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[EliDupree]

There are different types of elves?!

[NW_Kohaku]

There are different types of elves?!

If you mod, sure...

But I think that person doesn't seem to realize that elves will trade wood as well as cloth if you don't have very much lumber lying around.

[EliDupree]

I think that the best kind of control for the doors, if you could tune it right, would be a repeater that consists of a goblin running along a corridor with pressure plates at intervals, with all the pressure plates attached to all the doors. You'd place the plates such that the "off" signal of each plate came exactly 10 frames after the "on" signal of the next plate, which would leave the doors open for exactly 10 frames out of every 100. (You could use some other number, but 10 is easy if you're using a no-agility goblin, and 20 is too long, since bolts have about range 20 and move exactly one tile per frame).

The main problem is that you can't, as far as I know, convince a goblin to run in a loop without taking time to rethink its route occasionally, which would throw off the timing.

EDIT: Alright, I set one up, although it's more a proof-of-concept than anything - it turns out that goblins take longer when turning tight corners, which made the doors end up opening for only 1-6 frames half the time, so I'm not getting many bolts fired. I'm going to build another one with long straight corridors and three times the door-opening rate (there's a simple way to do this). On the plus side, it turns out that you can trick a goblin into running around a loop and only rethinking its route once every time around, and my rethinking-the-route glue worked fine (that is, I allocated two drawbridges in front of the doors and made sure they were up during the time at the end of the loop where the goblin leaves the door open for 90 frames in a row.)

[EliDupree]

Oh yessss. I constructed a goblin-based repeater that opens the doors for 10 frames three times per hundred frames. The rate of fire is great.

Hmm, with a repeater like this, it would be pretty easy to build three more goblin pillars/doors and have the pressure plates staggered so that there's _always_  a door open.

[warlordzephyr]

HERERSY! THIS IS HERESY!

You can't have a brilliant idea that actually works on dwarffortress for a substantual amount of time without a magma related major accident happening!

[LordSlowpoke]

HERERSY! THIS IS HERESY!

You can't have a brilliant idea that actually works on dwarffortress for a substantual amount of time without a magma related major accident happening!

Seconded. You need a lever that unleashes a bronzeadamantine colossus all over the generator.

[Grimlocke]

Hmmmm, true, most of my plans start as 'ha, this is pure genius!!' and end with me staring at some form of death and destruction thinking 'well, coulda worked'.

But its nice when it works out sometimes, it gives you a reason to make it bigger, more dangerous and ulitimately yet another cause for death and destruction.

[Jim Groovester]

So I've had this brilliant idea to make this setup automatic.


+D^^^^^^D+
###DDDD###

Legend
D = Door
^ = Pressure plate
+ = Floor Tile
# = Wall



The colors indicate which pressure plate is linked to which door.

The idea is that a goblin thrown in on either the two end pressure plates will run back and forth between the two exits he won't be able to escape from. As he's doing this, he triggers pressure plates along the way. The effect is that there will be a moving window of sorts for dwarves to shoot at him, but he should hopefully be moving fast enough that no bolts actually hit him. There's a wall in front of the end pressure plates so that when he gets stunned that his exit is closed, he doesn't get a bolt through his lung and throat.

Doors linked to pressure plates open when the pressure plate is triggered, right? And they open instantaneously, right?

You might add a tile or two of open spaces between the pressure plates and the doors, so that the goblin doesn't path through them and gum up the works.

I think this setup would work perfectly, but I haven't had a chance to test it out. Anyways, my idea was to use this near archery targets so that you don't have to keep dwarves on duty and station them where you need them to. They would go to the archery targets to practice, but would get interrupted by the goblin and hopefully fire lots of metal bolts instead of practice bolts. That would make this perfectly automatic, save for creating practice and metal ammunition.

[warlordzephyr]

one problem, there is no magma.

[EliDupree]

The effect is that there will be a moving window of sorts for dwarves to shoot at him, but he should hopefully be moving fast enough that no bolts actually hit him. There's a wall in front of the end pressure plates so that when he gets stunned that his exit is closed, he doesn't get a bolt through his lung and throat.

That was actually very similar to the first setup I tried (minus the doors. I think that the dwarves won't actually shoot at that goblin at all, with the doors there.) It seems that marksdwarves intelligently lead their target. Furthermore, they won't fire if they can't shoot to the point that leads the target. You might be able to arrange some of this if you took advantage of the pathfinding behavior (which is actually quite complex - particularly, they don't get 'stunned' if they can take a short detour, so you could make an infinite regression of short detours), but it's really much less simple than the stationary goblin / automatic door system. Even if you did manage to design it, you'd have to replace the goblin occasionally, because it would be shot to pieces when it went insane, while the goblins on the pillar are viable targets indefinitely.

