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[Steelion]

Rather than explain, here are some images of how I lay out my fortress. Designed for ease of expansion, not necessarily efficiency. Also designed for relatively small numbers of dwarves, though the size of the residential floor might suggest otherwise.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The fist floor. Usually dirt, this holds the stockpiles. The big one in the middle is a combined furniture/goods stockpile. Smaller ones are craft-specific piles. Wood, metals/fuel, so on. One of them is usually converted for use as a farm. As with just about everything else, each stockpile can be expanded fairly easily.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is the next floor. All the stairs link up, and the system works pretty well. I like having this level as dirt, since that means it can be easily built, and I can get my fortress off the ground quickly. Workshops are grouped by required resources, and placed next to the appropriate stockpile stairs.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Dining floor. Easy to access, easy to expand. Always built in stone, even if I have to skip another level on some maps.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sleeping quarters. Basic design. I sometimes abandon and start a new map before even one of these levels fills up. If not, just dig a level down/up. These are placed as far away fom the workshops as I can get them. Sometimes that's the bottom of the map.

Again, not built for large numbers of dwarves, or efficiency when the levels start to spread out.

[Yanlin]

I will use your workshop design just because it looks bloody awesome. I'll avoid the diagonal stairs though.

[Eater of Vermin]

I myself usually don't really care about noise. My legendary dining room made my entire fort ecstatic...

That's a given.  But you don't want to rely 100% on it, else what happens if the Dining Hall is suddenly decorated in lovely shades of magma or suffers an annoying Dragon infestation?

It only gives good thoughts if it's intact and dwarves can eat there...

[Ascii Kid]

That's why, once mine is complete, I lock all the doors and never let anyone inside.  They'd just get it messy.  =->

[NTheGreat]

I tend to build my fortresses around a central corridor, that extends a couple of screens across the map and all the way down through it, with a number of stairwells running from top to bottom along it. On one side of the corridor is all the workshops, statue gardens, dining rooms and other noisy stuff that happens in the fortress, with the other side containing the housing and stockpiles. The lower two levels are reserved for the community tombs and legendary dwarf tombs.

I find it works quite well, as when your fortress expands, you can just make the corridor longer and build some more stairwells when things start getting congested.

[Derakon]

I try not to have fixed plans for my forts, because that just ends up meaning that they all look the same. I have some concepts that I re-use, but they're basic things like "put workshops below stockpiles" and "have a central 3x3 staircase" - they don't dictate the important details of the fort.

Steelion: you'd get more efficiency out of your design if you allowed for passage between stockpiles on the same floor, or from the central shaft, or between dining rooms. In general, there should be more than one way to reach a given destination in the fortress.

[Blacken]

I'm working on an aboveground desert fort, at the moment. I've got three levels of soil above rock (no aquifer), and have piped the river into an enormous pond at the center of my fortress.

Ground level is buildings, as are aboveground Z-levels. Usually four workshops to a floor, or two on two separate floors if I'm feeling like it. Every building has doors; all down stairs have hatch covers. The nobility and seven founding dwarves live in a large building positioned over the lake; since I built pumps to cause waterfalls off the sides of the building, it was quite easy to build drowning-chamber plumbing for the nobles. So I did.

The first two underground Z-levels around the rest of the fortress are for stockpiles for the workshops above them. There tends to be a problem when the stockpiles have to be bigger than the workshops' buildings, but I usually wedge housing in between them, with enough of a buffer that there aren't noise complaints.

The third underground Z-level is the "subway". Lots of tunnels going everywhere; every building in the fortress is connected via these. The main barracks is actually at the center of this, underneath the nobles' building--it's the only place dwarves actually sleep underground. All the other barracks locations are aboveground, usually right by their lookout tower to which they're assigned. All of the buildings are also connected through ramps and walkways that go over the streets. It's gotten to the point where some dwarves almost never touch the ground, because their housing, workshops, and dining rooms are all reachable via the underground tunnels or the walkways over the streets.

The biggest problem has been making a suitably awesome dining room to keep up morale, but my metalworker got good enough to bust out a couple aluminum statues and life's been good.

[Drunken]

a front gate method that works for eversything except building destroyers and has optimal efficiancy is:

Code: [Select]

[[[^XXXXX]]]
[A+^^^^^^+A]
[ [XXXXX^] ]
[A+^^^^^^+A]
[ [^XXXXX] ]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%


%%%% = the cliff your fort is built into
[ or ] = walls
X = floodgate (closed during seiges and open during normal times)
^=traps
+A=fortifications with archer positions (optional)

This has the advantage of a 6 wide hallway and is also only 6 long but when there is a seige goblins must travel through every single (traps) in single file while under fire. Being outside means your dwarves shouldnt stray too far into their own maze.

Like I said cant handle building destroyers but apart from that it solces the short/long wide/narrow hall dilemma by giving you the best of both worlds.

[Charlemagne]

I'm pretty proud of what I came up with for this fortress. It's working out a heck of a lot better than my usual chaotic twisting hallway-of-rooms-in-whatever-space-is-to-be-found.



I'm still in the process of furnishing.