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[Aquillion]

None of these solutions will actually solve the problem.  Now instead of building a big row of traps, I build an even bigger row of windmills + traps.  If you raise the chance of them failing / jamming, I just add more traps.

I am not sure what the ultimate solution is, but nothing in this thread does it.  These would make traps more annoying to lay out -- especially placing windmills for every damn trap -- but they wouldn't make a whisker's difference for the end result.

And as far as that goes, I don't think that trying to limit things by making the interface for them painful is a good idea.  In fact, I'd say it's an absolutely terrible idea.  Players should be encouraged to plan clever and interesting trap-setups to deal with various enemies.  They shouldn't be forced to go through massive mindless repetitive actions (windmill, trap, windmill, trap, repeat forever) just to do something that otherwise works and is logical.

Give the enemy trap-scouts, who slowly search areas where traps have been encountered, and have an exceedingly high chance of finding + disarming traps (of course, players could use 'manual' traps with levers to get those -- that's intentional and part of the fun.  Or they could use crossbowdwarves or whatever.)  The point is it makes things more interesting, rather than just more tedious.

(Disarmed traps would be like 'jammed' ones -- don't force players to re-place them, that's tedious again.  Dwarves have to go and re-arm them instead.  Maybe forbid them automatically when they're disarmed -- or make that an option the player can set.)

[RavingManiac]

The game ought not to allow stone-fall traps or cage traps to be built outdoors. Without a ceiling overhead, there is no place from which one could suspend a stone/cage without being incredibly obvious.

[Aquillion]

...but it would be trivial for a player to build a ceiling over a large area, then build whatever else you want to require (walls, probably, for thickness) on top of that.  And I really doubt the AI can be made smart enough to realize that that's an obvious trap (especially since sometimes it will be and sometimes it won't be.)

I mean, maybe as a logical thing it could be done, but it's not going to make traps any less powerful.

[sonerohi]

Make weapon traps need a wall next to them, make cage traps and stonefall traps need a ceiling, make spikes need a block floor. It's not perfect, but it limits things, unless the player goes on a wall and floor building rampage. And at that point, their victory is hollow anyways, so why should you care? Play the game in a way that makes sense to you instead of trying to get things catered to your way of playing.

[RAM]

You could build a cage trap from the ground, it is a cage with the roof swung down to the side, it shoots up from the ground, via concealed grooves, at a certain height, after the roof has cleared the ground, a tether to the ground is pulled tight and pulls the roof so that it swings onto the top of the cage and locks into place.

 Rocks can be suspended from the ground, they can be seen, obviously, but they could be designed to only be accessible from one side, if the enemy reaches that side then they just kick it over(unless the building is indestructible, which they probably would be at present...), or they can try to disable it by throwing stuff. But if it comes to it, you can place multiple redundant triggers, deceptive release mechanisms, multiple rocks, and all manner of things you could think up if you were actually designing one, and have something with a reasonable chance of hitting someone with a rock if they stepped on a nearby piece of ground. Anything that doesn't 'get' the stone-suspended-in-the-air mechanisms may just walk under it regardless, and goblins may prefer to charge the obvious trap rather than face the penalty for cowardice.(which gets rapidly worse after they are recovered from the pit filled with tentacle demons...)

As for a repeating trap, assuming you have a constantly rotating axle. You can have a spike attached to a pressure plate. The pressure plate pulls the spike out of a gear, that otherwise holds the axe in place. The spike is only retracted at the specified pressure and a spring returns it after the pressure changes, the axe returns to the gear and cannot pass due to the spike.
As for the axle, you could link it to a battery, such as a suspended rock. When the rock reaches the bottom of it's track, it lands on a pressure plate which disengages the axe mechanism, and engages the axle. The rock is lifted to the top of it's track, at which point it disengages the axle and engages the axe, off the top of my head I am not quite certain how to do this, but I have gotten far enough that I am confident that I could figure it out given time, and I suspect that dwarves know more about gears than I do...

