Bay 12 Games Forum

First, on the subject of traps. Sending your soldiers into the tunnels to be slaughtered is poor strategy, and with the need for traps to be reloaded or reset in the event of a jam they become trivial to bypass. Simply taking a herd of your livestock and tying lit torches to their tails will allow you to drive them into the tunnels, triggering the traps with minimal casualties.

I think when moving fortress parts are implemented, traps are gonna go to another level and make fortresses truly unbreachable from the outside.

And since you mention logistics, you need to consider the underground connections of different fortresses and even the invasions that may occur from the underground, making the terrain a lot more like the above ground, with dwarves having the home turf.

I didn't know that about fortifications though with my setup the fortification is dry unless someone breaks the outer door and enemies won't try to path that way.

Your safe well also seems a bit too complicated, just have a grate leading to a 1 tile hallway with a door, like this:

                   X___River
__W__          X <- Put the grate here, on one of the up/down stairways
O     OOOOOOX
O___________X
           /\door here

So the steps would be:
1 - dig a channel where you want the well
2 - dig the cistern
3 - make a path from the cistern to the river and one to somewhere in your fortress so your dwarves can get in and out
4 - Build a door connected to a lever before you break into the river
5 - Open the door and break into the river then close it again(you can also break in before you connect it to a lever and the miner will just close it behind him as he flees from the water, then connect it)
6 - On one of the up/down stairways from the cistern to the river, install the grate - above the cistern water level if these also have to stay dry
7 - Make another door attached to a lever somewhere in the tunnel
8 - Build the well

I also like to put a locked hatch in the accessway from the fortress to the cistern but dwarves never try to go down there anyway

maybe it's the pitting bug:

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=7979

And next time, lock the doors of the training room. Also, if your dwarves are killing them so quickly give them wooden training weapons

I gave up on a fort recently because of fps death. It's better to make your embark area small, have a pop cap and keep few animals.

Also try to sell off as much of your stuff as possible to caravans. Get rid of all extra items you don't need like tattered clothing, corpses and so on.

And also don't dig anymore than you have to. Walling off areas of the fortress that you don't need seems to help.

As for the farm problem, maybe some of the tiles were exposed to light. When soil is exposed to light, it never goes back to being considered underground.

I was thinking about this the other day. I agree with making unskilled workers take longer to produce something better but they shouldn't get more experience from it. That way, you can decide between making lots of crappy items quickly to get him to learn or demand quality from the begining and eventually take longer to get masterwork pieces

In game, the air cavalry would still have to drop down to engage, but realistically, an archer on a flying mount could stay in one spot fire on ground targets with impunity. You would need some form of primitive anti-air gun, which inevitably would be developed in such a setting for need of a way to counter high altitude snipers. A ballista might work, if you could just set it on its back so it fires up instead of out, but I'm not convinced that would work well.

I think it would be more effective to drop boulders from up high if the creature can carry them, or barrels of flaming booze if some detonation mechanism was found but even just bags of rocks would be devastating enough. And there's also all sorts of nasty poisonous liquids and powders.

Ive used cage traps just like in the previous version, they catch everything except kobolds and big mean creatures

I put up 3 weapon traps on my bridge, each with 10 glass serrated discs and barely any enemies get past those

Stone traps are only good in 1 tile wide corridors I think. I don't use them anymore but all they're good for is stopping those early goblin snatchers that don't seem to come anymore anyway

I don't understand the whole thing. What's the advantage of this setup compared to digging against the side of the river and use a door to control the water? With possibly a fortification in the unlikely chance that something will crawl into the river and break your door