Utterly Mad

And here I believed fortifications couldn't be climbed. Found myself to be horribly mistaken, as an entire goblin siege just effortlessly scaled them. 2/3 of the fort are now dead, my farms are in ruins, and most of my dogs have been killed. Poor dogs ._.

Lessons learned the hard way. I lost a kobold camp to EXACTLY that. A dwarven siege arrived astoundingly early, and leave it to them to sprint straight across the bridge and over the wall.

Construction-based caveins are twice as carcinogenic as natural caveins. :V

I have a fort built on a volcano. Nothing new or innovative about that, but I've never really stuck with a volcano fort before. This fort is defended with a system of glass bridges which retract during invasions, making the only passage into my other wise open fortress a pair of narrow, trap lined, walkways. These work very well except when the dwarves are too lazy/slow to pull the retracting lever and a few invaders make it in or a few soldiers make it out onto the bridge. The defensive measure of the bridges is to allow part of an invading force to actually get out onto the bridge before pulling the span out from under them you see. This fort, vesselfountains, has a problem though. It isn't the giant vultures, and it isn't the bizarre pathing choices of dwarves. It's more a combination of these two things. When the vultures arrive in the early fall, my marksdwarves are positioned outside the entrance on vesselfountains glorious glass bridge and they spend a happy month pelting the vultures with crossbow bolts. The idea is that the vultures will fall into the volcano or onto the bridge for easy cleanup. Th trouble comes when a vulture does not fall into the volcano or onto the bridge, but rather falls on top of the hospital or the walkway leading to the mayors office. Most of the marksdwarves will do perfectly fine, pin cushioning the unconscious vulture like they should, some of them even going through the farms to give it a couple whacks with the stock of their crossbows. The regular dwarves of the fort, the scrappier ones anyway, refuse to go through the farms instead opting to try and cling for dear life to the inside of the volcano in an attempt to climb their way over to the walkway or up to the hospital roof. There are perfectly accessible safe paths to these two locations, but civilian dwarves who wish to be involved in the battle will always try to crawl along the walls of the inside of the volcano to try and get at the vultures. The results have been, without exception, the same every time. The brainless civilian loses his grip and falls into the volcano. I've had this happen with visiting warriors as well.

Also, I accepted a human poet into my fort to entertain people at the bar. That poet was a vampire. Because I can't draft human guests who are not fighters, I convicted the vampire of the crimes it committed and to my satisfaction, the guard captain chained her up in the open air prison. This vampire had killed one of my child prodigies and a legendary engraver. The original plan was to drop her into the volcano, but they I decided to put a little more effort into her execution. I removed several blocks from around her chain, leaving her on a narrow strip of block floor which limited her movement. across the volcano from her, I built a ballista. I've never successfully utilized a ballista before, and I must say the result was both underwhelming in the most fantastic way, but also completely satisfying to me, if that makes any sense. The copper tipped ballista bolt erased her from existence, leaving little more than a pile of pulped meat in clothing, a bloody smear on my prison floor, and the shitty book she had written about the time she escaped from a troll.

double post because why the hell not.

edit; holy shit, a giant vulture just THREW one of my marksdwarves through some fortifications and out into the volcano. I knew you could jump/fly/get thrown through fortifications, but it was a surprise to actually see it happen. (later) Ok, it's dead. But that Vulture managed to take down two dwarves before I could put it down and I have one seriously injured dwarf. Make that three dead dwarves, the injured one died as soon as I unpaused the game.

My last fort...well, camp, kinda petered out after I derped some things up fixed the mod, and also still never got any invaders.

Maybe next time I'll embark right the fuck next to a goblin fort.

I think goblins are still getting that thing where they get stuck on landmarks and can't get to your forts, either that or they are far more cautious. I get plenty of undead sieges though.

Does literally embarking as close as you possibly can make it easier?

Yes, in my experience, the closer you are, the more frequent invasions should be as the invading force has less difficult landscape to navigate. Of course, if you decide to retire the fort that close to a goblin town, it will not last long without you there to keep an eye on it. Undead are worse than goblins though because of the low invasion threshold for them. I embarked as close as I could get to a necromancer tower once and was invaded moments after my first migrant wave. The invading force was little more than a single zombie dwarf, a zombie goblin, and their hidden handler, but they ripped through my eleven dwarves and several children before I could mount any kind of proper defense.

That is one manly poet. Usually it's the guys with instruments that fuck people up best.

The FB was called "Mifuya Swamdrink, The Cavernous Filth of Fishes." The dwarf that killed it? Zaneg Waterclasps, fish cleaner by trade.

"I'm here to clean fish and chew plump helmets, and I'm all outta plump helmets."