I always get murdered after the first siege. This way of building doesn't provide much protection. But it's nice to know somebody else tried this too 
I like to play in a similar style, not really a human like town or castle, but a "dwarven castle". The last time i did it like this:
Immedialy build workshops and farm plots (i start with almost no food).
Quickly Channel a huge moat, at least 2 tiles wide and two tiles deep covering a bigger area, quickly build a wall to be protected against archers, and a bridge. The bigger your moat, the bigger is your building area, but the longer it will take and the riskier it is)
I build 2 walls and 2 moats and designed multiple burrows (burrows are very important to make this work!).
I had a big gate with two archery towers that was in the middle of the 2 moats, so when i got sieged and i wanted to fight, i could lock my peasants in the main fortress and lower just one bridge... (so, in the worst case, my army would get killed, but the rest would survive). I had two groups of dwarfs, one living above ground (providing food, soap, furniture cloth etc...), one living in the underground like normal dwarfs (seperated by burrows and a bridge for emergency cases) providing minerals (and later also additional wood) and underground crops. The underground dwarfs also had a small army to keep the caverns safe.
After the 11th year i had to abandon the fortress, not because of enemys but because i was so stupid to remove some important stairs (i designated a bigger area and accidentally designated my stairs)... Quite a handful of dwarfs died of starvation until i finally figured that out, after rebuilding the stairs a tantrum spiral kicked in and i simply abandoned the fortress.
I always checked the stockpiles after seeing dwarfs with blinking arrows and eventually dying (big *facepalm* moment)...
Beside that, that was one of my best running fortresses so far. Well, it happened multiple times that hunters and lumberjacks were killed and my underground and above ground military were each almost completely wiped out, but the seperation of above ground / underground and military / peasants made run none the less.
My tips:
you want to dig out the moat as quickly as possible, so you want to start with multiple picks. I started with a armor- and weapon-smith dwarf and took multiple cooper bars with me (each bar costs 10, a pick needs 4 and costs 40, so the costs are the same if you forge them yourself, but your smith get some experience and the results are of higher quality... ).
You want the first migration waves to be "slaves", making 1/3 of them miners (make sure you can provide enough picks), 1/3 of them masons to build your wall or craft stone blocks and the last third to be plebians carrying the stones to your mason.
Another tip: Have your depot outside the first moat and build a second entrance for it, build it in such a way that you can place archerys all around it and lock it inside your castle - and place some traps, later in the game most of the time the caravan arrives with ambushes, so wait with trading till you are absolutely sure that everything is safe for your peasants.
This way you can also easily kill the caravan or wait till it get's killed by the usually ambush and safely loot it afterwards...
It's actually a really safe way to play and quite fun, the only downside is that it takes a looong time till you have your moat and castle finished (its not a time efficient way to play, you dwarfs spend a lot of time carrying stones and constructing things...), leaving you somewhat vulnerable in that time (if you can't manage to build the first wall before the first ambush appears you can get heavily crippled).
Another danger are flying enemys, have a bunker (or keep) for emergency situation to handle them. (you want to designate multiple burrows and civilian alerts for different dangers).
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Topic: My above ground castle (Read 1829 times)