Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Dwarf Mode Discussion => Topic started by: Frogwarrior on August 23, 2011, 11:27:39 pm
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http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-2362-superdefenses
ok my df recording skills aren't that great, but hey.
my fort entrance is guarded by about five dozen dogs, a bear, three cougars, a leopard, and an alligator.
but that's not what I'm proud of.
I'm proud of the magma landmines.
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Yeah trust me those dogs wont do as well as you think against tough enemies.
I'm intrigued by the magma or should i say lava landmines. How is it you achieve this?
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I like it. Pumps artificially pressurizing magma to ensure that it will spout out of the ground when triggered by the nearby plates. Brilliant!
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Cool. Just dropping the Magma from above also works, but you need to use BIG hatches in order to drop it fast enough to prevent the
elves invaders from out-running it. I use maximum-sized Drawbridges as drop-hatches.
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I'm intrigued by the magma or should i say lava landmines. How is it you achieve this?
Magma gets pressure when moved by pumps.
I agree with Excedion that the rest of your defenses are not that impressive (weapon traps outside of the drawbridge seem like they would expose the mechanics to enemies), but the magma tube system more than makes up for it in terms of dorfness. You can drop it from above, but that just isn't as cool as it bubbling from below.
If I weren't too lazy to pumpstack, I would definitely try that out myself. Maybe I will embark on a volcano and do that.
Do your tubes have manual on/off levers as well as the plates?
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Goblin takes one wrong step, hears a whooshing, rushing, burning, bubbly sound from below. Moments later, he is engulfed in a towering spray of burning hot melted rock, a flood of titanic proportions which washes over him and his comrades, melting them into various fleshy bits instantly.
At least their deaths are quick. Except for the ones near the edge of the group. And none of the deaths are painless, I guarantee.
+10 Dorfiness points sir
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Reading the autopsy reports as I watch the video. 1 word.
Ow.
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"His head is melted."
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Well, my main defensive system is not the cabal of dogs and such (which are currently helping shred the trolls into a fine mist, but mostly are just fodder) but my four squads of well-equipped dwarves. I just think it's hilarious that I have this pen built into the side of my entrance, so enemies that wander in suddenly get ganged by a million puppies.
The weapon traps are mostly just there for flavor and random wounding of wild animals; each of them only has a single weapon on them anyways. Never seen anything get stuck, and anyway I set everything to an alerta as soon as I get sieged.
BUT WHATEVER, you're here for the MAGMA LANDMINES. (Which, I should say, I saw the basic idea for them on this forum somewhere, but I had to figure out the details myself.)
Here's a map of my fort:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-10671-rampartroots
Pumping from below is much more practical than dropping from above, I think, because to drop it from above I would have to pump it up over EACH drop site. With this, I only have to build a single pump stack.
Also, with the triple pump stack I used, the magma comes out REALLY fast; the goblins couldn't run away fast enough. And now they're melted. Suckers. Also, the other landmine that was triggered by the trolls, the video zooms by it but the magma gushed out to a height of three Z-levels.
SCHEMATIC:
Side View:
OOOOOOOO
O /=~~~O ~
O~=\ O~O ~~~
O /=~O~O~!g!~
O~=\ O~OOO#OO
OOOO~O~~~+~OO/= - screw pump
~ - magma
+ - door (hooked to pressure plates)
# - grate
!g! - burning goblin
NOTES:
-I have a few manual controls; I have one lever linked to all 15 doors; in case a wire gets crossed somewhere I can always pull the lever twice ensuring all 15 doors are then closed. Also, each pump stack has a lever that cuts a gearbox somewhere along its power supply train. Additionally, the Heart of !!Dwarven Science!!, the mechanism through which all of the power is channeled, is hooked to another lever so I have a full-stop kill switch on everything. It pays to have redundant safety mechanisms!
-Doors are preferable to drawbridges for the operating mechanics because they do not have the 100-tick delay - as soon as one of the four plates is triggered, the volcano begins.
-However, this means you REALLY SHOULD make DARN SURE your magma tubes are FREE OF ANY MAGMA-SAFE STONES before you pump in the magma! Otherwise the flow might push the stones onto the door spaces, preventing the door from closing. This is bad because it means you have pressurized magma spewing all over your landscape and, if you didn't put in a kill switch, you have only to wait for the awesome, awesome end. Fortunately, by repeatedly pulling the lever linked to all the doors, I was able to eventually flush the tubes out when this happened to me. (I was planning on building a drain area behind each of the problem sites, but the situation resolved itself before I finished it.)
