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[CognitiveDissonance]

I like anvil-fall traps: you just dump several anvils atop of door and wait till some pesky thief attempts to sneak his way in. Ensure that your dwarfs don't use that door though.

Acme, the Hills of Hilarity?

You know, Dwarf Fortress makes a lot more sense in context of Acme...

[Centigrade]

I like anvil-fall traps: you just dump several anvils atop of door and wait till some pesky thief attempts to sneak his way in. Ensure that your dwarfs don't use that door though.

Acme, the Hills of Hilarity?

You know, Dwarf Fortress makes a lot more sense in context of Acme...

Seems like you could easily do this with pressure plates and hatches to automate it.

Speaking of pressure plates, do upright spike traps jam and require cleaning the same as weapon traps do?

After reading through your post earlier in the thread in which you mentioned the possible efficacy of silver menacing spikes, I am thinking about setting up a trap corridor that is nothing but silver menacing spikes, hooked up to a lever in the dining hall/living quarters to which all of my civilians are restricted during hostile activity.

Thoughts?

[Mr S]

And knowing how well Dorfs listen to instructions, even when restricted to the right burrow at the right time, the Pull Lever task will be assigned to the one stupid sod who dodged a canary man up onto a wall and can't path to it... forever.  For my money, I'd set up a minecart repeater for mission critical operations.

[MadocComadrin]

I prefer 5 serrated discs (of blade-worthy material) and 5 Spiked Balls (of good blunt material, but edge-worthy is nice too). It provides a good mix.

[laularukyrumo]

Good way to deal with both the lever problem and trap-avoid creatures. Set the only way into your fortress to be a path that leads down a corridor with a pressure plate, set to trigger on all creature weights including civilians. Upon triggering, it seals of the door ahead of the plate, and opens a different one, routing them to a weapontrap or cagetrap hallway. Anything that doesn't trigger the pressure plate is either an undead giant sperm whale (too big for pressure plates) or trap avoid--in which case, they keep going and get mutilated by a buttload of upright spikes linked to a repeater.

[Drazinononda]

Presumption: Size = damage. Wiki is uncertain, but my experience says that this is the case

Traps do not mention anything to do with acceleration, which is a VERY significant factor to regular weapons. I would personally assume that acceleration from weapon traps is always 1x, making weapons like Whip relatively useless.

I assume you're talking about the velocity multiplier here, which is a characteristic of the weapon itself (the final value in the [ATTACK] tag in the weapon raws) and thus carries over into weapons inside traps. All vanilla trap components have a 1x multiplier ('1000' in the raws) but a whip inside a trap would still have the usual 5x multiplier.

Further theorycrafting - I believe that piercing damage is blunt damage that penetrates.

Conversely, some blunt damage is piercing damage that fails to penetrate. This is why bolts are currently so overpowered: even when they are stopped by armor, the full kinetic energy is still transferred through into the body, breaking bones and bruising organs. A blunt weapon will never 'penetrate' into a body, though.

I like anvil-fall traps: you just dump several anvils atop of door and wait till some pesky thief attempts to sneak his way in. Ensure that your dwarfs don't use that door though.

How does this work? Doors don't create a surface above themselves. I've never tried, but wouldn't an anvil dropped over a door just fall down and jam the door open?

Good way to deal with both the lever problem and trap-avoid creatures. Set the only way into your fortress to be a path that leads down a corridor with a pressure plate, set to trigger on all creature weights including civilians. Upon triggering, it seals of the door ahead of the plate, and opens a different one, routing them to a weapontrap or cagetrap hallway. Anything that doesn't trigger the pressure plate is either an undead giant sperm whale (too big for pressure plates) or trap avoid--in which case, they keep going and get mutilated by a buttload of upright spikes linked to a repeater.

If you have a repeater-powered spike hall, why bother with the weapon-trap detour?

[KroganElite]

A few observations from my perspective.

Serrated disc are best at killing.  However, they also create enormous amounts of hauling jobs.  Wiping out an 80 goblin siege, plus mounts, and then cleaning up after them can be extremely time consuming.

Personally, I've found wooden spiked balls to be best at handling almost anything, given two facts: On most embarks, there is hundreds or thousands of trees, and second, the spiked balls don't create all those hauling jobs.

You can set your stockpiles to not take dead corpses/bodyparts of goblins/trolls/kobolds/etc. Its not like you can butcher them anyways.

[Fenrisson]

If you have a repeater-powered spike hall, why bother with the weapon-trap detour?
[/quote]

Because the only thing beeing able to enter the hallway has a trapavoid token...

