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[koruth]

In line with the other best-x-ever lines, I thought up this one.  I'm not a huge fan of military myself, I prefer engineering my foes' doom.  Weapon and cage traps are a good start, but for the best in defense, one needs halls and halls of traps, pitfalls, and mechanical constructs.

Probably my best one was a construction I like to call my labyrinth.  It was a 3 tile wide road, connecting to the  south-east corner of the map.  it did indeed have an opening to my fort, but that was only to lure gobbos into it.  None of them ever got through.  The road twisted from east to west, winding back and forth across the map.  Some parts of the walls had crossbow traps (there were access pathways so dwarves could reload them without ever being exposed to the gobbos) hidden behind fortifications, behind pits so no building destroyers could get to them.  Some parts of the road had weapon traps, some had fatal drop pits, and I was working on mechanisms to flood the entire maze with both magma and water (not both at once obviously, digging the whole thing out would be a bastard.)

My two favorite parts though, had to be the access road, and the very end of the maze.  At multiple points in the maze, there's a 3-long-2-wide pit (2 wide because I remember colossi having a bit of a reach) with a raised drawbridge on the other side... A lever inside the fort operated the drawbridges.  Lowering the bridges revealed access ramps, so migrants, traders and carts could get to the upper level of the maze, which was pretty much a straight road into the fort. 

The end of the maze was a very long series of bridges, hooked up to pressure plates.  The plates would retract the bridges, dropping gobbos into a lower level road... which would lead back to the start of the maze!  Gobbos would just keep looping through forever!  Muaha!

... Then I tunneled straight into a heaping facefull of HFS.  With no military.  Hubris incarnate.

What's your best deadly, convoluted, confusing, or just plain dwarfy fort security system?

(edited for typos)

[Sofaspud]

Couple versions back (not that I imagine it'd make a difference), I Fed Them To The Hounds.

So many of them, in fact, that my FPS was down to about 6 or so.

The only entrance to my fort was a 5x10 hallway, with doors at both ends set so pets couldn't pass through... utterly filled to the brim with baying, barking, gob-hating War Dogs.  Seriously, I started the map with 10 of them and had the pit completed by year 4... by year 6 it was unplayable, but very very cool to see the gobs torn to shreds by packs of ravening hounds.

I had a refuse pile in there as well, set to accept bones (dunno if dogs still eat those but I assume yes), and it was open to the air (so no nasty miasma to deal with); the pound puppies got rained on, but, eh.

[Rysith]

I like my forts to be very compact, so long, winding labyrinths are sort of out. However, I normally use a looping hallway (~20 tiles long) out the side of a wide retracting drawbridge, filled with weapon traps. With floodgates to cover the 3-tile-wide back of the drawbridge, the goblins path into the trap hallway and pile up on the bridge.

The drawbridge is over a ~6 layer deep pit, with spikes covering the bottom, and fortifications on the second level of the fall for my archers to shoot down into the pit or at goblins standing on the ledge outside the entranceway. I've yet to find something that can make it through that, and it still leaves an easy, short path for merchants etc. to come through. For bonus points, have a curtain wall and a drawbridge so that you can cut off the goblin retreat and slaughter them all once the siege is broken.

[LegacyCWAL]

A recent fort was built around a natural valley.  The main gates were at one end of the valley, the entrance to the valley was at the other end, and in between was the spacious, easily-traveled, cliff-lined valley itself.  On the ring of hilltop around the valley was where much of my fort went: outdoor farms, my meeting area and its waterfall, and bridges across the valley made of pure limestone.  Beautiful, serene, and spacious enough for there to never, ever be pathing problems for anybody travelling down the valley.

Sounds like it isn't much of a defense, right?  But here's where it gets to the part I'm proud of.  Attackers would come and find this nice, easy way to the fortress gates.  They'd stroll right down this pretty little valley, under a couple beautifully-built arches of quite valuable stone, and past the occasional tree...and then find crossbow bolts raining down on them from above.  The goblins would find out the hard way that those bridges were lined with fortifications as nearly two dozen marksdwarves began slaughtering them with virtual impunity.

