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[JonathanCR]

I've been having much more fun reclaiming procedural forts than I ever did making my own. The insane-but-kind-of-makes-sense architecture... the gigantic ramps... the pointless huge constructions over the entrance... the forges. Oh, the forges!

My current fort was going very well. Its central staircase was literally a gigantic well bored right down to magma level, with a ludicrously dangerous ramp spiralling up the inside. Floors had been constructed across it on the main living areas, with the ramp poking through.

I'd got things nicely up and running, barring a few dehydration deaths in the first winter when the booze ran out and the brook froze. I'd installed a proper running water system from the aquifer. (It has to be said: worldgen forts are great for water, because you get the benefits of an aquifer with few of the downsides since the ancient dwarves have already punched through it with their huge ramp.)

Then the zombie sieges.

First we had a siege consisting of one zombie. This was the first one I'd ever encountered, so the dwarves huddled inside the fort in terror for a couple of seasons before I finally sent out the entire military, and they managed to pummel it to bits. The military aren't tremendously well trained and are desperately lacking in equipment, since we appear to have no metal ore. They're mostly wielding bronze axes and a lot of silver war hammers (since we do have silver).

The next year, a hundred zombies descended on the fortress.

They mainly milled about not attacking, so for the most part the dwarves could still get out, though there were some casualties. Eventually the numbers grew so great that I had to close the drawbridge (lucky I'd installed one) and get everyone inside. The siege dragged on and on. Then, with 40.07, undead pathing was improved. I decided this was our opportunity.

I'd created a corridor leading to the main entrance, with lots of cage traps. What if we raised the drawbridge to allow a couple of zombies in, closed it, caught them, replaced the cages, and kept on doing that?

The plan was an enormous success. Three zombies blundered in, got caught, and were safely stockpiled. The dwarves then had fun pulling the tattered clothing and weapons off the rotting, angry, zombie goblins without any issues (these were the same dwarves who'd previously been continually horrified by the sight of someone's leg lying on a ledge in the central well).

Time to repeat the exercise.

Unfortunately, the dwarves were a bit tardy in pulling the lever to close the drawbridge once the first couple of zombies had got in. About twenty-five of them - mostly fully armed - had lurched past the gate before someone finally decided that pulling the lever would be a good idea.

Eight got caught in the cage traps, with the rest making it through to the main stairwell and starting to descend. They immediately found a dwarf on the farming level just below and ripped her to shreds. This was one of my favourite dwarves, a legendary engraver who, some time earlier, had suffered from our first encounters with the zombies: someone driven mad with grief at the death of a loved one had punched her so hard her ribs shattered, and she'd spent a lot of time in the hospital before eventually discharging herself, picking up her baby, and getting right back to covering everyone's bedrooms with masterpieces. Well, she'd carved her last one.

The zombies were heading for the main living areas, where 80 dwarves huddled in terror. At this point I realised I'd inadvertently created a last-ditch emergency uberweapon.

This is how I'd carved out the channel to bring water from the aquifer to the lower levels of the fortress:



As you see, I'd dug direct from the central well. The tunnel goes south and enters a hole where the water drains down to the living areas. The side passage going west and then north is where the water comes from - there's a ramp at the end going up into the aquifer itself.

There are two floodgates. You can see the one at the north end of the tunnel, which I installed after digging out the water pipes but before breaching the aquifer. There is another at the south end of the tunnel, which you can't see because it's open. That's there because I wanted to be able to turn off the water if something went horribly wrong. (It didn't. The system worked very well.)

What if I closed the floodgate to the south and opened the one to the north?

The water would flood into the central well, pouring down the ramp, and carrying anyone on that ramp 43 levels down to where the floor on the first main level of the fortress would break their fall.

There was nothing to lose. The levers were pulled.

It was a glorious sight. The torrents gushed forth, and the zombies lurching down the stairwell were indeed washed right off it, down the central well, to splatter onto the hard schist floor beneath. It was hard to tell how many had been forcibly deanimated in this way as the torrent washed down below this level and the other main levels, carrying the bits further down - some to the burial levels far below, and some even to the magma levels right at the bottom. An unholy melange of water, blood, and zombie parts washed everywhere.

Unfortunately not all the zombies were caught in the destruction. I'd earlier had some pathing issues with the main ramp: dwarfs could travel up and down it fine, but for some reason they couldn't "see" objects beyond it (on the ground for those in the fort, or in the fort for those on the ground). I'd therefore created a staircase that bypassed part of the ramp which resolved this problem. Unfortunately some of the zombies seemed to be in this staircase and avoided both the initial torrent and the continuous waterfall which remained, and made it down to the main living areas. Despite all my precautions, a fully armed zombie goblin set foot on our main level, where everyone had retreated to.

Step forward Baron Onget Udistmomuz.

Onget was one of the fortress's foremost characters. He'd served as the bookkeeper from an early stage, and also carved a great work which had turned him into a legendary stonecrafter. He'd then been put to work churning out a vast quantity of amazingly valuable trinkets for sale to traders. When the opportunity arose to create a baron, I decided to reward him for his contributions to the fortress. (I didn't realise quite what this would mean for his work ethic.)