[Centigrade]

Good way to deal with both the lever problem and trap-avoid creatures. Set the only way into your fortress to be a path that leads down a corridor with a pressure plate, set to trigger on all creature weights including civilians. Upon triggering, it seals of the door ahead of the plate, and opens a different one, routing them to a weapontrap or cagetrap hallway. Anything that doesn't trigger the pressure plate is either an undead giant sperm whale (too big for pressure plates) or trap avoid--in which case, they keep going and get mutilated by a buttload of upright spikes linked to a repeater.

If you have a repeater-powered spike hall, why bother with the weapon-trap detour?

From my reading of the post is that the pathway leading to the split between the automated spike traps and the weapon traps is the only way into the fortress.

If that is so, then the path with the weapon traps allows caravans, dwarfs, and other friendly units to pass without harm whereas the path with automated spike traps would both block caravan access and kill any friendly units that passed over it. You are thinking of it backwards: the weapon traps are not the detour, they're the path that any creature takes by default. If any creature, except for an undead giant sperm whale or trap avoiding creature, walks across the pressure plate, then that creature goes through the hall of weapon traps: friendly creatures will hit the pressure plate and walk past the weapon traps unharmed, as opposed to impaled; hostile creatures will hit the pressure plate and walk into the weapon traps to be slaughtered. Only if a creature does not trip the pressure plate, due to being either an undead giant sperm whale or a trap avoiding creature, will that creature then be allowed to proceed into the hall of automated spike traps which will indiscriminately impale anything that crosses over them.

Had he only the hall of spikes, then the fortress would not have a safe entrance for friendly units.

[EvilBob22]

Speaking of pressure plates, do upright spike traps jam and require cleaning the same as weapon traps do?

After reading through your post earlier in the thread in which you mentioned the possible efficacy of silver menacing spikes, I am thinking about setting up a trap corridor that is nothing but silver menacing spikes, hooked up to a lever in the dining hall/living quarters to which all of my civilians are restricted during hostile activity.

Thoughts?

They do sort-of jam: the bodies will be sucked into the trap and show up on the "t" screen just like a weapon trap.  But, those bodies have no affect on the working of the trap itself, so they don't really "jam" it per se. You do need to clean them to prevent maisma, but not to keep the trap working.

A menacing spike trap corridor of almost any material is incredibly deadly.

[gestahl]

How does this work? Doors don't create a surface above themselves. I've never tried, but wouldn't an anvil dropped over a door just fall down and jam the door open?

Doors don't have a surface above them, but a closed door does block movement in the Z direction. A door with open space above it will happily hold up an anvil, some magma, anything that doesn't check the cave-in logic really.

[Akura]

Regarding the rock-dumping mentioned before, that looks pretty feasable. Basically, over the site the trap is intended to cover, channel(assuming underground, if outside, just build up) the area from the trap to the target site. Build a hatch(or retracting bridge for a multi-tile trap) over the empty space. Above that, put a dump zone intended to drop the rocks(or anything else, really) onto the hatch/bridge. When the enemy is below, Pull the Lever to open the hatch/bridge and watch as everything falls down.

Alternately, you can leave it open and dump rocks directly with your haulers, assuming they are not interrupted by seeing the enemy.

[Brons]

I'm never sure how many traps to put into a trap. Obviously 10 is the deadliest but there are other concerns like jamming too. Any suggestions?

[Centigrade]

I'm never sure how many traps to put into a trap. Obviously 10 is the deadliest but there are other concerns like jamming too. Any suggestions?

If your main concern is jamming, then you want an incredibly long corridor with one weapon per trap. This will minimize the number of attacking traps that can be incapacitated by a single jam: if you have ten weapons in one trap, and that trap jams, then you have lost ten weapons worth of damage against subsequent enemies; if you have one weapon each in ten traps, and one of those traps jam, then you still have nine weapons worth of damage against subsequent enemies.

[Itnetlolor]

I'd like to have a setup along the lines of a trio of 5x5 disc-corkscrew traps before a line of 5 or so 10x spike traps with a pressure plate between each of them setup as so:

P1P234P5PP -- 10x Spike Trap arrangement
1 4   2 53 -- Pressure Plate assignments

That way, the invaders (especially if there's a ton of them all at once) continually screw each other over with the spike strip, provided they bypassed or jammed the spinner trio at the beginning; and even an attempt at escape, considering the delays between pressure plate usage, should still get them on the return out if they panic, and if they somehow bypassed that (either by being too fast or too slow), then if the spinner trio unjammed themselves in time, it's one more pass through that.

Of course, even if they don't panic, another spinner trio will be waiting for them at the exit with maybe a cage trap for the lucky SOB that's now my prisoner. A drop pit of varying depth under a drawbridge remains between them and the entrance to my fort. Provided they survive the fall, they may or may not be let out of the pit, or mercy-killed by a trainee.

EDIT:
Of course, naturally, all pressure plates will be assigned not to trigger by my residents. Don't want to have ‼fun‼ that way yet. Could work for danger rooms, however if you assign a squad into one.