I am sure there are better ways of doing it, but I just wanted to suggest that someone with absolutely no background in engineering can find a solution. Bear in mind that there have been some exceedingly complex mechanisms made throughout history. Including a doll that could write(or was that one a hoax, I can never remember... Regardless, some of those things were real and fantastic...), and I heard that, hmmm, I think that the romans may have had a repeating ballista that would keep firing so long as some sort of crank was turned or something...

Traps should probably be less powerful than dwarves. It is possible to have a mechanism that hooks a weapon up to anything. Hook it up to something heavy enough and you could easily have a mechanism that could snap a solid steel axe in two rather than get jammed. But such things require space and to keep it compact they are probably not that forceful, so reducing the damage from traps seems reasonable. I could see the victim evading a trap to some extent, and if they have alot of room then dodging should be quite likely. But mostly I would like to see enemies having more options for trap resistance than simple trap avoid...

It would probably help to look at the mechanics suggestion thread, there are some related ideas there. I would like to see power being generated from levers, and power being universal, so that you could have your traps powered by a waterwheel or by a bunch of dwarves all pulling levers or have one super-dwarf powering a bunch of traps, and have bridges that require several dwarves to lift... And, of course, some traps don't require power, a simple hole in the ground doesn't require anything more than camouflage and a reason to walk over it...

[zchris13]

Every time I think of weapons traps, I think of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, right before the end, with the Trap Corridor. That is a corridor of 1 tile wide traps, using giant saw blades and axes. Maybe other things. But I concur with it requiring space above or to the side.

[eerr]

Hmm, X activations before jamming is a valid idea too


Constantly powered traps make no sense. This is mechanical power, the only way such a contraption would work is if the mechanisms constantly move in one direction, say an axe blade twirling around a swingset's top bar. And you can't store power in such a machine for multiple uses, it's always released all at once

needs some sort of power-Iterator

like a tank of water which is filled too far perpetually, but all can be withdrawn to power the weapon trap

or maybe all those giant stones lying around.


These days, the issue with traps is that they're far, far too easy to make.
If we make it require a little bit of work (seperate the trap from the pressure plate?) the game makes more sense, and the player feels like the trap matters.

as long as making traps isn't too difficult.

[Techhead]

If you made the weapon trap a 1-square building that attacked an adjacent square when triggered (choose a direction when building it, similar to pumps), you could hook it up to a lever or plate then. Not only that, but you could make hammer-traps propel victims properly and crossbow-traps shoot bolts across multiple squares.

I still want pit-fall traps, made of a hatch-cover and a mechanism.

[zchris13]

Not a bad idea, but I have one concern - why 3x1?  Initially it seems to make sense, but what if some poor sod wants to make an entrance that isn't a multiple of three wide - like me?  Yes, my basic corridors are 3 tiles wide.. but my 'grand' entry tiles are either 5 or 7 wide, with pillars and secondary corridors along the sides.

3x1 Severely limits design decisions of those who wish to use them - yes, Weapon Traps may well need a rebalance, and you may well have good ideas how to do it, here, but Forcing 3x1 size would lower the freedom of players.. which is a strong point for DF.  Why not just make Weapon Traps in some way linkable, to form a single, larger trap of variable size, with all the properties you describe?

Make them in the same building solid thing as Screw Pumps.  You get walls. You get traps. Genius.

[TerminatorII]

I skimmed most of everything aftger page 1. Just wanted to point out tho that a constantly powered yet only occasionally moving trap is very easy. USE A CLUTCH! step on pressureplate/trap and it engages the clutch until hte weight is off then it disengages stopping the movement of weapons in the trap without ever depowering.

[RAM]

I would agree, I have no idea how long clutches have been in use, but dwarves do seem to have a particular affinity for mechanisms...

