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[Naryar]

Now that we have flying domestic creatures (geese), I wonder if aerial meeting areas are makeable, and will work ?

So you pepper your outside map with fliers, not only they are completely invulnerable to most attackers, but ranged siegers will also waste perfectly good bolts on geese rather than your dwarves.

Only problem I see is against flying enemies.

[Halnoth]

Now that we have flying domestic creatures (geese), I wonder if aerial meeting areas are makeable, and will work ?

So you pepper your outside map with fliers, not only they are completely invulnerable to most attackers, but ranged siegers will also waste perfectly good bolts on geese rather than your dwarves.

Only problem I see is against flying enemies.

I'm like 90% positive you cannot make zones on tiles your dwarves cannot access.

Edit: and by this I mean black unseen tiles and light blue sky tiles, not tiles which are simply walled off.

[Starver]

Your setup is similar but suffers two major drawbacks which I've modded out of my design.  1) Fortifications won't stop arrows.  Any elite bowman will ignore them completely and slaughter your poults, and 2) The hatch can be walked to, so a building destroyer will happily walk over and smash the hatch open.  I solved both of these issues by using windows instead, and flooring over the whole thing.  It's harder to reload, but you never NEED to reload, so it doesn't matter.

I've got poults coming out of my ears.  Out of their ears.  They breed like rabbits[1].

So, anyway, they're expendable.  I don't care if they get shot.  I'd rather lock them in and keep them where they are, at least until they become adult and prove to be either the best breeding stock or suitable only for the butchers.  (Must build more butchers workshops!)  Then I'd swap them out with other sacrificialattentive watchbirds.

Plus, if a BD can walk to the hatch, they're well past the defences that this pillbox is, given the only (non-flying) way to it is to get through the defence-orientated entrance-way, etc.   (And flyers who get there are at least kept busy, I suppose.)  The pillbox is also future-proofed against (non-flying) Construction Destroyer activities, of course, but that adds little current value to the structure.

As far as external snipers, I did say that windows would help as well, indeed, and replacing the down-stair above with a floor/wall or even putting walls up on the access catwalks would help with the BD issue, of course, but both would make it not so easy to drop a "belly-gunner" bowdwarf into there to pick off an otherwise awkwardly-located enemy...


About the only issue I might have is line-of-sight range restricted to that given by the given livestock, but the eventual fort design will have highly constrained paths leading them right past various pillboxes well in advance of causing any danger....

(Hmmm, wonder if I should upload my map to the map-upload thingy.  It's only five years in, and very much in its infancy.  Never done it before, but s a kiloproject (not quite a megaproject...yet), there are several other aspects about the fort design that I wouldn't mind sharing.)


[1] As do the rabbits, as I've also been collecting every single species I can.  I had to slaughter the trapped-and-trained elephants because they slid over into starvation, but other than that I'm rotating the pastures[2] of and selectively culling primarily the grazers, at the moment[3].  Back to the birds, however, I had a similar population 'egg'splosion issue with a previous fort, and laid out an array of unconstrained 1x1 pastures out in the wilds to give them room to breath and which was also good for detecting ambushers, although caused issues with dwarfs wanting to go out and get the poultry back in their pasture when they fled in fright.  i.e. sending my little innocent animal-hauling workers potentially right into the fray...  also, choosing guard-poultry with "g" as their map symbol (i.e. guineafowl) confuzzled things mightily, 'cos they look very much like the goblins they're in the middle of...

[2] I have (I think) 30 separate 10x10 pastures at ground level within my compound (roughly 100x100, walled in and ditched on the outer, and there's space in-between them all as they emulate the subterranean corridor/room layout), with room for a few more, and two layers of soil below only partly employed for other purposes so giving me 100 total pastures of that size...  Currently the large (and mostly feline) carnivores have a pasture to themselves (as do the top-notch selection of male birds of all species, and I've just made a new hatchery for along those lines), and haven't yet gotten annoyed with each other, but I'm prepared to split them up if they do start complaining before I get cubs of the relevant species...

[3] And eventually I'll use eugenics on any creature not subject to grazing limitations,

[Girlinhat]

Zones appear linked to land.  I attempted to define a hole as a garbage zone, which failed, until I put a hatch over it and then defined the hatch as a zone.  That being said, I wonder if you could build a raised platform and declare it a meeting zone, would the geese fly to it?

Either way, anything you attempt this with will die quickly as it affords zero protection.

[Maklak]

For cheap, but wastefull (animals get killed) and dangerous (Dwarfs may sometimes go there) watchpoints:

a) Small pastures obsolete ropes. They still need to be reloaded with animal, but don't restrict its movement so much. Don't use cats.

b) Nest boxes work with lots of pollutry, but Dwarfs will go to collect eggs, and might get killed. Trolls will probably demolish nestboxes, but they're cheap anyway.

[Saiko Kila]

For cheap, but wastefull (animals get killed) and dangerous (Dwarfs may sometimes go there) watchpoints:

a) Small pastures obsolete ropes. They still need to be reloaded with animal, but don't restrict its movement so much. Don't use cats.

b) Nest boxes work with lots of pollutry, but Dwarfs will go to collect eggs, and might get killed. Trolls will probably demolish nestboxes, but they're cheap anyway.

Trolls should dislodge nestboxes so you should be able to re-affix them later. At least that's what FBs do.

