Bay 12 Games Forum

I had a similar idea recently, but with the pressure plates in series rather than adjacent to each other. Your idea works much better.  

The problem is how to use it.  I thought about making a line of bridges that constantly would be raised/lowered. The bridges wouldn't be particularly useful for defense, and would be a serious hazard to your dwarves,  but it would automate them in way they'd continue to run without dwarven interference, which means it'd make a keen trap for adventurer mode.  I've got a few ideas for an Indiana Jones-esque location that adventurers could visit, and this would be one of the traps they'd have to get by.  I'd also have some sort of lever puzzle, as well as a few spots where you'd have to jump off something to get where you need to go.  It'd have a big ending too.  There'd be a treasure room with one exit that you get dumped into the middle of.  The exit would have a pressure plate that you can't get around, which when stepped on opens an unseen gate holding back magma.  You aren't running from the magma though, it'd be running through a massive underground cavern, that has structural supports that hold up the various parts off the fort, which would be seperated by bridges.  The supports would burn up, causing entire sections of the fort to collapse.  

I'd be building it right now, if my computer weren't so atrociously slow playing DF.

For a graveyard, why not channel a hole, put coffins in them, and then cover them with stone floor?

An exceptionally designed image of a square?  Is it a perfect square?

Looking at engravings makes me chuckle.

Three squads of ranged goblins in a row, in one friggen year.  

Someone hates me.

Not everyone died, I had a good 20 dwarves left, out of an original 60.  I'm suprised it went so badly, last time I took a major hit, the goblins just passed by.  I could have kept going, but losing most of my dwarves with legendary status just took the fight out of me.  I've started anew in another place.  This one is interesting, the biome reads as serene, but half the map is a black sand obsidian mix, which looks kind of like a blasted wasteland.

I'm still pretty new to Dwarf Fortress, and for the first time today I was ambushed by goblins.  Now, my only squad was asleep and I lost a couple of good dwarves before they woke up.  So of course, I make a second squad as soon as a new group of immigrants show up.  Now, this works for a little while, a few little groups show up, and get slaughtered with minimal injuries on my side (I love crossbows), but suddenly two groups show up at once and slaughter an entire squad.   Then, a third group shows.  A group of marksmen. I lost more than 10 dwarves to them, we didn't kill a single one either.  If they hadn't simply passed by they would've killed everyone.  

Now I want to be prepared.  I built a wall around my surface entrances.  It'll have two floors (I'm right next to a hill so I want one entrance leading out there, and one on the ground floor).  I dug a pit which I'm going to place a retracting bridge over, and on the second floor another bridge the leads to the hill.  

Now with the siege engines, I want to place a ballista at each of the two entrances.  The wiki article suggested it's hard to get enemies in the sights of a ballista, so I figure placing them at the two choke points are going to be the most likely means of getting them to actually hit enemies.  This may be a bad idea, it might get my dwarves killed for all I know.  On the second floor, I want to place a Catapult on each corner, but this would be useless if Catapults cannot aim across the Z axis, so I want to be sure I'm not going to be wasting my time.  Also, I've placed fortifications every few spaces on the first floor, and I'll be placing them all over the place on the second.  I'm not sure if this is smart, should I have very few of them or should I forgo walls in favor of fortifications?

I recently came across the perfect site for a fortress, it had everything I wanted, but during my first year 4 of my dwarves were killed by carp.  I don't want to ditch this perfect site, so I abandoned the fortress and reclaimed it instead.  Now, I don't really want 35 dwarves but that I can put up with, but all the furniture and items I wasn't using a scattered all over the place and the new dwarves absolutely refuse to touch any of it.  This wouldn't be a big deal, it's a bit of mess but who cares, but some of the rooms in the fort are now covered in a mess of unusable stone, which is causing me problems, and my dwarves flat out refuse to use any of the existing workshops.  Do I need to do anything to make them use this stuff?