-Magma will only flow up to the level of the highest screw pump pressurizing it, so, make sure your pump stack is tall enough. The landmine encountered by the goblins was at the height of the highest pump, so it was at the limit - the trolls triggered one 2 z-levels below, allowing for an impressive 3-z-levels tall geyser. For maximum awesome, make a huge stack way taller than you need it.
-Needless to say, there will be a lot of magma lying around on the surface, being dangerous, starting fires, etc. Make sure your dwarves don't all get killed fighting over a !!cave spider silk sock!! or two.
Lastly: The deaths are not painless. But neither are they as quick as facing my warriors. Most of them are able to escape from the torrent, only to bleed to death from their horribly mangled, melted bodies as what's left uncooked of their muscle tissue tries to drag them somewhere, anywhere, where the pain will stop.
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This is pretty awesome. I've never messed with machinery too much before, but I'm going to have to try this out. Imagining the look on the faces of those goblins as the magma shot straight up in to the air was priceless.
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Wow, it has been some time but...
Frogwarrior
You deserve a *Bloated Tuber Biscuit* for this.
Congratulations.
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That's awful. And awesome. Serves 'em right for being trolls and goblins, the bastards.
I can imagine several "redundant" safety mechanisms being jolly useful when working with pressurised (or any) magma. Maybe you could do a water basin/spout to stop the lava from doing too much damage? That way you can turn a siege into a horribly smelling obsidian farm.
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Brilliant! That isn't simply good, it's Dwarven!
Can we build this also horizontally, a kind of Dwarven automatic flamethrower? Next megaproject: Dwarven Iron Curtain!
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Looks impressive. The animals would probably not last long against a goblin siege, though.
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Today I learned that pumps pressurize magma. A useful, if not absolutely !!critical!! bit of knowledge. Well done, and thanks!
Now to combine magma mines with an overhead water sprinkler — instant obsidian pyramids to entomb the invaders. It'd be absolutely terrible to clean, of course, but it'd be a fun show.
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Hmm, I would like to see a dwarven flamethrower. It would be a nice touch in a fort: the only hallway into a fort, walls on either side lined with flamethrowers.
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I want one of these. How much would it cost to contract your dorfs to make one for my fort? :P
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Hmm, I would like to see a dwarven flamethrower. It would be a nice touch in a fort: the only hallway into a fort, walls on either side lined with flamethrowers.
Unfortunately, the heat from even a magma-safe material would still transfer to a dwarf with such close contact, so either we must STRIKE THE OIL! or make them remote-controlled. The latter, really, being good only for emplacement weapons. I would LOVE to see dwarves melting down a forgotten beast wherever it may roam, however.
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Magma Landmines.
Now with Water Sprinklers, and Obsidian Rain-Drops!
And if that doesn't kill them, collapsing the structure for the Water-Sprinklers WILL!
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you know, necro found a completely flat volcano that was massive a few days ago, http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=91712.0
being here, now to combine thes things to create a 91z fountain of pure delicious death
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Could easily be done horizontally as well. Not sure if there's an advantage, and you'd be more limited in where you could put a horizontal one - you'd have to put it into a hillside that goblins would be walking RIGHT past, or into a corridor or something. If you just put it any old cliff face, there's a really big chance that the goblins will path AROUND it (they'll path around large obstacles in a diamond shape, so they'd miss it entirely). So if you do it horizontally into a hillside, leave the ramps on I guess, but if they come from above there's a good chance that only the first one down the hillside onto the pressure plates might get melted, with the others safely on high ground.
So if you do it horizontally, it'd be best to build it into a cliff face that the goblins have to walk past to get to your fort. If you built it into a cliff face or hillside like I did, you could level out the rest of the hillside into a big, straight cliff with no ramps; then any goblins from that side of the map will walk RIGHT along the cliff face to get to you, meaning it's a great place for a horizontal trap.
And there's the distant possibility, perhaps, that instead of wasting magma pumping up an impressive several-z geyser, it will instead rush at high velocity horizontally, i.e. right into goblin ass? Testing is required. I might repurpose the entire aboveground into a maze of magma landmines of various builds.
