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[Doughnut189]

My fortresses generally result in everyone being dead (More quickly than I'd like), and I'd like critique on my designs, and perhaps some insight on how you build your fortress!

http://i698.photobucket.com/albums/vv350/Doughnut189/smilewithyou.png
Oldest fortress I have a picture of. I think it was made in the last version before the bug update.

http://i698.photobucket.com/albums/vv350/Doughnut189/Voulez-vous.png
The fortress immediately afterwards, and I think when I fell in love with mountains.

http://i698.photobucket.com/albums/vv350/Doughnut189/Onthegrooooooooooouuuuunnnnd.png
This was in the early stages of a fortress made in a rocky badland. In the end I think a siege stabbed everyone in the face. Also one of my first fortresses to try using a pit-fall bridge defense system.

http://i698.photobucket.com/albums/vv350/Doughnut189/returniwilltooldbrazil.png
This fortress is only a few months old- It ended in a tantrum spiral and three forgotten beasts running amok.

http://i698.photobucket.com/albums/vv350/Doughnut189/LaVeillee.png
I only lost this fortress the other day when my dwarves were too slow to pull the lever and so many trolls got past the retracting bridge. Eventually said trolls were killed, but after that the bridge was extended and dropped, and sadly the pit had not been entirely lined with spikes yet so I had to send the military in the pit to finish the goblins off, but a bunch of marksgoblins stood at the top of the pit and rained arrows on them. Then everyone ran in to get socks and got covered in arrows.

[Dangerous Beans]

in general the designs don't look too bad, though personally i prefer more multilevel fortresses.

with the defences
1) make them nested: don't just rely on one pit trap, have other traps behind that, then war animals, then a draw bridge, and also some military.
2) build blind corners into your entrance so that marks-goblins can't turn your defences into a shooting gallery. then deploy your marks dwarfs on the z level above behind fortifications. I also find that elevation changes are good.

hope that helps

[cdrcjsn]

Place your barracks near the entrance.  Have your main entrance lead directly into the barracks.

Don't use long, straight hallways in your main entrance.  Make it so that Archers will need to get up close and personal before they can attack your dwarves.

Have a way to seal off your Depot from the rest of the fortress (and trap that path as if it leads to the outside as well).  That way, you can let a path to it open to merchants without leaving a clear path to the rest of your fortress.

If in doubt, add more weapon traps (and/or cage traps).

Wagons don't currently exist, so unless you absolutely want 3-tile wide entrances for aesthetic reasons, you can do more with less if you use a 1-tile path to the outside.

[Oaktree]

I prefer a more vertical layout (roughly a 35x35 square per level going Farm / Depot - Storage  - Workshops - Kitchens - Dining Hall - Residences - Catacombs / Mining Galleries {smelters often down at the Magma Sea}) and very controlled outside access. 

Initially a drawbridge inside a dog-leg set of walls (or ditches) and protected with cage traps and possibly a weapon trap or two*.  Sometimes an outer perimeter is established with a set of ditches and/or walls to provide for pasture (if I'm keeping numbers of grazing livestock), woodlot, or simply to keep the ambushers farther away.  In any case I eventually build 2-3 access tunnels for getting out or letting migrants, caravans, or sieges in. (Well, the last *thinks* it is getting in.) 

Said tunnels extend out a distance away from the fortress and then surface.  They have outer, inner, and intermediate drawbridges and the intermediate drawbridge is used to force goblins to use heavily trapped paths (actually a complex known as a "grinder" trap that gets the goblins pathing back and forth through multiple weapon traps.)  Backed by a few more cage traps and fortifications for the marksdwarves to use.  I have also experimented with drop pits and dodge-me traps in these tunnels and each method has its assets and shortcomings.

Per getting massacred over socks all I can suggest is adjusting corpses and belongings to not be claimed automatically.  And also work with burrows.  I have each of my access tunnels defined as a separate burrow.  When an attack comes in from that direction I can simply set that burrow to exclude civilians in the appropriate alert and it gets evacuated.  Let the goblins in, close the outer drawbridge, and let business as usual go on out the other way.  Once the goblins are chopped the burrow can be set accessible and the goblinite claimed.  The haulers can then go get it safely since the outer drawbridge is still sealing the tunnel closed.


*- The last two forts had sand and thus I got glass production going fairly early.  Glass serrated discs and spikes aren't that good on armor, but they can do a number on the aggressive smaller wildlife and snatchers, and can help out until the goblinite accumulates.

[OcelotTango]

Another idea is that you can have a normal entrance to your fortress, and a siege entrance to the fortress. So a normal entrance for caravans that you can seal with a drawbridge and a pit, and an alternate one that sieges will try after that which has traps, dogs, fortifications, magma, or whatever other fun toys you want. You want to be able to seal this one also, to either trap the siege in, or take a temporary break to collect socks arrow free.

