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[mscantrell]

So I'm next to a necromancer training school, it seems. I didn't check this before embarking, but they sure keep coming. I have four in cages now. (I just liked this embark because it has a little bay of the ocean coming into a forest.)

My initial defenses included moat+wall. Bridges over the moat. (Later, I added archers on top of the wall.)

When I got past my first undead siege, I set my dwarves to dumping the corpses in the moat. Then I blocked it in. Wall at the northeast, locked door at the south.

Ground-level (Z=0) view of the walls and moat.


Moat-level (Z-1) view, with door and wall. The two holes in the floor are a later addition, keep reading.



This was good. The next undead siege, a hundred or two zombies and skeleton sprang up and had a harmless undead cocktail party in the moat.


This last siege, same plan as before. Beat the undead down, toss them in the moat. But I had been thinking. For just-in-case purposes, and framerate purposes, too, I should get rid of the corpses entirely. Magma's 120 Zs down on this map, so I don't want to dump them in magma. I'll atomsmash them. Hundreds are already in the moat, so I don't want to haul them somewhere else. I'll build the bridge a level below that, channel it out to drop them all into place, and smash them there.

Here's the smasher right below (Z-2). Bridge is up right now, with a pile of corpses to smash.


But wait, says I. I should close up those holes. Hatches, linked to the lever. That way the corpses will fall down to be smashed, but when not in use, I'll close them against flyers.


Experienced players will have already spotted the problem. Hatches open instantly, bridges with a delay. I knew about this, but didn't think it would kill 24 dwarves at a time.

Here's what happens if you do this.
-Dwarf pulls lever.
-Immediately, hatches open.
-Immediately, 200 corpses fall through open hatch onto down drawbridge.
-100 ticks later, drawbridge raises.
-(Here's what suprising) Almost none of the corpses fly around the drawbridge room on Z-2. Instead, they shoot up and out through the holes.
-Some of them land southward. One or more lands on the open hatch covering the main stairs.
-If you use a "central staircase" design, then when the zombie corpse hits somebody, that somebody will fall down about eighty flights of stairs. He'll hit anybody else on the stairs, and they'll fall too. Until the zombie corpse and the pile of mangled dwarves reaches a closed hatch.

24 dwarves this cost me.

[Loud Whispers]

....I think you just witnessed DF's first gravity cascade.

[weenog]

Hmmm.  I wonder how tricky the timing would be to slaughter an entire siege group with a tall stack of stairs and a single stone-fall trap.

[Rover963]

Hmmm.  I wonder how tricky the timing would be to slaughter an entire siege group with a tall stack of stairs and a single stone-fall trap.

I was just thinking the exact thing. Or better maybe easier to do: Huge stair case to go down into your fort, at the top is a raising bridge in front of the stair case ent, then right after a pressure play. The bridge will constantly fling bodies into the stair case.

Or make a huge stair case with a water source at the top that you can open up. I wonder if the rushing water would slam people around as well

[megahelmet]

Hmmm.  I wonder how tricky the timing would be to slaughter an entire siege group with a tall stack of stairs and a single stone-fall trap.

I was just thinking the exact thing. Or better maybe easier to do: Huge stair case to go down into your fort, at the top is a raising bridge in front of the stair case ent, then right after a pressure play. The bridge will constantly fling bodies into the stair case.

Or make a huge stair case with a water source at the top that you can open up. I wonder if the rushing water would slam people around as well

In an ill fated attempt to make a pretty central waterfall, I instead made a downward shooting water cannon. Yes. Pressurized water will slam dwaves to their death down stairs.

[Drazinononda]

Unless I'm mistaken... this means that pit traps can be up/down stairs instead of channeled out, right? That might actually make them trouble-free enough for me to actually implement one or two. The main reason I don't do big pits of any kind (aside from my grand halls, which is worth it for the sake of architecture) is that channeling out large rooms requires too much micromanagement.

[Gentlefish]

This is beautiful.

On a side not, yes, you can use stairs. They just need to be able to fall at least 1 z-level.

[zubb2]

Holy crap this went from "Listen to my horrible workplace accident" to "How can we kill hordes of things with a flight of stairs".

I enjoy the forums almost more than the game.

[Sutremaine]

For just-in-case purposes, and framerate purposes, too, I should get rid of the corpses entirely. Magma's 120 Zs down on this map, so I don't want to dump them in magma.

You don't need to roll them directly into the magma. Throwing them down a long shaft leading into the magma flow will save a lot of walking time, especially if you semi-automate the process with a dumping track stop.

You don't even need to make the shaft empty space -- channelling out the down stairs at the top of the shaft will start the corpses falling and allow them to pass right through the stairs beneath.