He'd spent his time since then demanding better rooms, ordering the production of crossbows, and training in the barracks, since he was on the militia. His favoured weapon was the bronze axe and he'd got hold of a bit of bronze chain mail too. In fact he spent so much time training he'd become proficient in their use and was alarmingly disciplined.

This was his moment. Stepping forward, he lopped off the zombie's arms and legs, before finishing it with a mighty decapitation. The battle lasted two pages of reports and he got out of it with only bruises to the arms.

Pausing only to comment, belatedly though with unfortunate prescience, that he must withdraw, the Baron stood his ground as a second goblin zombie emerged from the ramp. This one was much, much tougher than the first. The Baron began by lopping off both its legs and then started kicking it repeatedly in the teeth. The zombie replied by biting him in the right hand - his shield hand - and ripping it right off. Undaunted, the Baron unleashed a flurry of axe blows to the zombie's torso, remarking as he did so on the horrifying nature of the situation. An attempt to behead the zombie failed as the axe lodged in its neck: the zombie bit him in the left arm as he tried to pull the axe out, causing serious damage and forcing him to drop the weapon. The Baron, taking a pragmatic approach to the problem, bit the rotting zombie hard on the neck and kicked it in the mouth at the same time - an impressive move but an unwise one as the zombie simply bit him on the ankle and latched on firmly, shaking him around until he was so wounded that he dropped dead into the knee-high quagmire of water, mud, blood, and rotting body parts.

All this while, the mayor was hitting the zombie with a huge silver hammer, as the rest of the militia either crowded in to help or ran away screaming.

The zombie perished soon after the Baron did. Two more zombies remained: one on the upper levels, and one on the shortcut staircase. I followed the upper level one as it lurched slowly to the stairwell, stepped onto the flood and plummeted straight down to its death. The last zombie staggered into the main living area where the remaining militia members managed to subdue it through the brilliant tactic of waiting for it to grab the mayor by the head and then rushing it while he shook him around. The example of the Baron was not forgotten as someone sliced the zombie's head off neatly, relieving the mayor, who was surprisingly unhurt though probably unhappy at now having a severed zombie head clamped to his scalp.

The zombie invasion had been repelled (well, apart from the many dozens still milling around outside), thanks partly to the awesome heroics of the Baron but mainly to the impromptu Ramp Waterfall of Doom. Only 44 dwarves were still alive, mainly children. The mother of all cleanup operations has begun, but whether we will survive the incipient tantrum spiral is very uncertain.

Here is the entrance to the fort. You can see the Path of Traps and the eight zombie cages:



This is what the upper living level looks like now. This is the first point at which the dwarves of old put a floor across the well, so it's where most of the zombies actually landed:



And this is the next level down, which also has a floor over the stairwell. This is the main level of the fort and it's where everyone hid during the attack, and it's where the Baron and the other members of the militia had their last stand. That blue body lying in the workshop room next to the stairwell is the Baron. The body part in the middle of the nearby stone stockpile is his teeth. Exactly how that happened, I'm not sure, but I'm fairly confident it was spectacular.



This unplanned bit of !Science! yields the following results. Diverting water down the central well of a procedural fort is, basically, an awesome defensive weapon. It took out about a dozen fully armed zombie goblins with ease. It would have been much more effective if:

(1) We hadn't had the shortcut staircase in which some of them could escape the torrent. This may have been our biggest mistake.
(2) We'd had a second torrent coming from the opposite side of the stairwell, to ensure maximum coverage over all parts of the ramp.
(3) We'd got rid of the floors spanning the stairwell at the living areas.

(3) might make this an unstoppable weapon. The floors meant that any enemies who did make it down that far were safe: they could simple step off the ramp and start fighting people. Without the floors, they would have plummeted much, much further down. If they'd somehow survived, they would have had to clamber back up the ramp against the flow of water, surely an impossible task.

Further experimentation is required. Possibly with magma.

[TinFoilTopHat]

I fully and wholeheartedly approve of this.
Now you weaponize the caged zombies. Might I suggest a very Fun alternative to the abandon fort button? Possibly using your undead goblin army to wage an assault on the circus?

Spoiler:  spoilers here newbs don't look. (click to show/hide)

 Dwarf fortress, the only game where you can assault hell with an army of zombies.

[JonathanCR]

It could be a bad tantrum spiral. I just found the captain of the guard, killed by an enraged three-year-old child. It's not quite clear what happened but I think they were standing on the ramp when the child punched him, sending him over the edge; unfortunately the pile of muddy zombie body parts wasn't enough to break his fall. It doesn't help that there are bits of zombies and of dwarfs pretty much everywhere, swept there in a flood of water, mud, and rancid blood. I just discovered one dwarf in hospital with a broken spine, from where the angry mayor punched him after the battle. These dwarves really don't think long-term.

On the other hand, before the battle began, I had a dwarf trapped in a strange mood, requiring bone, which we didn't have and had no means of getting. I was resigned to losing him. But the sudden supply of zombie goblin parts let him make his artifact after all, and rather splendid it is:



So at least he's happy. In fact he's doing most of the body part collection right now. It helps that the flood washed a lot of the mangled bits to the tomb level, so it's not too far to haul them.

