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[Armeleon]

Almost everyone should, by now, know how to construct many different kinds of elaborate death traps inescapable even by deadly building destroyers. It's not difficult, and it works as a fool-proof way to safe-guard your fortress.  But how would you go about safe-guarding your fortress against intelligent invaders (for now, only adventurers fall under this category, but as Toady improves the AI we can hope for something more) ?  Secret doors and time-released beasts all fall under this category. I've been able to do a series of gates which open only by someone who knows the correct combination of moves--one wrong move and it's game over. 

What I'm attempting to do is create a list of possible traps that will work for this scenario, I'll add suggestions as we go along.

1) Combination Locks -- This includes doors, floodgates, etc which only open via a series of pulled levers or pressed plates. I've always done it with the levers releasing water into different chambers via hatches. This has an added bonus of allowing you to flood rooms due to wrong answers. You can do it as simple as you want, or more complex, if you want to get into random bit sequences.

2) Collapsing Rooms -- A ceiling held up by supports set to collapse at a trigger.

3) Timed Beast Release -- When the Invader enters your fortress, he has only so much time to leave before the beasts are released.

4) Death Maze -- Twisting passages filled with strange creatures, mysterious levers, and surprising pressure plates all designed to confuse the invader. With the right combination of bridges and pressure plates, the maze can change infinitely.

5) Ghosts??? -- Can ghosts be used as a trap?

6) Untested Secret Door -- I would think this could work by building a wall and collapsing something on top of it, or taking out its supports. Has anyone been able to do something like this?

[wierd]

A 16 lever combination door would stump even a human player, if a sufficiently random bit squence was used. (Levers actually control hidden floodgates, hatches, and a pumpstack. Unless properly activated, the pumped water will never reach the pressure plate that opens the door. Added bonus: penalties for failure, since water is pressurizable, and can be made to overflow into the locked chamber.)

[King DZA]

DeathMaze. The likes of which would actually become more effective if the AI had a more human intelligence, as they wouldn't immediately know which path would lead them to the center.

[wierd]

The death maze can be made more !!fun!! By including pressure plate activated bridges in the maze.

Eg, "ai invaders" take fastest route to center. This has them coss bridges, and step on the plate. The plate lifts some bridges. This changes the path through the maze. Ai invaders take new path, step on another plate. Path changes again.  Rinse repeat.


(With a sufficiently convoluted death maze, you could prevent demoralized invaders from fleeing by eliminating the exit.  System needs to be reset-able somehow though.)

[King DZA]

To screw with the pathing I just fill mine with a shit load of doors and floodgates which are operated in a control room deep below the surface. But pressure plates seem fun, too.

[wierd]

I switched to bridges after having building destroyers just smash the floodgates down.

That was some time ago though.   Do they still destroy floodgates?

The added benefit of bridges, is that gobbos tend to cluster in rank and file lines behind their leaders, and bridges can be quite long. The raised bridge can then itself become a devistating weapon.

Building them over chasm like pits with steel spiketraps at the bottom makes it more delicious.

This method is vulnerable to flying invaders though. Regular shredding traps in the hallway have to take care of those.

[Ferozstein]

This is a great idea, which certainly should be implemented in at least a few forts in the succession game from this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=98593.0

At least I think that a fort intended from the start to be abandoned and used as a site in the adventure mode should be something more than a grab-bag of neat weapons and equipments. There should be some kind of challenge. This is, after all, a DWARF fortress you're trying to rob

[acetech09]

One of my favorite traps is as follows:

Code: [Select]

Z-Level 0:
OOOOOOOOOOOOOO
O^^^^^^^^^^^^O
O^^^^^^^^^^^^O
O^^^^^^^^^^^^O
OOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Z-Level 15:
··············
··············
++++++P+++++++
··············
··············

Z-Level 17:
··············
·····OOO······
·····O¢O······
·····OOO······
··············

Z-Level 18, 19, & 20:
OOOOOOOOOOOOOO
O············O
O············O
O············O
OOOOOOOOOOOOOO

O = Wall
+ = Floor
^ = Upright Spike
P = Pressure Plate
· = Open Space
¢ = Floor Hatch, linked to pressure plate.
Fill the reservoir with water, flush enemies. Fun, and awesome.