I use two things on surface:
1. watchtowers with modded blue peafowl, so they are Talented Observers. They live twice as long as turkeys, that's why I prefer them. But I don't have sand so I can build only a limited number of these.
2. ropes with cats, not-bluepeafowl birds and other small and useless animals. I surround these with up to 4 trap cages, so there is a chance something will get caught. I've been doing that since roc encounter - if I had traps then I'd catch him, and he was oblivious to other bait-traps, which were good against dragons or cyclops.

I keep in mind to post either good males (fat and meaty) or females, preferably birds, because then I can still control breeding and get usable animals for other purposes.

[Girlinhat]

For cheap, but wastefull (animals get killed) and dangerous (Dwarfs may sometimes go there) watchpoints:

a) Small pastures obsolete ropes. They still need to be reloaded with animal, but don't restrict its movement so much. Don't use cats.

b) Nest boxes work with lots of pollutry, but Dwarfs will go to collect eggs, and might get killed. Trolls will probably demolish nestboxes, but they're cheap anyway.

Hate to sound this way, but everyone who's created a zone has noticed pasture zones, and realized how useful they would be for positioning watch animals.  You're not really giving new information here.

Both of your examples have one massive flaw that I tried to avoid with my watchtowers - you either have to manually refill it, and/or it puts dwarves in danger.  My design allows you to build a tower, and leave it alone for 20 years.  It has zero maintenance and the smallest sliver of a weakness (flying building destroyers, which are very rare and may not do any damage anyways).  Although my towers suffer a smaller view range, they have the advantage that you will only refill them like twice in the normal run of a fort.

Simplicity and zero maintenance, that is what I put forth.

[evileeyore]

Simplicity and zero maintenance, that is what I put forth.

The perfect woman.  I'm fallin in love.

[LuckyLuigi]

I'm building a chain of these, but I dislike using 1 zone pasture for the birds.
I'd rather pit them into the tower from the roof, then close the roof with a hatch (lever optional). There's an access bridges across the roofs.

Will flying building destroyers destroy the roof hatch from above ?

Can I zone the roof as a pit after I have placed the hatch ?

[Girlinhat]

Yes, and Yes.  Any building destroyer which can reach your roof, will gladly smash the hatch and then kill the occupant.  If the hatch isn't locked, then any goblin riding a giant bat will fly through the hatch just like an unlocked door on the ground.  My design was made to protect against all attackers, and it requires deconstruction to replace the watcher, but you only have do it once every two decades.  If you simply cannot handle that 2 tile piece of deconstruction work to replace the bird, then you're more than welcome to place an entry-friendly method of replacement, but you will sacrifice security in doing so.  I suppose it's a balance, it can be secure or it can be easily replaced.  Usually, if it needs to be replaced it means it's not secure, so one problem will fix the other if you're doing it right...

Dwarves will pit animals through a hatch, as long as it's not locked.  I would suggest attaching it to a lever, so that you can control when it's locked or not rather precisely.  Of course, more than anything I would suggest simply not using a hatch, but if you must use one, make it safe.

[LuckyLuigi]

I plan for eternity 
I was building a (completely closed) tunnel across the roof of the towers, allowing the use of hatches while preventing attack from flying building destroyers.
Sadly, I just realized this still leaves the problem of extracting the dead bodies of the perished birds (*doh*)...I could of course replace the center floor tile with another hatch, then wall off the bottom of the tower allowing a chute to drop the bodies below ground for safe pickup...

Your original idea is perfect for starting out, but I need to keep my 200 dwarves working 

[ashein]

When using watchtowers you apparently also get a nice bonus in a form of a badger scare-away tower! The buggers usually turn around and run, even if some of them are enraged by the birdie. Think it's much better than getting rid of those badgermen in a dwarven way - well, if you didn't mod your civ ethics to be able to butcher them

[Kaos]

I love this concept.  It's a way to make gems and glass windows really useful.  On my latest fortress I've taken the idea to a ridiculous extreme.  The fortress includes a large aboveground structure covering most of the map.  The entire outer wall of the fortress is lined with windows on the 2nd floor, with war dogs chained periodically behind the windows.  Essentially I've made the entire aboveground fortress into one giant animal-powered watchtower.  Thieves and ambush groups are spotted almost the moment they enter the map, giving me plenty of time to decide how to deal with them.  Which came in handy when I pissed off the elves badly enough for them to send me 30+ ambush groups in a single season.

Don't they just run away the moment they get spotted?? at least thieves.... in that case spotting them right after they enter the map would result in them leaving immediately and you won't be able to "deal" with them, and I sure want to "deal" with kobold/goblin thieves and babysnatchers, not let them run away.... 




About the watchtowers, I use a slightly modified version, the same watchtower as the OP but the ground level is completely closed by walls not only the four columns, in the center there is an up/down stair that leads underground to my fortress! that way I can freely enter and exit the watchtower from the security of my fortress, and can replace watchbirds without the need to deconstruct...


For added style instead floors on top of it I use ramps so it gets a nice looking "roof"

[Girlinhat]

I usually add a few ramps and a statue or two on the roof of my towers, actually

[Nidokoenig]

When using watchtowers you apparently also get a nice bonus in a form of a badger scare-away tower! The buggers usually turn around and run, even if some of them are enraged by the birdie. Think it's much better than getting rid of those badgermen in a dwarven way - well, if you didn't mod your civ ethics to be able to butcher them

That could be a lifesaver in my next fort- next version of the pony mod will have honey badger pegasi. That, and it's a great way to train up glassmakers with cut green glass gem windows.

One idea for the watchtowers, if you added a level below the watchanimal that was a ring of fortifications with stairs leading to tunnels through the rest of the fort, you could station marksdwarves there to get some live target training, without being blinded by them going to booze up.