Doors linked to pressure plates open when the pressure plate is triggered, right? And they open instantaneously, right?

Yes. The first frame when the door is open is exactly the first frame when the goblin is on the plate.

That would make this perfectly automatic, save for creating practice and metal ammunition.

Did you read my recent post about goblin-based repeaters? It's already completely automatic except for designating the melting, melting tasks, and forging tasks (and, until I get a suitable other creature or refactor the system, replacing the goblins when the repeater-goblin goes insane). I'm currently working on a way to automatically regulate repeating tasks that require  materials, too, so that (for instance) I'd never have to re-designate the forging tasks when they ran out of materials. I *might* even be able to come up with a complicated dwarf-tricking system so that I don't have to re-designate the melting tasks, either, so the only thing left would be designating melting (which there's no way around whatsoever.)

I guess the other thing that isn't automatic is forbidding the occasional masterwork bolts and/or designating new weaponsmiths when the old ones get too skilled.

[Pie]

Has anyone suggested putting a fortification directly in front of the goblin? Will that prevent the marksdwarves from shooting? Because if not, that should increase the longevity of your goblin stack.

[EliDupree]

Has anyone suggested putting a fortification directly in front of the goblin? Will that prevent the marksdwarves from shooting? Because if not, that should increase the longevity of your goblin stack.

I actually tried various things with fortifications before even starting on the moving-goblins or cycling-doors tricks. As far as I can tell, marksdwarves never shoot through fortifications that aren't immediately adjacent to them.

My current system makes the longevity of the goblin stack be infinite anyway.

HERERSY! THIS IS HERESY!

You can't have a brilliant idea that actually works on dwarffortress for a substantual amount of time without a magma related major accident happening!

Oh yeah, and this. I so do not play Dwarf Fortress by its motto.

Although, TBH, the biggest accident that could have come from this would have been nine goblins getting off the pillar and attacking. Which wouldn't have been a big threat considering the, y'know, 10-stack of marksdwarves with adamantine bolts conveniently right nearby.

[EliDupree]

HERERSY! THIS IS HERESY!

You can't have a brilliant idea that actually works on dwarffortress for a substantual amount of time without a magma related major accident happening!

You'll be happy to know that I just had a magma accident while building an expanded, improved version of the generator. I lost six dwarves - three children, a legendary mason (fortunately I have another), and two random workers - and I have to wait for the magma to "evaporate" before continuing construction in one area. Unluckily for you, though, the project is not stalled and I don't have to do any major engineering to fix it.

Seconded. You need a lever that unleashes a bronzeadamantine colossus all over the generator.

I now have a pump that fills my smelter-room with magma.

[warlordzephyr]

HERERSY! THIS IS HERESY!

You can't have a brilliant idea that actually works on dwarffortress for a substantual amount of time without a magma related major accident happening!

You'll be happy to know that I just had a magma accident while building an expanded, improved version of the generator. I lost six dwarves - three children, a legendary mason (fortunately I have another), and two random workers - and I have to wait for the magma to "evaporate" before continuing construction in one area. Unluckily for you, though, the project is not stalled and I don't have to do any major engineering to fix it.

Seconded. You need a lever that unleashes a bronzeadamantine colossus all over the generator.

I now have a pump that fills my smelter-room with magma.

It was inevitable my friend, like water always running back to the sea, magma will always run back to the dwarves.
XD
I've got nothing against your unlimited adimantium cheat project, i don't HAVE to use it, but being an old hand at it i remembered the DF theory of relativity: Ma=CiD^2
(Magma accident="Clever" idea X Dwarves, sqaured)

[EliDupree]

I think you're looking for something more like Godwin's Law: "As the cleverness of an idea goes to infinity, the probability of a lethal magma accident goes to one."

Of course, the law breaks down in any case if the clever idea is a way to do something without magma.

P.S. I copied my save and opened up the HFS. My eight masterwork-adamantine-clad champions

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

made short work of 30 tentacle demons and the boss, with only one champion being injured. Actually, only four of the champions were even in the tunnels at the time of the fight. It was kind of disappointing - no spirits of fire, so nothing really interesting to experiment with. A couple of the demons died mere frames after they were spotted, and a sizable fraction of them had major injuries on the exact same frame they were spotted.