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[knaveightt]

Do you go for aesthetics with details selective?
Or function, performance, and highly effective?

Lead to the underground, cradled by earth?
Or shows-off its grandeur above the green turf?

Welcomes the world with grand pastures and farms?
Or trapped and adorned with severed goblin arms?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

How do you design your perfect fort entrance? What have you been using as your entrance design lately? Preferences? Pet peeves? Best/Worse you've seen?

[da_nang]

Select few, functional, high security entrances. Built to last and stuff.

[Gnomeknows]

can't really say since setting up traps takes up 90% of the work on my entrances and I haven't finished one yet before my forts died off.

[Lich180]

I've taken up using nothing but a stone door and legendary, steel clad dwarves for my entrances. Makes for more challenge.

[Iamblichos]

First year?  Walls and drawbridge ASAP (not for use for atomsmashing enemies, but more being able to turtle).

By the third?  Gatehouses over the bridge with archer's platforms, preferably linked with bridges to outlying structures where archers can follow invaders raining death on them from above...

... which usually go completely unused since by the third year, my melee dwarves are like tiny steel-clad cuisinarts that kill off everything before the archers even show up.

[Imminent]

The kind with two adult fire-breathing dragons guarding it that cause maximum collateral damage to anybody caught in the cross fire.

[ImagoDeo]

I've yet to find a decent entrance design which is repeatable, easy to create and maintain, flexible, expandable, and functions properly to adequately handle all different kinds of invaders. Everything's changing in a week, though, so entrance designs will have to be modified a bunch as well. Not much point in discussing this.

If you absolutely need a 'perfect' entrance, then the one that I've found to be 'perfect' is walling up to the edge of the map with raised bridges and restricting all caravan entry through that. It's an exploit but it's effective as hell and it allows you to ignore the caravan variable in your aboveground entrance plans.

[XArgon]

My model of a glorious entrance should always include a long straight path from the entrance-sealing drawbridge to the trading depot for the caravans (or invaders) to cross. Preferrably, if it's above ground, it should be a trench, and if underground - should be at least 2 or 3 z-levels high, with ledges going along the hall on the higher levels for the marksdwarves to man in case of emergency. Could include some siege engines to fire down the hallway.

Not that I've ever finished one of these. In the next version, perhaps.

And I avoid using traps - they are spooking the traders.

[Fen]

One entrance. 5+ tiles wide. Traps, pitfalls, drawbridges, fortification walls, guard animals, and frighteningly close to the barracks. Caravans take a long, trapless route through the hallway, invaders leap into weapons traps and become eviscerated, if the dwarfs or pitfalls they might dodge into don't end them first.

I've seen minotaurs bleed themselves out trying to run the gauntlet, and anything that happens to be trap immune gets to fight my squad of Legendary military dwarves, along with a couple of backup squads of decent-quality soldiers. Anything that wants to take the fortress gates better pray for a miracle.

It's not pretty. I'd go so far as to say it's crude, even. But that doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is we haven't had a civilian death from invaders inside the walls of the fortress. Ever.

[KingBacon]

I just try to channel out a grand entrance chamber and create a path towards it. Aesthetics are everything. I used to use statues but those get destroyed so I switched to pillars. Guards are either stationed in a small barracks outside the entrance or in the hall. I recently built a bridge across a volcano into a 5 level high chamber. I really should channel some skylights down into these nice chambers I dug out...

[JAFANZ]

I think my most common design is a "single lever airlock" using only one bridge per lever/airlock (When the bridge is up, the fort can't access the Depot/Airlock, when the bridge is down [so the dwarves can cross into/out-of the airlock] Building Destroyers still can't do anything about it, 'cos they have to come up from below).

I have been known to build 1 for each cardinal direction, for... traffic flow (let's call it that anyway) reasons.

[krenshala]

Here is the entry level I've been using for about a year now.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Working upward, you have the constructed floor bridge into the Entry Hall, where the war dogs are pastured and the militia trains non-stop (no Danger Rooms for me).  Next is the depot, and on this fortress a hall that, when completed, will go through the hill to the valley on the north side of the ridge where I will put in another Entry Hall with dogs and militia members.  Right now, anything that can't fly has to get through those dogs and soldiers.  I'm just about to get the second dwarven caravan for this fort, so things aren't complete yet, but you can see the 20 rooms on this floor (empty as I haven't done the level above them yet, so most won't hold beds), the above ground farms (cave farms one level down) and the stairs between the depot and the Crafthall below.  When completed both the Trade Hall (depot) and Entry Hall will be roofed over and the Entry Hall will have fortifications on the east and west walls on the floor above for my marksdwarves.

So far this design has worked wonderfully, except sometimes the melee dwarves die due to excessive aggressiveness by running to far out of the fortress chasing after things.

