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[qgloafhun]

So, I had an idea: I should build a tower and drop all of the 77 caged goblins I have from the top. How should I do that? How tall should it be for sure kills? Is there any trick to the design and what building parts or designations I should use?

[Spehss _]

Depends on what you're trying to do. If you want to just drop goblins and let them splat against the bare floor, a fall height of at least 25 to 30 zlevels is required to instantly gib creatures. With the addition of pulping in the newest version this may have changed a bit, but it's still a good rough height to shoot for.

You could also add spikes or weapon traps at the bottom for goblins to fall on. You'd need less height to kill stuff then, but the lethality of the fall will still depend on the height of the drop and just what it is they're landing on.

[qgloafhun]

Thanks. I was thinking about the first version. How should I build the tower, with stairs or ramps and should they be inside or outside?

[ComatosePhoenix]

You really want to build this outside, so that thine enemies can see the horrors that await them.

and you can turn the tower into a lookout when war comes.

[qgloafhun]

Yeah, I want to build this next to the entrance of my fortress, in plain sight of any who come invading.

[ToadChild]

Depends on what you're trying to do. If you want to just drop goblins and let them splat against the bare floor, a fall height of at least 25 to 30 zlevels is required to instantly gib creatures. With the addition of pulping in the newest version this may have changed a bit, but it's still a good rough height to shoot for.

You could also add spikes or weapon traps at the bottom for goblins to fall on. You'd need less height to kill stuff then, but the lethality of the fall will still depend on the height of the drop and just what it is they're landing on.

Don't you need to watch out for the "shaft of enlightenment" bug if you use spears?  You don't want to have a Goblin survive with broken legs, become a superlegendary sword user, and start killing your dwarves.  I suppose it's moot if you stripped them of all their equipment beforehand.

[qgloafhun]

Depends on what you're trying to do. If you want to just drop goblins and let them splat against the bare floor, a fall height of at least 25 to 30 zlevels is required to instantly gib creatures. With the addition of pulping in the newest version this may have changed a bit, but it's still a good rough height to shoot for.

You could also add spikes or weapon traps at the bottom for goblins to fall on. You'd need less height to kill stuff then, but the lethality of the fall will still depend on the height of the drop and just what it is they're landing on.

Don't you need to watch out for the "shaft of enlightenment" bug if you use spears?  You don't want to have a Goblin survive with broken legs, become a superlegendary sword user, and start killing your dwarves.  I suppose it's moot if you stripped them of all their equipment beforehand.

That bug sounds fun. I won't use spears anyway and all my goblins are already stripped. Now... do I need to put down floors for every Z-level the tower goes?

[cikulisu]

you're going to need a lot of masonry. simplest would probably be a two tile wide alternating staircase set up then put walls around that so your guys cannot be hit with arrows as they climb. at the top just create a hatch, and then pit(?) them through it. don't have it connected to the surface in any way; make sure to only allow access through the fortress, so as to eliminate it as a defensive weakness/alternate entry point for a siege. it'll take a while to build. you'll need many masons.

[Bki]

First, make your tower as high as you can. For the design, I would say a circle of around ten square of diameter is good. Once that done, sent your miner inside, and start channelling. Because you placed it smartly, it will intersect your dining room : this is perfect, you should now remove the walls there and replace them with walls constructed from glass blocks (clear glass is better, but green glass is fine, too).

Stopping there is fine. You would sacrifice the goblins and all your dwarves would be there to appreciate the spectacle (you would actually want some windows at regular intervals rather than glass block walls so you can train their discipline.). But, if you went with that, you might as well channel down to the magma sea. So continue digging, and because it will intersect the cavern, you will want to start sending your masons to start building the part of your sacrificial tower that pass through them.

Bonus point if, rather than sending them to the magma sea, your throw them to the circus.



And now I know what my next fort will be about...

[GavJ]

spears don't help and can backfire by making them invulnerable nearly super fighters.

What does work is paving the floor at the bottom of the drop with high density materials, like cobaltite or platinum. Which can potentially do several times as much damage as a hum drum normal density boring stone floor.

[Solon64]

If i recall correctly, amusingly enough, the density of the floor does matter.  The game seems to treat falling damage as multiple "Attacks" by the ground onto the falling target.  A heavier floor would have more force behind its "attacks"

Quirky DF physics for ya.  I also seem to remember someone designing a drop pod system for their military dwarves that involved dropping them onto featherwood floors to reduce the damage when they landed and murdered goblins.

[GavJ]

Well I mean of course it SHOULD use hardness, not density, but it's still a better approximation than nothing, IMO

[Merendel]

Well to be honest once your going fast enough it barely matters what your smacking into.   Unless your landing on a specialy designed airbag or some other setup to slow you down to survivable speeds your still a red smear if you smack into rock, dirt, wood or even water at terminal velocity.  Even at slightly more survivable speeds surviving a fall from a hight depends more on how you land far more than what the ground is made of.

[GavJ]

Well it does already kill you no matter what in DF if you fall from like 30z
And it does already approximate falling at various angles or body positions via its random dice rolls for damage.

So beyond that, it's pretty much hardness that would matter. Assuming:
1) That the first thing you hit doesn't break, if it does break then the force used up by breaking it is important, since it will soak up kinetic energy helpfully without hurting you much. Not too relevant to DF.
2) If it's a fluid, then surface tension essentially acts as hardness. Falling onto water will hurt you from much lower heights than falling into, say, a pool of hexane would (though you would still find that unpleasant for other reasons...). Since DF only has 2 liquids though, and one of them presents much bigger dangers anyway, this is also not super relevant.

Thus, pretty much just hardness, IMO. Which is basically the same thing you're getting at with "airbag" == artificially "soft" surface.

Imaging tripping and falling from just 6 feet or whatever your standing height is, and hitting your head. Would you rather land on cement, or balsa wood?  It would make a HUGE difference. One might kill you or make you a vegetable, while the other might just give you a bad bruise. Though it's really the softness of the balsa wood, not the low density, that's helping you.

Falling onto lead, for instance, would generally be slightly safer than falling onto steel, since the lead will yield a tiny bit and thus distribute the force a tiny bit more equally. Whereas DF would simulate it the opposite way around, by a lot.

[quarague]

As you have quite a lot of goblins to drop, I think it also becomes an issue that falling on a large pile of dead goblins is considerably softer and more survivable than falling on a floor. So you might need to clean up the mess in between a few times, otherwise the last ones might survive the fall (unless they fall into magma :-)