[King DZA]

I switched to bridges after having building destroyers just smash the floodgates down.

That was some time ago though.   Do they still destroy floodgates?

The added benefit of bridges, is that gobbos tend to cluster in rank and file lines behind their leaders, and bridges can be quite long. The raised bridge can then itself become a devistating weapon.

Building them over chasm like pits with steel spiketraps at the bottom makes it more delicious.

This method is vulnerable to flying invaders though. Regular shredding traps in the hallway have to take care of those.

Yeah, I admit building destroyers can be a problem at times. Luckily, trolls seem to get lazy after smashing the first couple, and then proceed to loiter around while their kin get slaughtered. The only thing I use bridges for currently is an atom smasher trap in the Deathmaze, and easy access for my dwarves to reach its outer edges.

Though now that I think about it, some of the traps would probably work a lot better if they were pressure plate operated...Hmm, guess I'll have to play around with them a bit.

[the woods]

A vast empty desert with no tools or life. A cigarette-butt littered wasteland of walmarts, trailer parks, mcdonalds, and dollar theaters. Filthy bus stations. Titanic faceless corrugated aluminium warehouses built on bulldozed spires. Garbage dumps, full of toilets. Pepsi cans and cattle syringes damming a rancid creek. Broken glass under a concrete bridge. Facebook, billboards, ravines full of car batteries. Cultural void, nether, absurdity, abuse. An intelligent invader would be disgusted and deterred. Blah blah blah words

[Armeleon]

This is a great idea, which certainly should be implemented in at least a few forts in the succession game from this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=98593.0

At least I think that a fort intended from the start to be abandoned and used as a site in the adventure mode should be something more than a grab-bag of neat weapons and equipments. There should be some kind of challenge. This is, after all, a DWARF fortress you're trying to rob

I'm actually on the list! I'm a month or so down, but I'm hoping to implement most of these in whatever fortress I end up designing. Perhaps we should get a list of all related threads to the meta-topic together.  Collaboration en masse!

Also, I've updated the list. Why didn't I think of the death maze? I've used it I don't know how many times.

[Lmaoboat]

A vast empty desert with no tools or life. A cigarette-butt littered wasteland of walmarts, trailer parks, mcdonalds, and dollar theaters. Filthy bus stations. Titanic faceless corrugated aluminium warehouses built on bulldozed spires. Garbage dumps, full of toilets. Pepsi cans and cattle syringes damming a rancid creek. Broken glass under a concrete bridge. Facebook, billboards, ravines full of car batteries. Cultural void, nether, absurdity, abuse. An intelligent invader would be disgusted and deterred. Blah blah blah words

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37OWL7AzvHo

[Jacob/Lee]

A room full of 20 levers. 14 do nothing, 5 drown the room and the last one opens the door.

[wierd]

I still like the 16 lever puzzle I mentioned earlier.  Makes a nice neat 4x4 square of levers. If the incorrect sequence is triggered, there is a chance of flooding the room. There is a delay before the door opens on the correct sequence (the rube goldberg contraption has to do its thing first), making an impatient human skip it as ineffectual.

[Armeleon]

I still like the 16 lever puzzle I mentioned earlier.  Makes a nice neat 4x4 square of levers. If the incorrect sequence is triggered, there is a chance of flooding the room. There is a delay before the door opens on the correct sequence (the rube goldberg contraption has to do its thing first), making an impatient human skip it as ineffectual.

I like this idea. You would have to put in a lockdown sequence that locks the levers while still computing.  And you could probably color code the levers as well. Just to make it fun