If you do it horizontally, I recommend you put the door at the bottom of the trap, so that buildingdestroyers don't smash it and turn it on forever:
OOOOOOOO
O /=~~~O
O~=\ O~OOO
O /=~O~O~~!g!~
O~=\ O~O~OOOOO
OOOO~O~+~O
I'm working on a trap specifically for buildingdestroyers where you DO build the door at the top, so that trolls will path there, smash the door, and get a pressurized magma surprise. I'm working on making it automated and easily resettable - it would have to involve some sort of magma-triggered pressure plate that prevents magma from gouting out until you manually kill it, but in such a way that the magma flowing off or drying up doesn't activate the system again. Ideally the system could be reset by rebuilding the door and pulling a single lever, and I'm working on how to do that. Also, I might put a whole bunch of obsidian statues near the door to distract them so that the whole troll squad arrives by the time the door gets broken down.
ANYWAY. The advantage of pressurized magma is that you do NOT have to build screw pumps for each trap site; you just hook everything up to the same pressurized system. However, if multiple channels are open at once, the magma will NOT follow all of the paths but only the one CLOSEST to the pressurization site. So when I pull my all-doors lever, only the landmine with the shortest path to the pump stack starts erupting. No clue what would happen if you did some wizardry where every magma landmine was the same distance from the pump stack though.....
LASTLY. If this all is somehow NOT DWARFY enough for you....
Make a bunch of magma-safe chains. Put one next to each landmine. Chain up a puppy or kitten. When the goblins attack, they will path to the animals. Awesome.
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Hm. I wonder if there's a way to get this to work with that embark of mine with the 1800z magma spire.
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parameters plz? :D
If you can climb up all the way to the top, and put in a screw pump or two, then yes probably >: )
Actually, pressurizing a naturally high deposit of magma would require a different engineering feat. The pumps pressurizing it need to be drawing from another source of magma, which should not be connected to the pressurized system. Otherwise you'll just be pumping magma in a loop.
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ahhh, they called us mad, Not using a military and leaving our defenses to machines. MAD. WHO'S MAD NOW?!
LAVA TO THE FAAAAACE.
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It is mad. In a very likeable way :)
I built something similar once, but dropped the magma from above. Building all the magmaducts took years and I also used a lot more pumps to get enough pressure. It was more like a giant magma rain machine. I think, I prefer your way. Does it also have a way to open the hatches manually, in case an invader walks close by but doesn't step on the pressure plate?
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Relevant shameless self promotion:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=77353.0
Similar, but can fire for a long time and with high flow rate.
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It is mad. In a very likeable way :)
I built something similar once, but dropped the magma from above. Building all the magmaducts took years and I also used a lot more pumps to get enough pressure. It was more like a giant magma rain machine. I think, I prefer your way. Does it also have a way to open the hatches manually, in case an invader walks close by but doesn't step on the pressure plate?
You could build it that way; I didn't want to put in another 15 whole levers but whatever.
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bump
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Bonus points if you somehow manage to make a bridge that goes over a giant statue of Trogdar, with the Magma Landmine shooting out of his mouth, in order to burninate the Goblins.
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By the way, I've noticed that trolls will path to the landmines and just sort of chill out around the pressure plates. Eventually they'll smash the grate. Does destroying rock grates take a fixed amount of time or anything?
Destroying the grates doesn't actually hurt anything, and it's only a matter of time before one of the trolls steps on a pressure plate and melts the squad, so it's no problem.
Anyway, I haven't done anything new with this just yet because I've been busy with, e.g., trying to get my Duchess and Queen both married off. Duchess is, now working on the Queen.
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I've decided to try the magma flamethrower. It's a 3x30 Hallway, with a pair of raised bridges holding back a lot of pressurized magma. Grates drain the magma back into the cistern that holds it.
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By the way, I've noticed that trolls will path to the landmines and just sort of chill out around the pressure plates. Eventually they'll smash the grate. Does destroying rock grates take a fixed amount of time or anything?
Destroying the grates doesn't actually hurt anything, and it's only a matter of time before one of the trolls steps on a pressure plate and melts the squad, so it's no problem.
Anyway, I haven't done anything new with this just yet because I've been busy with, e.g., trying to get my Duchess and Queen both married off. Duchess is, now working on the Queen.
Build a large number of single-tiles rock roads around them, with pessure plates spaced intermitently, and trolls will die in droves.