But it gets better.  When the goblins turned to run, they found that those bridges they had already passed under were suddenly filled with marksdwarves as well.  Caught in a vicious crossfire, they would all be cut down in seconds, filling the serene little valley with corpses rotting in rivers of blood.  Any that had lagged behind far enough to escape the butchery would find themselves fleeing straight into a batch of cage traps, where they would be captured, stripped, and executed by a marksdwarf firing squad.

[Zerox]

D-day:1545

That was the theme of my trap "Hall"  if you could call it that. The 23 tile wide hall had 3 bunkers 7  spaces across each, filled to the brim with marksdwarves and one catapult each. the goblins would run in, trying to find the most direct way. By alternating bridges leading into the fort, I could have them running across the hall back and forth, all the while being pincushioned. I had no melee dwarves, and a couple metric tons of steel bolts stored away in the bunkers. Almost every dwarf was a champion, and they were allways training with their nice *Goblin bone bolts* when not during sieges. Oh, and on a side note, screw the merchants.

[Foa]

My hall was decked out with Isolated Barracks ( Isolated from the hall ) , each barrack is 3z tall ( hall level to top ) in the top two z each had 5 marks-dwarves, the hall level is filled with bridges to unless my wrestler and war dog army, it is completely fool-proof.

[Duke 2.0]

 15 z-level pit.
 5 drawbridges.
 1 dwarf manning the lever.

 Final destination... for the goblins. I even muddied the death pit and left all the stones in there, just to make the survivors miserable.

[koruth]

You fool!  Did it ever occur to you that muddying the goblins would only encourage their females to mud wrestle!  You gave them their greatest entertainment!

... And that reminds me of the one time I made a flood trap that was so high pressure, I could drain their iron-and-lighter equipment practically halfway across the map (nanofort).  In the end, I rerouted it so it would carry their stuff to a drainage pit close to my stockpiles.  More iron and more convenience than I ever thought possible.

[Ivefan]

My High pressure trap was so pressureized that they did not even get pushed, the tunnel was instantainiously filled.

Trapped Spiral corridor next to the main entrance, main entrance gets inaccecible by bridge.
Spiral ramp circling a tower filled with Xbow dwarves.

[Foa]

My High pressure trap was so pressureized that they did not even get pushed, the tunnel was instantainiously filled.

Trapped Spiral corridor next to the main entrance, main entrance gets inaccecible by bridge.
Spiral ramp circling a tower filled with Xbow dwarves.

Heh, a drownery, classic.

[Ivefan]

Actually, that was not my intention. I wanted them to get flushed out of the tunnel wich ended 10z above ground...
Damned teleporting water.

[Foa]

Actually, that was not my intention. I wanted them to get flushed out of the tunnel wich ended 10z above ground...
Damned teleporting water.

Make a water wall?

Just add some pumps, some grates to go on top of your channels.

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[Ivefan]

Hah, It was 5 wide, 2z high and atleast 30 tiles long before taking a turn to east for another 10 tiles before the end where i intended them to fall to their death.
I had a really large reservoir above and 6 hatches. I simply used too much water at once.

[koruth]

That's why I usually go through several prototypes of a trap before I go with a final design.  Just drain the reservoir, knock in a wall or two, make it a little smaller/bigger as necessary, check for new result, rinse and repeat.  It's science!  The dwarf way!

[Grumman]

My main fortress has three gatehouses, one in the west, across the river, one in the south, and one in the east. All have paths to my fortress require passing either two or three drawbridges over moats, while my main entrance has: a reservoir on top of the gatehouse that can be dropped onto the drawbridge, some cage traps, an automated Dwarven-Atom-Smasher trap which I'm converting into an automated pit trap, more cage traps, even more cage traps, another drawbridge, and then a 5-wide bridge that I can convert into a 1-wide corridor killing field for my ballista, which I will soon be able to convert further into drowning room.