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[peskyninja]

Try making a drowing room, it usually works for me.

[Iosyn]

Simplest, foolproof defence:

3 wide tunnel into the mountain, make it long and then give it at least 2 turns, so in the future you can have ballista or minecart cannons aiming down it.

Construct a mechanic's shop, make four mechanisms, deconstruct mechanic's shop.

Carve a space out for the trade depot-- and construct a 3-wide drawbridge to raise towards the depot barring outside access and link to a lever. Voila, fort is impenetrable before you even have your legendary dining room smoothed.

I'd also channel out the tiles underneath the bridge and remove the ramps on the bridge side, just to be sure-- hell, you could make the bridge as long as you want, channel out more tiles and have it as a drowning trap.

alternatively, construct a floodgate in one wall, stick another bridge at the end of the hallway, raise them both and you can flood the same Z-level while having an outflow in one of the channels.
That should suffice until any building destroyers show up, by which time you should have had ample time to at least flood the tunnel with stone fall traps or create a more foolproof drowning trap.

Having multiple bridges at the very entrance designed to block passage, atomsmash or fling stuff into trapped pits at the same time is a very good idea, but bridges can take ages to construct with raw stone, so you might want to get on that after you've got an internal mechanic's shop running out plenty of mechanisms and a good amount of stone blocks.


Also never, never have corpse, refuse stockpiles or butchers and tanners ANYWHERE NEAR the trade depot.
Goes double if you're in an evil biome or embarked next to Urist McNecrophilia.

[donald]

If you get lucky enough to have a vampire in your fort, a necro or especially a reanimating biome can be put to good use. Station the vampire outside with good armor and train him up on the undead. He'll become unstoppable very quickly. Then when caravans invaders arrive, let the undead horde devour them and set urist mctwilight to scooping up the trade goods goblinite and depositing it inside your airlock. Send him back outside, cycle the lock, repeat as desired. I did this with a reanimating biome with good results. The difficult part was the eventual need to permanently kill some of the growing undead horde due to fps creep as it swelled to over 300 slavering undying abominations.

[Supernerd]

Personally I really like weapon traps loaded with 10 enormous wooden corkscrews, provided that you have wood to spare they are cheap to make and quite effective if the incoming siege needs to pass through upwards of ten of them, and I'm pretty sure that undead don't typically wear armor.

[Iosyn]

Got to love setting reanimated anything on goblin sieges.
Sheet gets exponential .

you tend to end up with zombie hordes larger than the goblin siege. It's fun watching them try to limp away.

Also, day one of my last freezing glacier embark: It has started raining Freezing Goblin Blood!!
Just watching the snow turn red tile by tile...

Until the snow covers it once more...
Yeah, this is a good omen.
I can just see some future goblin siege turning up ready to wipe me from the face of existence-- and then slipping on the ice and snow to reveal the frozen blood beneath.

'oh dear. Xom? this cherry ice tastes like Larry. And Angus.'
'bitch please, it's not like they've found some way to crush us like grapes and drain our precious fluids from the heavens.'
'but they're dwarves, xom.'
'..Touché.'

[612DwarfAvenue]

I've had this idea for a couple days. An auto-reloading animal dropper.

First, let me show the basic set up via a crappy Microsoft Paint picture, and then i'll explain how it works.

Spoiler: kind of a big picture (click to show/hide)

Now, let's start off with the tower where the dogs are chained. Have female dogs chained on the top of that tower, with male dogs kept somewhere safe to spore-breed with the females up there. Whenever any puppies are born, they'll get washed off the tower by the water. Obviously the water is to be kept at a level so it's enough to knock the dogs off, but not enough to slowly suffocate the mothers with repeated drowning. Since the mothers will be chained, they shouldn't* be knocked off the tower, it's just the puppies that will.

There's two ways to go about this. Have the drop from the tower to the water be a long one if you want to employ corpses, or a short one if you want to employ living ammunition. Either way, living or dead, the puppies will then be swept away to where the retractable bridge is. Once you've accumulated enough canine ammunition, wait until the enemies are over the floor grates down below which mark where the puppies will go, and open the bridge. They will suddenly find themselves with puppies smashing into their heads and water knocking them down. If said puppies are still alive they can potentially fight against those enemies as well, causing further damage.

All the while, the water's draining through the floor grates and making its way back up to the main loop up top, thus avoiding any needless wastefulness. Simply wait for the dropper to be reloaded with more puppies and it can be used again.


This can of course also be used with other animals, preferably strong ones like alligators and such if you go with the "living ammunition" route. If using the corpses instead, you can just use cats or something.


*Correct me if i'm wrong in that regard, because if i am then this whole idea's pretty much null.

[RanDomino]

I've had this idea for a couple days. An auto-reloading animal dropper.

My brain is melting out through my eyes??

[Joben]

@ The OP. If your forts end up like Sparta this should suit you. Breed your war animals for strength and size. Since there's no actual mating, as the joke goes everything reproduced via spores, you need to cull every single weak member of the species in the fort. The next generation will a little better and you won't have to kill as many runts. It won't turn dogs into megabeasts, but hey "Gigantic and fat with incredible muscles" has to be better than "Skinny and incredibly weak."

[Graknorke]

The only times I've ever set up somethung imaginativish has been a hollowed out passages on either side of the entrance tunnel, leading to a big water cistern. When invaders came I'd lure them down it then flip a switch to pump water from the cistern onto the path. Then the fort died because that cistern was also for cleaning/hospital. Turns out enemies tend to cause trouble when they're in the water supply.

[Vicid]

Drop gibbos 30 z levels onto a single square column.  He explodes and his gore and gear fall on the invading gobbos below.

[AndreaReina]

Constructed floors also cause a cave-in if they lose support right? Build a floor above the entrance held up only by a support. Collapse support, bye-bye anything under.

[Loud Whispers]

Constructed floors also cause a cave-in if they lose support right? Build a floor above the entrance held up only by a support. Collapse support, bye-bye anything under.

Yup. Also the favourite tool of the scaffolding builder, link one of those up to a support and you can smash through layers of scaffolding without a single Dwarven injury taking place.

[Graknorke]

without a single Dwarven injury taking place.

That is simply not how dwarven construction works. Something has to die, else Armok ends up less-than-pleased.

[Loud Whispers]

without a single Dwarven injury taking place.

That is simply not how dwarven construction works. Something has to die, else Armok ends up less-than-pleased.

Think of the long term here! Less unholy death falling from the sky onto hapless Dwarves means more hapless Dwarves capable of raining unholy death onto invading enemies!
A net gain in blood if you will.

[wolfwood296]

ok i wanted to try this challenge so i put my pop to 0. but i keep on getting migrants, why?