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That's a good idea.
In other news:
(http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/tt150/Frogwarrior4/flamingfb1.jpg)
(http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/tt150/Frogwarrior4/flamingfb2.jpg)
Yes, that Forgotten Beast is on fire. Two of the other five Forgotten Beasts in that magma channel are melting. One is made of olivine and thus obviously won't melt. The other is made of snow and won't melt.
Huh.
AT ANY RATE.
Basically I built a really long twisty corridor leading from the cavern layer to the middle of my fortress with these 5 beasties (I had it sealed off for a LONG time because of a nasty forgotten beast or two with a fatal dust attack) and, somewhere in the middle of the corridor, a door leading to pressurized magma. In front of the door was a one-use pressure plate set to activate on magma, which closes drawbridges at both ends of the corridor (the fortress end and the cavern end). The cavern end was exposed, and all five beasties pathed into the fort and rushed in... right up to the door to batter it down. (Fortunately, the miner who let them in was JUST able to escape before the corridor closed and filled with magma!)
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The other is made of snow and won't melt.
Huh.
Fridge Logic.
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XD
In other news: The magma landmines were even MORE effective in the most recent siege. Since I locked the elf caravan out with the goblins, and the entire goblin army chased them until someone inevitably stepped on a landmine. And then everyone melted.
Guys I weaponized elves; the way you weaponize them is to have them get murdered in such a way that the goblins die horribly as well.
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Guys I weaponized elves; the way you weaponize them is to have them get murdered in such a way that the goblins die horribly as well.
I ... I think ... you took your Dorfiness to 11! :o :D
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this has finally inspired me to mess with pumps and such, thank you
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*bump* THIS MUST BE SEEN!
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Dwarven Welcome Mat?
Dwarven Lawn Sprinkler?
Dwarven Bidet?
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Frogwarrior, you sir are my new best hero
thats best friend and hero combined
congrats
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The right half of my map is regularly completely flooded with magma. I had to build a wall around the river (and the artificial lake I just dug) to keep it from being thoroughly obsidian'd. After every invasion, I run the risk of my haulers going for a troll fur sock right next to spreading magma, or a mountain goat randomly triggering one a moderate distance away.
It's kind of awesome.
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I understand that it works, but I don't understand how it works. Could someone smarter than me explain it to me?
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I understand that it works, but I don't understand how it works. Could someone smarter than me explain it to me?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a01QQZyl-_I&ob=av3n
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Toady ought give you a custom title along the lines of "sarcastic bastard." :P
I understand that it works, but I don't understand how it works. Could someone smarter than me explain it to me?
Basically, when you pump magma it gains pressure (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Pressure#Magma_in_a_U-bend) same as water. In this trap, you place a floor hatch or other similar item over a hole in the ground, at least one but preferably more z-levels below the pump you used to pressurize the magma, connected by underground tunnels to that magma. When the hatch is opened by a pressure plate/dumb troll, magma that was trapped in the tunnel spews out and kills everything.
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To simplify: There's a pump stack at a higher level. All the pumps face the same way, depositing magma into a tube. This tube goes down, over, and up, but it doesn't go up as high as the original pump stack. Magma pushed through a pump will teleport to the next empty square it can path to that is below the pump's level.
A dumb picture:
pP~|
| |
| | |~~>
| |_| |
|_____|
As long as the output is below the pump, the magma will flow.
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Dwarven.
Magma.
Bidet.
Nothing more needs saying.
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That DOES sound luxurious. Don't let your nobles suffer without one!
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Dwarven.
Magma.
Bidet.
Nothing more needs saying.
I looked it up.
Every noble must have one.
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Interesting, now I know what I should do with 400 000 cubes of magma blocking my access to adamantine.
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Interesting, now I know what I should do with 400 000 cubes of magma blocking my access to adamantine.
It regenerates like filthy grey goo-red goo.
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This is utterly awesome! I'd build this in my current fort, but I'm doing a desert/mountain embark with no river anywhere, which means the only water is a small amount in the caverns, which means I'd have to do a MASSIVE wind farm for the power to all this :(.
BTW, on that map I noticed you had a rather deep magma cistern. Is the volume of magma moved at once that large as to need it, or is that just for convenience?
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I am sure I seem extremely unoriginal as I say it, but this is by far the most epic defence I have ever seen.