Bah. The goblins are stuck sending me their shitty scout squads over and over, once per year. Awesome.
The layering of the grinder works, mostly: it consists of two grinder cells anyway, and now there's a hostile-sensing pressure plate between the "outer" and "inner" cell. When waiting for enemy groups, now only the inner cell will be active initially. The leader of the squad walks through the outer grinder unmolested, triggers the pressure plate which activates a latching cell that turns the _outer_ grinder on and continues to blow apart in the inner grinder. The squad AI lets the squad walk up to the place immediately adjacent to the leader's last position but won't ever step into the tile. Not good when the leader inevitably gets killed on the first tile of the outer grinder. Now the rest of squad will happily walk into the originally-inactive outer grinder and gets splattered once the leader turns it on. The remaining issue is dealing with potential followers who made it to the tiles between first and second grinder. I installed a retracting bridge there, which should help a bit by tossing creatures around (hand-cranked).
It turned out i'd overlooked something obvious in the bigger project: critters will find a path through (6/7) water into your fort, but not through a tile covered in magma. That was sort of predictable, no? Anyway, they'll path through doors that open directly into magma, so it's not a real issue, i just needed to dig out one tile to the side and put another door there:
Massive percussion-based squad killer with magma trigger:
The corridor to the left is the main killing zone: 30 tiles, with powerless minecart thumpers above. Each cart (gold, loaded with stones) sits on top of a hatch cover until the trigger is set off - so the squad actually files into the corridor to get punched.
The trigger is that magma-filled tile surrounded by four doors. The doors to the north, east (recent necessary addition) and south are the path followed by the hapless victims - opening the first door already releases magma into the door jamb and onto whoever opened the door, incinerating them. Magma on the central tile falls to 4/7 or 3/7 within ten steps, triggering the pressure plate set to 0-4 magma. The pressure plate opens all the hatch covers, setting all the minecart thumpers into simultaneous motion.
I wasn't going to wait until winter to see it in action, so made a pure-testing spinoff copy of the save and unleashed that thing on the human caravan. Result: a ‼merchant‼ set off the fun and everyone in the corridor apart from that one human was thoroughly smashed by buggy hits through the floor from three-ton minecarts. Everyone, including the yaks (and the ‼yak‼, too). Two merchants of six hadn't reached the corridor yet, so turned tail and ran (although one lost her entire inventory to a retracting bridge hurling her yak around). The official test will have to wait for proper enemies, i need the caravan intact to lighten my load of x☼pig tail fibre socks☼x and *prepared meals*.
Linking thirty hatch covers to a single pressure plate was a massive pain, as was fiddling with the minecart-based trigger-refilling setup. It's completely overequipped for the boring shitty goblin tourists pretending to be sieges, but they're annoying enough to deserve every last ounce of ☼golden minecart☼ that's improperly hitting them.
By the way, a werebear snuck into the trading route, couldn't decide to harass the war animals pastured as buffer before the depot and was quickly chewed to bits after it returned to elven shape.
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6119278 times)