the magma-supply-channels allows for precise control of the system.

A bonus feature of this design is that goblin leaders are killed invariably within a recently/temporarily magma filled hallway, so all their squad followers want to "be there" and thusly path to that area and are also subsequently vaporized when they open the doors to access it.

I have seen two 80 goblin sieges dispatched "back to back" in under 2 minutes of real time with this design.   

[ledgekindred]

I used to build goblin abattoirs using the goblin repeater method that Oaktree mentioned above.  The way I would deal with the building destroyers though would be to put a retractable drawbridge on both sides of the trigger mechanism, with the "outer" one manually activated.  When the building destroyers lined up to destroy the hatches and whatnot, I'd pull the bridge out from under them, dropping them into a trough underneath which had upward-leading ramps back into the abattoir.  There was a long, windy path into the abattoir proper, which could be blocked off with a bridge.  Once the entire siege had wandered in, there was no way out again.  By then the first few in would start stepping on the weapon traps and start getting ground up.  Then as the siege began to panic, they would eventually all run over the traps, leaving nothing but rotting body parts and goblinite to clean up. 

The only manual step is the drawbridge to keep out building destroyers.

Has anyone actually tried dodge-me traps in the latest version?  Falling damage seems to have been severely nerfed, so you will need to have retractable spikes or something of that nature under the dodge areas, otherwise you will only wind up with stunned goblins even with a 20-z-level drop, unless they happen to land on their heads.

[vjek]

... Has anyone actually tried dodge-me traps in the latest version?  Falling damage seems to have been severely nerfed, so you will need to have retractable spikes or something of that nature under the dodge areas, otherwise you will only wind up with stunned goblins even with a 20-z-level drop, unless they happen to land on their heads.

I abandoned dodge-me traps in 34.11 after I tested a 30-z-level-drop onto upright spikes and had goblin survivors. 
"To Slade with that idea!" - Me