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[Fintan]

So after my Dwarves endured the horrors of the 11 Goblin Crossbowman invasion, they were honoured by a visit from the local terrifying dragon (this was my first time seeing one, that breath weapon was kinda badass to watch as he roasted all my roaming horses). The dragon (after he was done roasting horses) nicely wandered into a cage trap for me, so now I have a dragon sitting in my animal storage. I was just starting to experiment with traps yesterday, and ran into this article on the wiki: http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Trap_design#Dragonfire_Pillbox

Will this work? Has anyone had experience with a dragon pillbox? Can dragons breath fire through multiple z levels? It sounds like a lot of fun, and I'll be trying it out today for sure.

[Jim Groovester]

The wiki article says no one tested it, so I don't know why anyone bothered to put up there in the first place.

It's an awesome idea, and I don't know whether it would work or not. My suspicion is that it probably won't. At least, not how you wanted it to. But try it out anyway and let us know if it does.

[Sensei]

I'm pretty sure that the fire would go through fortifications, but the dragon doesn't know that, so it won't shoot through them unless it has something to shoot at (EG, a chained up magma man) within the fortifications.

[Demonic Spoon]

Check up giant cave spider silk farming, I believe it would work if you set up something similiar.

[Martin]

Dragons can't use the fire breath across z-levels, so you need to have it at ground level. It will go through fortifications but the dragon needs to be able to path to the enemy to target it. So chaining it or fully walling it in won't work. You could put a door that is set to be not pet passable on the back of the pillbox, since it will path through the door, but being a building destroyer, it should just tear down the door and wander out.

I think if you remove the building destroyer tag and use an unlocked door that blocks pets, it should work.

Another way that might work would be to have a big skinny hallway ring of fortifications with the dragon in the hallway and have the enemy path through the middle of the ring. Have two floodgates on opposites sides hooked to pressure plates so that one was always open, but as soon as the dragon crossed a plate it'd toggle the floodgates. That way he could always path out to the enemy but could never actually get outside the ring. Something like this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

   ##############=##############
   #     D                     #
   # ######################### #
   # #                       # #
  <#^#>                     <#^#>
   # #                       # #
   # ######################### #
   #                           #
   ##############_##############

D: dragon, currently trying to path to the bottom opening but will cross the pressure plate before reaching there.
#: fortification
<>: ramps over/under so enemy can path through the gauntlet
^: pressure plates hooked to floodgates
=: closed floodgate
_: open floodgate

You'd need to make it much longer, however, or you run the risk of the dragon reaching the open door before the  pressure plate triggered the floodgate, and make sure you could funnel the enemy through there. You could make it 5-7 tiles wide in the middle, widen those ramps to 3 so wagons could get through to a depot - dragon breath has a pretty good range, so I think 7 tiles would be fine. For added fun, line the inner hallway with forbidden barrels of booze.

[Fintan]

Hmm, that makes things tricky sounding. It has to be able to path to the target in order to breath fire? Not just unobstructed line of sight? My next option was going to be just chaining the dragon up outside a second entrance to my fort, (to be used only during sieges) but would it not breath fire while on a chain then?

EDIT:: Whoops, posted this before completely comprehending Martin's idea. That sounds quite genius actually and I'll give it a shot right now. Let you know how it turns out. One worry that my brother pointed out to me is; what happens when the dragon steps on the pressure plant, and just immediately heads the other direction? Maybe I'll just put traps outside each floodgate to be safe.

[Martin]

Hmm, that makes things tricky sounding. It has to be able to path to the target in order to breath fire? Not just unobstructed line of sight? My next option was going to be just chaining the dragon up outside a second entrance to my fort, (to be used only during sieges) but would it not breath fire while on a chain then?

Yes, I'm almost positive it has to path, just like the giant cave spider and fire imp, and other ranged animal attacks. The chain only allows it to path one tile, so anyone outside of that range shouldn't trigger an attack, and they usually don't used the ranged attack just one tile away.

Think about how the game handles pathing. For the dragon, it'll explore all paths until something prevents it from pathing further (wall, chain). During that operation, it'll never even encounter the goblin to trigger the ranged attack. Ranged dwarves/gobbos/etc - anyone with an equipped weapon, as I understand it, have a different hunk of code that gets around this and also allows them to see across z-levels that they can't path across. That code doesn't get used (yet) for dragons, GCS, imps, etc. But due to a bug, the pet-blocking door doesn't stop the pathing algorithm, so the dragon path operation would allow it to find the gobbo, calculate the absolute range, check if there's a line-of-sight path, and then fire. My goofy ring of doom would work the same way.

