40d:Fortress defense

NOTE - This page is currently being combined into several others, the Defense guide, Trap design, Defense design, and Military design.

Please see those pages for content previously found here.

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There are two important things to consider when designing defenses for your fortress. First, you must protect the fortress itself. Second, protecting your dwarves is also often a priority. These two goals can often be rather divergent, as without careful planning your dwarves may wander the open countryside to collect herbs, cut trees, hunt, fish, or otherwise just enjoy nature, and while outside your fortress are vulnerable.

Entrance design and traps

You can help your soldiers a great deal by sensible entrance design and use of traps and siege engines. Simple approaches include clustering stone fall traps or cage traps in your entrance. More care is needed when placing ballistas or catapults as they can hurt your dwarves too. Below are some example designs of more elaborate possibilities.

Fortification based entrance designs

Keep in mind that the entrance to defensive chokepoints should be outside. If you try to set up your defense somewhat underground, ordering your dwarves to stay inside has the result that your carefully designed 'kill zone' will be chock full of your own dwarves at the critical moment.

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Defending your dwarves

The best way to prevent dwarves outside from being ambushed and slaughtered by hostile creatures is to keep them from going outside. Unfortunately, there are valuable commodities like wood which are hard to acquire inside.

The next best thing is to provide defenses which protect your dwarves while outside. On the truly labor intensive end, you can fully enclose areas of wilderness you wish to utilize in walls or behind moats with the only access being from within your base. While faster, the moat is less effective because it can be seen over, and unless the area beyond the moat also has no access to any entrance to the fortress (and no dwarves) you will still be vulnerable to archers. Hostile creatures, even 'invisible' ones like ambushers, start at map edges and travel across the map - they will only spawn in regions where they can path to a dwarf. By controlling which areas have access to paths to dwarves, you can force all hostile forces to appear in predictable and limited areas. Basically, creating artificially constrained outdoors areas for dwarves to work in is like keeping your dwarves inside - you're only vulnerable while establishing the defense system, afterward its part of the fortress for most purposes.

Another options for outside defenses is scattered traps. Most hostile forces will flee if they take enough casualties, and stone-fall traps can be quite damaging to goblins and are easy to set up. Cage traps work even on Bronze Colossi and Dragons. You just have to make sure your dwarves working outside actually stay near your traps - a fisherdwarf who goes wandering screens away from the nearest trap is not protected.

War dogs can also be assigned to dwarves who go outside frequently. Then when the dwarf encounters danger, the war dog runs at the danger while the dwarf runs away from it. Unfortunately, war dogs can't be reassigned once they are assigned. To get around this, have the dwarf you want to be guarded train the dog. (Dogs follow the one who trained them until they are assigned.)

Finally, a sufficiently large military could be used as a reactive force to rescue ambushed dwarves. The disadvantages are many - soldiers must physically move to the conflict zone which may be many screens away from the nearest entrance to your fortress, by which point dwarven lives may have already been lost. And while squad organization may make ordering a large army easier, a squad commander who is sleeping, eating, or drinking prevents his entire squad from responding. At best, an army should be considered supplemental for defending dwarves outside your fortress.

Armed Civilians (Gobbo Season Open!)

It can be a fairly decent idea to keep mass numbers of cheaply-made crossbows (or your lower-quality rejects) and bone/wood bolts on hand, and all expendable dwarves in one mass military squad set to use crossbows (and leather armor, if you have enough). What dabbling marksdwarves lack in speed and accuracy, they more than make up for with incredible enthusiasm, as a hailstorm of pathetically-aimed bolts will tear over anything stupid enough to move. Not nearly as effective or useful as properly-emplaced marksdwarves with high skill and proper equipment, but a good emergency measure, especially if you keep your craftsdwarves busy churning out cheap ammo from spare bones from the kitchens and cheap crossbows from fishbones from the dining hall.

non-hunting hunters

Sometime you will embark in an area devoid of (huntable) wildlife. In that case, you can turn on the Hunting skill for all civilians and use the military menu to arm (and more importantly, armor and shield) them. Normally turning on hunting will cause dwarves to wander outside looking for wildlife, and turning it on on all your dwarves would delay your economy greatly - but without wildlife, no hunting jobs are generated, and they go about their business armed and armoured. Note that if X number of hunt-able animals do appear on the map, that many dwarves will then go hunt them.

See also

• Defense guide for a complete guide