[Dwarf_Fever]

It's hard to tell how much of your fortress is dedicated to defense, but I usually give it a level all of its own, to ensure I have plenty of space to set traps, set up firing corridors, etc.

On that note, you could try the old corridor with ballistas at the end trick, just make sure the corridor goes down a ramp or two to pass under the ballistas. You can have a ballista cover each part of a hallway if you stagger them.

Multilevel is good. Building like a cube rather than a flat plane will probably cut your dwarves wasted travel time in half or less. Not really relevant to defense, though.

Definitely use burrows! I simply add all the "safe" work areas to one burrow, this keeps them from running outside during danger when the alert which it is linked to is active, but they can keep working.

Also a big fan of cage traps, a series of these are great against sieges. Put tons of them in your entrance! Learn how to dis-inventory caged things and how to mass dump traps into a training pit for warriors or archers, or a lava pit etc.

Even if you have a massive, cool drawbridge defense system, have a fortification with doors outside it. They can be locked instantly and will slow building destroyers down until you get to flip levers.

Even better than doors: Destroyers can not crush hatches above them. You can take advantage of this by making a destroyer-safe "air lock," by tunneling up and down again just a few blocks afterwards, then placing a hatch on each end from the top. When locked, enemies cannot get past.

As you tunnel down to explore, make sure you periodically put hatches to be able to quickly seal your fort off against any hidden surprises you might tunnel into, like trolls lurking in caves and such.

Lastly, if your fort is self-sufficient, you can shut the outer gates/hatches and ignore the armies outside until you're ready for them. Eventually they will also simply go away, IIRC.

PS: Break your fortress into chunks which can be sealed off from each other via doors or preferably up/down hatch-locks.

[Tevish Szat]

I pretty much still build my forts in the style suggested by the wiki's quick-start guide, but as I've gotten beyond that point, there are a few things I've noticed.

1) Even if you don't like walling in, outside walls are good, funneling enemies to a single entrance you can trap/defend the hell out of, with some space to do it.  It takes a lot of extra work to do the same against flying enemies, but those shouldn't show early like goblins and trolls do.

2) Layered defenses and airlock protocols are absolutely spiffy.  My most advanced fortress has a large outer wall with a drawbridge over a dry moat as its outer defense, but has another, much smaller wall-moat-bridge before it goes underground. In war-time, only one of these is open at a time, either bringing enemy forces into my (trapped) yard or sealing the enemy there off from reinforcement while letting out my military and mechanics to clean up the remainder and reset the traps.  There's also a bridge down in the tunnels, right after the trade depot but before my main stairwell, that can be sealed in a pinch.  I've never had to do so.

3) The caverns, as it seems you have discovered, are at least as much ‼Fun‼ as the surface world.  Sure, the wildlife is only mildly more hostile (at least in caverns 1), but the Forgotten Beasts are at LEAST as dangerous as goblins.  They require a defense that may be smaller, but is no less paranoid to handle.  Your initial caverns breach should almost always be walled off, and a new cavern-gatehouse dug in preparation for a real breach. 

Spoiler: Avoiding too much cavern fun (click to show/hide)

My favorite strategy  uses three rooms, three dwarven bathtubs, and two raising bridges to ward off enemies and syndromes.  From the stairs to the main fort, it goes through doors to a tub, then through a door into the outer staging room. (those doors are for dwarf control ONLY)  This room might have a food/booze stockpile so you can use it as long-term quarantine, and has three corridors: one goes straight forward, the other two go left and right, then forward.  the center corridor:  Dwarven bathtub. 
At one end of the tub, raising bridge (doors are useless, the FBs will wreck them), and then the shooting gallery: the other tunnels dead end next to this room, and overlook it with fortifications.  This is the last line of defense against the hostility of the caverns, bracketed by marksdwarves.  If you can spare artifact furniture as bait, it might be best to hold them here.  After that, there's another tub stretch guarded by a drawbridge, and finally the breach chamber, a big open room where I could station my military in preparation for a miner cracking open the last wall to the FB-infested caverns.  The idea, of course, was that if the frontline infantry failed, I could open the last bridge, have any survivors flee through the tub (I'm paranoid about syndromes), and engage in the marksdwarf-bracketed room without any danger to my fortress.  the infantry would be walled in there as long as beasts were alive, and the marksdwarves had one last tub if they fled, to deal with any syndromes they may have contacted, and a locked door between them and the fort in case I thought it wasn't safe.
  Assuming I manage it right and don't pull the wrong levers or leave doors unlocked, there's no way a FB or syndrome gets into the main fort.  While intended just for the 'initial' breach after some Uninvited Guest buildup, such a gatehouse could, with a little cleverness, also be used to control the ingress and egress of woodcutters, mechanics, or anyone else with legitimate business in the caverns.  For instance, a wood stockpile in the shooting gallery, along with some food/booze for the course, would allow your cutters to deposit their harvest with the outer bridge open.  Close it, sealing them in the caverns, and open the inner bridge, and you can then empty the stockpile with the "take from pile" order.  It might have to be retrofitted a bit to work as a worker colony rather than just FB defense, but that's a LOT less painful than having inadequate layers between you and the caverns

