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[Fleeting Frames]

Agreed, though I'll note that climbing through fortifications seem to be unusual dwarf-exclusive behaviour - unless you've had invaders come in through enclosed fortifications?

[Werdna]

Never enclosed ones.  I think I had an instance where a goblin successfully climbed a wall, parkoured the constructed fortification overhang (un-roofed), and got into a fight with a marksdwarf atop it.  They both ended up on the ground behind the wall.  I didn't witness any of it happen though - only found a dead marksdwarf and a beat to shit goblin limping around inside the wall (combat reports long gone).  The only path to that spot was through the fort (where he would've lit up the civvies), and some blood in the battlements, so I assumed he climbed it. 

I could be wrong about the fortifications though, maybe he climbed a naked wall further away, and the fortified part was merely where the fight started.  With my current fort I'm at a point where I'm setting up animal watchtowers, so I think I'll run an experiment and use unroofed fortifications instead of windows and see what happens.

I have to share a rather hilarious event in my last siege - I witnessed an invader and an axelord facing off across a 2 tile gap, and they both decide to each leap across at the same time, then repeat that 4-5 times trying to get at each other.  Finally someone got the quicker step and they fought.  The gap was a perfect diagonal so they were both making chess-knight leaps (2 across 1 up/down) without getting any closer to each other. 

[Fleeting Frames]

Awesome, you have literal knights. Ahaha.
 
Anyway, can confirm climbing over unroofied fortifications, as least as far as dwarves go.

[Werdna]

Well, huh.  So I think I've discovered something new.  Did people know invaders can leap straight up?  I thought general knowledge was that invaders climb a wall first and then mantle diagonally.

I built two animal watchtowers, unfortunately close to each other.  One was a single tile pedestal supporting a 3x3 watchtower.  The other was a 3x3 pedestal supporting a 3x3 watchtower.  All rough logs.  Two tiles gap between platforms.  Each 3x3 'platform' is 4 fortifications in the cardinals and and 4 walls at the intercardinals.  No roof.  Chained cat and chained goose.  Stupid me, I forgot the goose could fly up a z but it mattered not.  Let's call them pedestal tower and block tower.

They uncovered a massive warwolf (Fortress Defense race - larger than dwarves, very fast) ambush.  I watched what happened twice - the warwolves spawned near the block tower and raced right for it.  Both times, about 4 ww's arrived and scaled the intercardinal walls (wall on top of a wall) and ignored the fortification-on-wall face.  They climbed to z+2 then down in and killed the goose.  The killer climbed back out diagonally to the top of the wall, the others hopped to the wall closer to the pedestal.

At this point I thought, crap, I built them too close - they're simply going to leap across to the roof of the pedestal platform.  On first viewing, I thought this happened but wasn't certain.  It was the 3rd day of Autumn luckily, so I simply savescummed to watch again.  Using ".", what I saw actually happen is that they scaled down the wall-on-a-wall to the ground, moved one tile over, then leaped straight up to catch the pedestal platform wall at z+1 above them.  I expected them to move in next to the pedestal to climb it then mantle diagonally up a z.  Again, all 4 lined up to leap up to the walls above them, totally ignoring the fortification face.  From there they climbed to z+2, dropped down into the center, and killed the cat. 

So in two runs, they totally ignored the fortifications path when scaling, which lends some evidence to your viewpoint.  Next experiment I'm going to:

- place floors on the blockhouse jutting out from the roof of the walls at z+2 to make that path impossible, and see if that forces a path through the fortifications.
- make pedestal platforms with 2 and 3 wall high pedestals to see how far up they can leap (or, to see if they use the diagonal mantling)

A pity that the goblin army before this spawned on the other side of the map, would be nice to be certain goblins behave the same way. 

[Werdna]

2nd interesting behavior - I've seen this before - once the warwolves kill the cat, 4 of them pile into the watchtower and just hang out in there for the rest of the siege.  Another one clings to the side of the blocktower, just hanging out.  I'm pretty sure they only use the special climb/leap behavior only when something is in sight to provoke them - once there's nothing in sight, they forget how to climb and leap.  The interesting thing is that 3 of the ww's pathed into the cat's perch after it had died, so apparently when they see something they set a waypoint for it and head there, even if it gets killed before they arrive.

They all pile out the moment my melee squads march into view. 

[Fleeting Frames]

Masterwork tends to give out lot of natural skills and probably odd body plans, so you'd have to check the raws on warwolves. But I'd say probably yes.

Also, another thing, to go with Bumber's "cannot hold onto a building" that I recently tested with raising bridges (do block climbing, at least when 2z high, though they can grab things like walls 1z above, but only if there's something to grab - otherwise 1z is enough, barring jumping like a bronze colossus), saw this on reddit today: the poster tested successfully using vertical bars instead of fortifications to stop dwarves leaving the archery tower.

I see the jumping on threat behaviour as useful way to ensure no dwarves or stupid pets wander into absolutely deadly trap area, though I am yet uncertain if there is anything that can't jump - I do recall a report of zombies also jumping straight up after spawning in "wagon-only" entrance (that utilizes unusable ramps being usable for wagons).

[Werdna]

Just basic Fortress Defense with 9 of the races enabled, I've played Masterwork but not with DF2014. 

So if I'm reading that Reddit thread right, constructed floors on top of fortifications do not stop dwarf jumping?  I have seen this happen I think, but I thought it was the inexactness of the Station order.  A marksdwarf ended up at the base of the wall rather than at z+1 in the fortification where I issued the Station - I thought she reported to that location but maybe she jumped out.  What's odd is that it was really a very rare case - why haven't I seen it more often?

[Fleeting Frames]

Mods are mods. Can't rely on them to act like vanilla unless they're written exactly same as vanilla (i.e. for instance having multiple goblin entities so that you can be sieged by several goblin civilizations.)

You're reading it right, and that also applies to fortifications carved into a wall. Station is always on same z-level, the inexactness is about x and y position. But can't answer why it only happens sometimes.