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[Broseph Stalin]

My fortresses are always hardened to be impregnable to flying building destroyers. When you can survive that you can survive anything, I don't think climbing will change that much.

[Drazinononda]

I imagined that the climbing would just treat the space around a rough wall as stairs, basically. There's already pathfinding for stairs and I don't see any instance where a space adjacent to a rough wall would be functionally different than an up/down stair. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Telgin]

I imagine this will mostly catch new players and early forts, where an ambush ends up climbing a wall that isn't roofed over.  Walls are very useful in early forts to provide chokepoints for detecting and dealing with thieves and ambushes, but if the AI can ignore constructed walls now, that could be a problem.

I hope that the AI will only consider climbing if there is no ground path, or if the ground path is majorly far out the way.  That would allow you to continue to use chokepoints until your courtyard is roofed over, if you have a courtyard.

Either that, or I hope constructed walls that are made out of blocks aren't climbable.  Or we have the option to smooth constructed walls.  I'd like to see that anyway, really.

[hjd_uk]

I expect that simple climbing would only be over 1-tile high walls, just make your walls 2-Z-Levels high, otherwise, well, just means that a moat is now a more beneficial line of defense. And I expect swimming&climbing enemies would be as 'rare' as flying enemies.

[Telgin]

It looks to me like climbing is going to be pretty common actually.  It seems that if you can do it in adventure mode like this, all dwarves can probably do it, which implies to me that all humanoids can do it.  Toady mentioned having free hands I believe, which would imply that some invaders wouldn't be able to climb due to carrying too much junk, which is probably going to have interesting effects as sieges break apart into those who try to climb your walls and those that can't.

A moat definitely will provide a greater defensive advantage now, althouh it's possible that goblins / whatever might be able to swim through a moat to the walls and begin climbing, although it's likely that they'd be picked off by marksdwarves by then.  Swimming is hard enough for invaders though, so it likely won't be a problem.

[Kon]

My fortresses are always hardened to be impregnable to flying building destroyers. When you can survive that you can survive anything, I don't think climbing will change that much.

Me, too. When a siege arrives, I check for flying creatures. If there are any, I close drawbridges to the surface which are the only way flying creatures can get in.

[Starver]

Also, are walls smooth? If so, then they shouldn't be able to scale walls.

If tied in with some of the alternate suggestions for material-handling, this could mean something...

Even right now, a wall built of rough stone would have many hand-holds.  A wall built of stone blocks would (potentially) be less easy to climb, perhaps with a brick wall somewhere in-between (giving the grouting assumed to be used).  (At least by non-'gecko-ish' creatures that can climb anything, and possibly even under overhangs as well.)
Ditto a log wall c.f. one made with planks (a.k.a. wood blocks).  Metal walls might be the hardest to climb (save for those with suckers, or magnetic capabilities).  Ah, and glass.  Just suckers (and geckos and their like) for climbing those.

Concentrating just on stone, the idea (superseded by the latest mining changes, so maybe not how it will ever go) by some of us at one time is that skill in mining lets one produce varying amount of dust, rubble and different sized stones or quarry-quality blocks from mining (also according to what the player designates as wanted from that tile, so quality can be sacrificed for speed).  A rubble wall would not only be technically easy to clamber over (or a rubble-partition easy to dismantle, when blocking a tunnel), but would let liquids through, with large-block walls (perhaps with rubble innards) being more resistant to every form of attempt to get through (including siege-engine projectile impacts) and again also harder to climb.

You could not so easily lay down a solid floor on top of a rubble barrier, however.  Or it would need to be a careful laying of paving slabs (obtained from quarrying large-scale materials) rather than merely a layering of rock chips that would sufficiently 'surface' solid ground to create paths with reduced impedance of movement by vegetation (if regularly used, at least, kind of like the unsurface roads we have now).


Anyway, that's not all so applicable to climbing.  Let's just say better quality walls are harder to scale (unless they're easier, for some particular sub-method of climbing), that smoothing does likewise, although engraving may make it easier again.  Some form of "Trajan's Column" being made by climbing engravers might well be a self-supporting effort.

[TKGP]

Let's just say better quality walls are harder to scale (unless they're easier, for some particular sub-method of climbing), that smoothing does likewise, although engraving may make it easier again.  Some form of "Trajan's Column" being made by climbing engravers might well be a self-supporting effort.

I can't help but imagine a squad of "combat detailers", dashing around cleaving skulls and then engraving random cliff faces to make a quick vertical escape, or smoothing the handholds out from underneath would-be-climbing goblins.

[Mickey Blue]

Personally I'm all for anything that makes it easier and/or more realistic for enemies to attack.  I'd love to see enemies climbing walls and digging through dirt to get to you.  Sure we can make our own challenges, and I do, but it's nice to know that more can be added without having to do it yourself, particularly when it's something that makes sense (as opposed to the enemy racing over the thin tunnel of spiky death over and over).

To each their own of course, and I know some people would not like sieges being so effective and (in the event of digging eventually being added) would not want their landscapes all dug up by enemies.  It seems having a 'climbing/digging invaders on/off' option would pretty well solve such problems.