For those that wonder, this design came about because I was trying the above ground fortress start, bringing ore for bronze (12 each cassiterite, malachite and bituminous coal) instead of tools, and about 225 granite rocks to turn into blocks.  When not dug into a hillside this needs 160 blocks (40 rocks) for the outer wall on each level (two levels), plus whatever is needed to create the internal walls and floor for the Trade and Entry Halls.  I need additional rock sources to roof/floor all the bedrooms, but by that point I've usually got 40+ dwarves and underground mining below the Crafthall going.

[falcn]

I've become a big fan of underground trade depots. Feels very dwarven, plus saves a ton of hauling, since the depot is located right in the center of 3D industrial/storage zone.
Main storages located around the depot to minimize haulers bumping into each other. I have big clusters of stairs between floors in this area to account for traffic peaks when loading/unloading depot.

My next fort will have nothing on the surface except thee holes in the ground for ramps. I'm planning to move all fighting underground, because I got tired of blood and limbs and corpses covering the entrance tower and surrounding area with no way to clean it all except turning on refuse hauling for the WHOLE map (but the blood will stay anyway). The result is that all civilian dwarves who go outside end up covered in blood.

Dwarves promptly clean underground area, so that should fix the blood problem.

[Panando]

Unless it's a reanimating biome I only use military. The entrance is thus defended by the barracks where my strongest squad trains, usually the backup squads train a bit further back. If it's a reanimating biome I use a snaking, 3-wide corridor with shortcuts filled with bridgewalls linked to a pressure plate, which smash any intruding zombies, husks etc out of existence.

I sometimes use cage traps but it's more to catch things for fun than defense. I do often 'defend' the caverns with a cage trap corridor, but again this is more for fun than anything else. I usually either wall off or strategically de-ramp the caverns, so only fliers can get into my fortress that way.

One rather exploitive thing I enjoy doing is making a sealed corridor right to the map edge for caravans. It is underground until the last 5 tiles, at which point it surfaces. You can't wall the last 5 tiles, but you can use raising bridges and raise them to completely seal off the map edge. A less exploitive way is to instead use only channels to force wagons to go down the wagon corridor, while still allowing other enemies to enter. I use that way sometimes. Partly depends on whether I'm planning a f*ck the world lava flood device or whether the map comes pre-f*cked with evil rain or whatever. Making a secure wagon corridor simplifies defense a great deal. But because it's a bit of an obvious exploit I don't always do it. If I don't, the moment a caravan appears I just send my best dwarves to the caravan to intercept any siege/ambush which spawns on it's tail.

[Blastbeard]

I try to go for a combination of security and visual grandeur when building my entrance. My favorite, best entrance was that of Stonehall III, one of my longer-lived and more successful fortresses built into the side of a tall, foreboding mountain whose name has been lost to time.

Basing the entrance partly off of the gates of Ironforge, I wanted something big and recognizable, something my ranged and artillery element could fire from with impunity and looked good doing it. The result was a 8x by 6x by 4z cubbyhole carved into the mountain, ringed with fortifications overlooking a reatracing drawbridge that covered the ramp down into the entrance hall proper.

The walls at ground-level were engraved by my finest(original) engravers, and immediately above that, an unbroken line of fortifications provided an unrestricted killzone against any foe foolish enough to venture so close. The z-level above that was ringed with more engravings, and the cieling level featured a small platform with golden statues and a door leading into the upper level of the fortress. The door was meant to allow any flying adventurer quick access should the fortress fall, and served as a dumping point for prisoners. Anyone that survived the fall was free to limp to freedom.

Later, when I managed to start a dragon breeding program, I set up a flame bunker in the passage underneath the retracting bridge for added defense. After that was an area I called the Hall of Battle, a large, weaponized, 2z high entrance hall littered with traps my melee fighters gathered in to meet anything that got past my defenses. Here dwarven warriors did battle amidst pillars of stone engraved with feats of heroism, terrible beasts, and fine cuisine, capped by carefully selected statues of great figures form dwarven history to watch over them as they did battle. above them at ceiling level was another ring of fortifications, from which a waiting crossbow unit stood by to support my fighters from.
This defenses of this grand entrance never failed, mostly because I was vigiliant about the retracting bridge. The one I didn't activate the bridge in time, the dragon bunker managed to incinerate the attacker, a giant, before any harm was done. As is often the case, the bane of Stonehall III came from below.

This is a rendition of that glorious entrance as I remember it. Sadly, I have lost this fortress to time and file cullings, and cannot provide a more detailed image with one of the various visualizer tools. I try to replicate the design as much as I can, but I rarely find the proper conditions for a perfect copy.

Spoiler:  even dwarfier than I remember it (click to show/hide)