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[Aslandus]

I've been pondering creating a "spiral" wall on the edge of the map to force invaders to go around and around a few times, but it would take a lot of labor...

True, but trap-a-palooza means it'll probably be decades before anything gets to your dwarves...

[utunnels]

Some of the walls can be bridges so you can lower them when necessary.

[Max™]

Afterwards: Ok Urist, it took three years, but it is complete, our wallspiral of doom is perfect!

*goblin climbs over the wall and stabs Urist in the head*

[wierd]

Dont be ridiculous.  Any such feature needs to be a labyrinth, not a simple maze. Put it indoors with a roof over the spiral corridor. Then they cant climb over the wall. Make it so they have to go through the corridor to path into the fortress, which removes any activity point for them to attempt to climb up onto the roof from the outside wall.


Not hard to resolve at all.

[Max™]

Might be easier to just make there be an entrance which can be used normally and then dig the spiral tunnel with an always open door to invite invaders through though. Trying to build it at normal dorf speeds would take a lot longer, though you could always do it in stages with a series of progressively larger walled off regions around the fort set up right so you can later remove a couple walls, add a couple more, and end up with the finished labyrinth regardless of possible mid-construction interruptions.

Bonus points for trapping an elf diplomat wearing nothing but tights and a jacket and putting them in a cage with two floating ball monsters near the end of the tunnel.

[Ancalagon_TB]

The problem here is the speed at which enemies can cross the map and be on top of you, even with my fort entrance being roughly in the middle.   That same problem makes it difficult to have a "normal vs battle mode" layout - by the time a dwarf can pull the lever, the goblins (or whatever) may be in the fort already.

I was hoping that the spiral would encourage the goblins to go around and around, and not over the wall, because it's "opened" - so the easiest path is not to climb the wall but just go around a few times.  By the time they have done that, I've had time to pull those levers, close the main (ie practical) entrance to the fort, and open the alternative (ie very deadly) entrance.

[Max™]

Yeah, I just stopped bothering with sealing things up and set up my military dorfs training right on top of the entrance, so if you want to invade you've got to wade through whichever squad is training at the time as I call the rest over to play with you too.

I do like to have a hatch with a ramp that I can use to cut off access manually by just forbidding it as a fallback though, but naturally you have to take climbing into account these days.

[taptap]

Distance: When I saw my planter kill a forgotten beast I stopped worrying. He was not even really trained that time, by the time goblins arrive even my haulers will be legendary in several combat skills, not to talk about the cave crawler farm. They can walk right into the fortress, if they so wish.

[Aslandus]

I do like to have a hatch with a ramp that I can use to cut off access manually by just forbidding it as a fallback though, but naturally you have to take climbing into account these days.

As far as I know, goblins won't climb a sheer wall unless they know there are dwarves on the other side, so as long as you don't install windows into your wall you should be fine

[Max™]

Well, after watching a legendary dorf climber make a mockery of many of the earth and stoneworks I used to rely upon for controlling siege flow, I'm back to square one with a few things like the old wagon-only access tunnels I used to make.

He climbed right down inside like it was nothing.

[Melting Sky]

I often run odd shaped embarks which are only 2 wide but up to 5 long so that I can get in as many different biomes and geographic features as possible without completely wrecking the fps. It's amazing the difference between how fast a 2x5 runs vs a 5x5 or even a 4x4. If you want biome variety without performance loss its a pretty decent option. A 2x5 runs about as fast a 3x3. As other have brought up, the only real down size to cutting one or both of your dimensions down is that attackers can be on top of you very quickly and the smaller the embark the less resources you will have available.

One thing you should check for when creating a tiny embark is that you have plenty of Z levels to work with. Embarking on a 2x2 that is pancaked with only like 25 Z levels to work with will be whole different experience from a 2x2 that's a 100+ Z levels deep.

[Melting Sky]

I play on 1x1 all the time, and in fact it annoys me greatly that Toady does not allow this by default (for no apparent reason... it's perfectly stable), since it's often the only thing I use dfhack for, and I have to install it to play on 1x1 embarks each new version, tediously.

This would be a good thing to bring up in the suggestions forum. Toady generally allows the players to configure things any way they want which suggests there may be some hidden issues caused by such small embarks that we simply haven't spotted. If there aren't any bug related reasons to disallow it, I don't see any reason why Toady wouldn't take the 20 minutes it would require to implement such a reasonable suggestion.

[GavJ]

I'm sure it's been brought up half a dozen times before, I know there have been many threads in general DF discussion, etc. (which he also reads less carefully) purely about that.

[utunnels]

Well 1x1 crashed quite often, at least on me. For example, it crashed every time I tried to settle on a volcano. Sometimes I managed to create a game, but it still not stable. It could run years without a problem, but when I uncovered the cavern, *crash*

I think there must be some reason why it is not allowed by default.