[sweitx]

Hmm, X activations before jamming is a valid idea too


Constantly powered traps make no sense. This is mechanical power, the only way such a contraption would work is if the mechanisms constantly move in one direction, say an axe blade twirling around a swingset's top bar. And you can't store power in such a machine for multiple uses, it's always released all at once

needs some sort of power-Iterator

like a tank of water which is filled too far perpetually, but all can be withdrawn to power the weapon trap

or maybe all those giant stones lying around.


These days, the issue with traps is that they're far, far too easy to make.
If we make it require a little bit of work (seperate the trap from the pressure plate?) the game makes more sense, and the player feels like the trap matters.

as long as making traps isn't too difficult.

Power storage can be implemented as a part of the trap.  The power stored can be a large counter weight or a spring.
The increment release of power for trap can be handle in a variety of ways.  Escapements comes to mind, which with some modifications, can be made to release only a small amount of power each time.

[Belathus]

I recall reading somewhere about the separation of the trigger and the trap itself.  I'd really like to see this.  Like the spike traps.  The stone-fall trap built into an open space above the pressure plate, the projectile trap, when triggered, shoots a bolt/arrow/dart across multiple tiles, the weapon trap, when built into the wall, attacks adjacent squares, or, built into the floor, works like spike trap, or, built into open space to attack tile below.)  I could see cage traps being built below where a trap door is.  Basically, a built cage below a trap door.  Alternately, instead of a cage, goblins are just dumped into a pit, potentially spanning multiple z-levels.  This sort of trap would be easily self-resetting, too, with a counterweight that slightly weights more than the door itself.  A goblin's weight causes the door to open, the goblin falls, and with the goblin's weight gone, the counterweight reseals the trap door.

With this sort of set up, traps take up more space, sure, but you've many more options.  Imagine that you really like projectile traps.  Build a few pressure plates all attached to a gear.  When  those gobbos hit one of the pressure plates, the gear engages, powering a series of projectile traps which, in turn, unload their entire stacks of bolts into the group of goblins until the gear is disengaged (gobbos no longer stand on the pressure plates).  Or, one just gets a single shot without a powered set up per depression on the pressure plate or until someone manually resets the projectile trap.

Stone-fall traps are reset from the level above, allowing dwarves to potentially reset the traps in relative safety.  Cage traps are reset from the level below, allowing the same safety.  Jammed weapon traps, however, are still dangerous to reset during the siege.  Except perhaps those built into the ceiling above.

And, man, I'd love to see explosives used for one-shot traps.  Or, spiked balls rolling down hallways leaving a wake of impaled and smashed goblin remains.  Fun stuff for everyone involved (especially those poor dwarves who also get caught in them).

[Techhead]

I was the one who mentioned that before. So, using some of your ideas, the new list of traps could be:
Stone-fall Trap: Drops stone on square below when triggered. Build above linked pressure plate. Needs to be manually reloaded, from top level.
Weapon Trap: A wall that attacks an adjacent square when triggered. Build next to linked pressure plate. I vote for a one-shot trap that can be reset from either the "Hot" side or one of the 3 "Safe" sides. Crossbow-traps can launch across multiple tiles.
Pit Trap: Hatch/plate combo. Build above open space. Either one-shot or self-resetting, I'm not sure.
Cage Trap: Can be one of three methods. The first would use a pit-trap to drop a creature into the cage. The second would drop a cage onto the creature. The third would have a cage spring shut when a target walks through.
Spike Trap: Spikes extend/retract when triggered. Extended spikes do damage to creatures that fall on them.
Foot-hold trap: Attacks target's foot and holds on, preventing the target from moving. Must be manually reset.

In addition, linked traps could be used in other methods, like a volley of crossbow traps triggered on lever, or in death traps.

Perhaps if a citizen is injured by a trap, someone should be held at fault for it.

[sonerohi]

Perhaps for crossbow traps, an ability, such as with walls, to extend the traps trigger area? It wouldn't make sense for a crossbow to only point-blank someone.