[Fintan]

So I built your pillbox idea, adding on an outside layer of floodgates to use as shutters. Unfortunately I forgot that megabeasts like to destroy constructions. So it flipped the pressure plate, walked up to the closed floodgate, and then though it. Then there was burninating.

I told all my unarmed/untrained dwarves to rush the thing, and we got it! After it killed 49 of my 67 mans. Quite hilarious. Watching jets of fire spurt out of the big smoke plume was very satisfying. So... need another idea for next time. Probably something with channels.

[AlienChickenPie]

How did you get so much carnage out of one dragon? When a dragon showed up at my fortress, a single non-legendary swordsdwarf caught it on top of the fortress wall and cut it into five pieces without getting wounded himself.

[Fintan]

unarmed/untrained dwarves

I was relying entirely on traps, the dragon ended up inside those traps when it escaped.

[Hyndis]

I had attempted to use a bunch of trained fire imps(mine can be trained and will breed, makes magma pipes VERY dangerous even to a mature fortress) as a fire based defense system, but they're very trigger shy.

I did have them isolated though, because if I simply locked a door they would continually try to path through the locked door, and this will utterly kill your FPS. They almost never threw any fireballs.

This could work in a fortress with no meeting zone though, where a pet-impassable door will hold them just fine because they will not continually try to path to the meeting hall. However, this also means that your dwarves will wander around on their own.

With the next release and with burrows this could be a lot better, depending on how animals handle burrows.

If the default is to just wander aimlessly with no meeting zone, and animals would do this, then great. Or if you could assign an animal-only burrow, your imps could park themselves onto the firing platform to rain fiery death upon the goblins.

My current fortress has no meeting zone at all, and to counteract dwarves being hit at the edge of the map, my military basically spawncamps the only place where goblins can zone in. I have a defunct archery range (masterwork steel axes and swords are so much more effective!) that I could easily convert into a pillbox for fire imps.

I'll set up some traps to try to capture the 50+ fire imps in the magma pipe and set my dungeon master to train them up, and see what happens.

[nil]

So I built your pillbox idea, adding on an outside layer of floodgates to use as shutters. Unfortunately I forgot that megabeasts like to destroy constructions. So it flipped the pressure plate, walked up to the closed floodgate, and then though it. Then there was burninating.

I told all my unarmed/untrained dwarves to rush the thing, and we got it! After it killed 49 of my 67 mans. Quite hilarious. Watching jets of fire spurt out of the big smoke plume was very satisfying. So... need another idea for next time. Probably something with channels.

Gotta put the shutters on the other side of the fortifications.  Or use channels, dragons can't fly in vanilla.   I haven't seen a dragon (or any megabeast for that matter) since 2d, so I've never had the chance to build one of these.  I've always wanted to though.  I'd think it would work just fine, unless megabeasts don't fight invaders or won't flame at creatues they can't path to.

Of course flaming goblins might flee into your entrance and burn everything down, but that's a feature, not a bug.

[Fintan]

It shouldn't matter what side of the fortification the floodgates are on (mine were on the outside, away from dragon), but channels are definitely the way to go. Unfortunately the general consensus seems to be that the dragon does need to be able to path to the target. I can't verify that from this experiment though.

[nil]

Lame...

Maybe something like this would work then:

Code: [Select]

===================X=
=D               ^  =
===================X=
Where = is a fortification, D is a caged dragon, X is some sort of impassible but destroyable building (e.g., floodgate) and ^ is a cage trap.

When goblins are in range, release the dragon.  It can path through the destroyable building to the goblins and therefore flames them as it travels the length of the enclosure.  Before it can reach the end, though, it is recaptured.

It's a one-shot that must be reloaded after every use and therefore a lot less effective than the pillbox idea, but would it work?

[Martin]

Hmm, I didn't realize that building destroyers would take out pressure plates (how did I not know that?).

Anyway, the answer to the floodgate is channel+retractable bridge, but the pressure plate doesn't work the same way with bridges that it does with floodgates, so this might be a total rethink.