[klefenz]

Awesome, ill have to try a proc-fort again. Last time I tried it was full of zombies (i think a necromancer took resodence there)

[thegoatgod_pan]

This is awesome, but where do you drain the water when you are done? Does the tunnel culminate in a cavern or do you just dump it into the magma sea?

[Button]

[JonathanCR]

This is awesome, but where do you drain the water when you are done? Does the tunnel culminate in a cavern or do you just dump it into the magma sea?

The very bottom of the stairwell is one level above the magma, and it was full of magma forges when I got there. Some got disassembled (because the ur-dwarves had rather brilliantly sited them in such a way as to block access to the rest), so there are various big holes over the magma. I imagine that a lot of the water, and probably zombie bits and other detritus, washed into them. The rest of the water is just evaporating on various levels throughout the fort.

Just to update: the zombie siege lifted after a while, with the last stragglers eventually shuffling off (leaving only an animated yak skeleton and half an animated rooster skeleton that the zombies' necromancer had created while there). The tantrum spiral claimed many dwarves and we were down to about half a dozen functioning ones, when a great wave of migrants - the first for well over a year - appeared. Most of them went into deep shock when they realised what kind of place they'd just moved to, but they should soon get fairly used to it. Once everything's cleared up it'll be time to put into effect my planned improvements to Operation Plughole, hopefully in time for the next siege.

Then there's the small matter of the Forgotten Beast that wiped out the original inhabitants of this fort, which we've got walled up in yet another Forge Hall, and which I intend to destroy with the tallest magma pump stack of all time. But that can wait.

[JonathanCR]

Well, the cleanup was about half done when another zombie siege descended on the fortress. We'd only had time for one round of migrants, who didn't exactly settle in happily, and no-one can remember when the last caravan visited. Now about 75 zombies - some human, some goblin - were milling around outside.

This siege had to be broken quickly. We couldn't afford to hang around. The food and booze stocks were dwindling, and there were still fist fights breaking out in the aftermath of the misery caused by the first siege. We couldn't sit it out.

So the dwarves got to work. The following changes were made:

(1) Most of the floors across the stairwell were knocked out. The purpose of this was to ensure that enemies would fall as far as possible and, should they survive, have a long and difficult climb to get up to the living areas. Two floors remained: one at the necropolis level, about a hundred levels below the surface, and one right at the bottom of the stairwell, above the magma. (Two dwarves died during this work, which was not helpful.)

(2) A drain was installed at the magma forge level, to ensure that it wouldn't become permanently flooded.

(3) Two new waterways were constructed, to channel water from the aquifer. One of these fed directly into the stairwell, as with the original. The other piped water into that annoying shortcut staircase that bypassed part of the stairwell. I felt that this was a better option than simply blocking off that staircase, since this way the dwarves could continue to use it and path properly right up to the last minute, and also it was a way of creating a water flow somewhat lower down the stairwell to ensure maximum coverage of the shaft. (One dwarf died doing this.)

That done, everyone huddled on the main living area and pulled lots of levers. With glacial slowness, 75 zombies started shuffling into the fortress.

Here's what the invasion looked like:



The zombies basically took it in turns to wander vaguely down the staircase. One by one, they lurched into the water flow. Some got swept away instantly; others took a little longer, but the same thing happened to them all. Here's one captured in mid-flight:



Some seemed to fall at an angle and hit the ramp at a much lower level, shearing off limbs, but most fell right down the middle and splattered on the floor of the necropolis, nearly 100 levels below. This is what it looked like:



The water then washed most of the mess further down another 53 levels to the magma forges and the bottom of the staircase. Here's just a few of the items on just one tile down there:



Every single zombie was annihilated without any difficulty whatsoever. That's seventy-five zombies wiped out with the only casualties being three dwarfs killed by engineering incompetence.

I conclude that this is a terrifyingly effective way of wiping out besieging invaders.

Drawbacks:

(1) It won't handle enemies that aren't trying to get into your fort. In our case there were several reanimated body parts that had been created during the first siege and were still hanging around outside. They didn't enter the Plughole of Doom and had to be dealt with in more traditional ways afterwards.

(2) It's only been tested on zombies. Whether other enemies are stupid enough to walk down into the maelstrom remains uncertain. It will surely not affect flying enemies.

(3) If something goes wrong, you're in serious trouble, because you've invited the enemy right into the heart of the fortress. Dire fun could easily result.

One could obviously replicate this weapon in a non-procedural fort by digging out a similar stairwell. I wonder if it would make a difference if the well were a different size or shape. This one had a central shaft of 3x3 tiles. It's possible that a central shaft of 2x2 tiles or even just 1 tile might be even more effective, because the water would gush around and hit more sides more often, rather than forming a waterfall down the middle. On the other hand, enemies might be more likely to be washed onto the ramp on the opposite side rather than plummet down to the bottom, so that might make it less lethal.

Further experimentation is required!