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[peterb]

I have an interesting fort right now, "Ropedanced".  Through a lucky placement and some careful digging, I have just one entrance to the fort, access to magma, I'm working on access to running water through a long-term engineering project and -- most importantly -- there is only one map edge, the northwest corner, from where caravans and enemies can reach me.

This allowed me to build a large-ish wall around a wide swath of land, giving me somewhat protected area for outside activities.  I built a channel with a bridge and a sort of 'baffle' area to put the trade depot, and then a trap labyrinth behind that.  All of this is outside of the fortress proper. There's some risk of course that flying creatures could bypass all of this, but I'm willing to treat that as a separate problem.

Here's the issue:  I don't have a strong enough military yet to mount regular patrols to the map edge without losing dwarves.  For two seasons running now, the goblins have assaulted incoming caravans.  They completely slaughtered the elves, took out the human Merchant Baron, and then were killed by the caravan guards.

My question is:  is there any reasonable way (sort of sprinkling traps around the map, which I am doing) to give the caravan some cover without actually exposing my military to unreasonable risk?  Or are they simply going to have to fend for themselves?

[Mephansteras]

One solution is to put protected watchtowers out there. I use these all the time. Just use an underground tunnel to access them, so there aren't any doors for invaders to come through. Then you can station marksdwarves up in the tower to help the caravans. Sucks if the goblins bring crossbowmen, since they can take out your guards. But for melee goblins it's an awesome defense, since they can't do anything about.

[Anfold]

At the entrance to the map you can build a wall so that there is only a 3 wide space for the wagons to come through.  Concentrate traps and postion some trained animals there as a lookout device. One way in, No way out.

[umiman]

If you feel like it, try building the Great Wall of Dwarftopia; wherein by building a simple 1 z-level wall with a guarded, fortified gate at your one access point right at the edge of the map where you can build (it's not right at the edge, but close), you should be able to protect your caravan and your fortress against anything.

Preferably you'd want to be able to churn it out fast, because like you mentioned, goblin raiders come often and can put a damper on external projects like this. So I would recommend at least 4-5 masons? Or just temporarily assign everyone a masonry job since construction has no impact on masonry skill or does masonry skill affect the speed of construction anyway.

A fortified gate would be like... say...

code:

....||....
....||....
....||....
.========.
.++...>||<
.||++++||.
.^D^^^^D^.
.^D^^^^D^.
.^D^^^^D^.
.========.
....||....
....||....
D = Door
. = Ground
|| / = = Wall
+ = Fortification
< / > = Stairs
^ = Trap

[Hypcso]

A fortified wall/gate structure won't really help if the caravan is getting slaughtered by goblins on another z-level ( which is what I assume is happening unless I read wrong ). Your best bet is probably to go with the guard towers with marksdwarves, again, it isn't fool proof and they can/will probably die but with plenty of bones or wood marksdwarves are cheap and quick to skill up.

Additionally you could try some long range ballista sniping with a ballista tower on the same level as the things you want dead, and a clear line of sight to them.