[blue sam3]

In my current fortress, I'm going for:

1) Entrance Zone. Exists purely as a means for sorting out various entrant groups from each other, from which they can go into any of areas 2-4, depending on which group they belong to.
2) Migrant Zone. Small housing/farming/brewing area used to hold migrants until I get around to putting them in a useful job and housing them properly. Only connects to the fortress proper when I'm letting migrants in.
3) Trade Zone. Contains the depot and vast stockpiles to hold stuff for it. Is either connected to the surface or to the fortress proper, rarely both.
4) Upper Defence Zone. Contains a whole variety of magma related traps, ballista/catapult corridors, archer bombardment lines, long twisty corridors and a permanent, rotating military group. Eventually leads to the fortress, purely because I like to have some possibility of something getting through.
5) Central Zone. Essentially a massive spiralling access system linking up all internal sections.
6) Actual Usage Zones. Contain various industries, housing and the like.
7) Lower Defence Zone. Attached to the bottom of the Central Zone. Essentially the same as the Upper Defence Zone, but links to the caverns instead.
Internal Defence Zone. Another layer of security and stuff, with the secure zone behind it.
9) Secure Zone. Contains stuff I really don't want getting attacked. Will probably be turned into a (smaller) copy of the central zone eventually. Has the jail and stuff coming off it. Also contains the control room, behind another layer of security.
10) Surface Zone. Closed off by a wall from the rest of the surface, for farming, herb gathering, woodcutting and the like. Also has a small defences base behind it, and the capacity to seal it entirely, in case of flying attackers.
11) Cavern Zone. As Surface Zone, but entirely walled off from the rest of the caverns.


Each individual zone can be separately sealed off from the rest of the fortress from the control room, and there is a separate set of corridors linking the internal zones without going through the central zone that are usually sealed. I occasionally lose a couple of zones to attacks, but I've yet to lose anything significant.

[King DZA]

Dear Armok, they're beautiful...

My forts also normally more horizontally focused. The difference is, while yours seem to be magnificently build and planned out dwarven citadels, mine are usually a chaotic assortment of rooms and passageways mostly build out of necessity, placement of which usually decides on where ever there is enough space to dig them out.

Anyway, the only advice i can give has probably already been said by others:

Have lot's of doors, hatches, levers, and whatnot to segment areas from each other, allowing you to control the flow of both invaders and dwarves. That way, even if something goes horribly wrong with your trap layout, or your military gets pushed back, you still have a chance of cutting off the invader-ridden zone from the rest of the fort.

[Doughnut189]

Thanks for the advice, personnes of the forums. I generally try to avoid the caverns ever since they resulted in so much fun for me on a few occasions, so right now I'm pretending they don't exist defense-wise.

http://i698.photobucket.com/albums/vv350/Doughnut189/lechatdesdorfs.png
This is how I am digging out my current fortress. I plan on building some walls around the inlet with standard weapon traps in the path leading towards the first hallway. The first hallway will be a flood trap utilizing bridges (whenever I use floodgates a troll floods the fortress). The next hallway will be a ballista run (though, since they will have to go towards the ballistas, will it cause them to run away?). Finally, the third I am not too sure of. I think I may make it a repeating spike room with pressure plates to detect trap avoids.

E: Also one-tile-wide hallways that run through the main parts of the fortress make me cry. So I will not do that.

[Dwarf_Fever]

I generally try to avoid the caverns

What sort of queer elven heresy be this, lad?!?

[Doughnut189]

I generally try to avoid the caverns

What sort of queer elven heresy be this, lad?!?

My kind sort

I suppose it isn't very dorfy to care about aesthetics as much as defense, but it results in countless unnecessary deaths either way, and at the end of the day, that's all that really matters.

[Gizogin]

My favorite defense setup so far has to be my [currently unfinished] SKULLGATE.  It's a gate in the shape of a giant skull, with eyes that [eventually will] rain fiery death on my enemies. 

Ridiculously overcomplicated megaprojects notwithstanding, I am a fan of multilayered walls, drawbridges, and cage traps.