Bay 12 Games Forum

If you can make a task do itself without silly lever-pulling, it is infinitely superior to the silly lever-pulling alternative.

Check to make sure you didn't accidentally invent a one-way ramp.
By sending more dwarves down.

Clown vs. Gobbo fight to the death.

Urist McGeneral: Fear not the goblin hordes in that dark tower! For tonight, WE DINE ON PLUMP HELMETS IN HELL!
Urist McSpeardwarf: I've actually done that.
Urist McGeneral: Come again?
Urist McGeneral: I've eaten a roast made of plump helmets grown in Hell.
Urist McGeneral: Who, here, in the what now?
Urist McSpeardwarf: My cousin owns a little restaurant the next fort over that's actually in Hell. The back wall is slade and everything. A demon even came in while I was eating and started roaring at us. Some minor named Urist stared at it for a second, set his biscuit down, and jammed his pick into its brain.
Urist McSwordsman: You're putting us on.
Urist McSpeardwarf: Heck, I've got its skull right here in my backpack. Check this out.
Urist McGeneral: SWEET MERCIFUL ARMOK!
Urist McSpearfwarf: RARRR... I'm a big bad Falcon Demon named Murray who doesn't know what a Legendary Miner is. I'm a MONSTAAA! RARRRR! Oh, oh, pick in my brain. Down I go.

I really want to sig this but it's so long.

I would advise to use station instead of kill, when facing something dangerous. It gets your troops all together, rather than each rushing the target one at a time, whenever they get their lazy dwarven asses up.

Flood it. With magma. No, not the fortress, the entire world.

Magma tends to leak out the edges of the map. You'll need to build a wall to turn your embark into a magma-cistern if you want to do that. Or if you can get a sufficient stream from a sufficiently speedily replenishing source, you could just let it leak out.

Regarding goblin defences, if you really really want to make a fort last from invasion, make a moat as close to the edge of the map as possible. Make a single 1-tile entry way as far from your main entrance as possible, extrapolate a path between your fort's entrance and the moat's entryway, and fill it up with cage traps. Build a massive execution tower with steel spikes at the bottom to dispose of captured scallywags. Honestly, I have about 200 cage traps set up like this, although poor planning means they aren't all hit reliably. The downside is that this is quite cheap, to the point that some regard it as an exploit.

If you do use it, however, it means that you will never see an ambush popping up at your front door, and will almost never see a thief or snatcher being caught in the middle of your fortress. In my experience, captured prisoners of ambushes or sieges can be dragged around with ease, and you don't need to worry about them breaking free from a dwarf's grip on their way to the top of the execution tower. Thieves and snatchers are slippery like soap, and cannot safely be dragged around. Also trap-avoid or flying things will have to be taken on by your military or a more complex defense system.