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[Ironhand]

Why not play two fortresses simultaneously... on one map? 

I'm currently playing a game with my uncle in which we split everything in half from the start. We found a river with nice, even landscape on both sides. We dug a tunnel under the river and sealed it off as an airlock. Then my three dwarves (the Ironhands) stayed on the eastern side of the river and his three (the Copperveins) went to the western side. The seventh dwarf is our broker/mayor, and she switches fortresses every year. We take turns getting caravans and we pick immigrants elementary-school-style. We've ironed out the kinks that we've run into (mostly with merchants and immigrants), and it's actually worked remarkably well so far.

We switch it back and forth like a succession game, except far more often (we sat and played the first season or two together; now we switch almost annually) and we're only allowed to control our dwarves. It's sort of a friendly competitive multiplayer. We obviously try to be the biggest and the best and the richest, but we help each other out (for a price, of course) if necessary.

If you people are interested, I might make a thread about it.
But if not, you can figure it out yourself.
It's lots of fun. I highly recommend it.

[Beanchubbs]

Very good idea right there. Although I do believe it would be hard to start with only 3 dwarves, it's an excellent way to do a multiplayer type thing. I believe I would be lame and flood the other half of the river with magma or something though.

[Stromko]

I think a productive response is to direct people to things that will let them sate their lust for online multiplayer Dwarf Fortress so they can get over it, so I'll list what I can think of as things that scratch the DF itch and have some form of multiplayer.

Wurm Online is the thing that occurs to me as the most successful DF-like multiplayer game. It's nowhere near like Dwarf Fortress, mind you. It's not, in my opinion, very fun. Some people really enjoy it, but it takes a long time to get things done. What makes it DF-like is you can mine out ground, make caves, build buildings, craft things, etcetera. These things will take a very long time to do and are very obscure to learn. Some people run cities and such, I think you can make wagons and have mounts, so if you have enough friends or others to cooperate with to provide a vast pool of free time to sink into realizing your dreams, yeah, you could pretty much play it like multiplayer DF.

'Love' is an upcoming (cross your fingers) online game that will have many sharded worlds that handfuls of players will share, meaning that it can allow individuals to rapidly change the environment (since they aren't ruining the fun of hundreds of other players if they stay up all night and terraform the world). Kind of hard to google 'Love' and find this game so I'll just post the link for those curious. http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/screen_shots.html

Also there was a Dwarf Fortress clone some guy made on BYOND. It was kind of interesting but the server is not freely available, server availability and stability can be very iffy, and it's nowhere near as fully featured as DF. There are no NPC caravans, there's no automation whatsoever, so it can be very monotonous and wrist-injuring to run a hamlet let alone an empire. I did find it entertaining for a few days, and it's definitely a great way to learn that a limited version of DF, multiplayer, isn't /that/ great of an idea. http://www.byond.com/games/Ginseng/DungeonMaster

For something completely different, and quite awesome in its own right, there's Cortex Command. It DOES NOT have online multiplayer! It has split-screen (or multi-display?) local multiplayer, so if you got buds and some USB X-Box controllers you're all set for crazy fun. It's a 2D sci-fi action game, but you can build bases above or below ground (before play begins), mine gold, and defend yourself from hordes of AI attackers. There's an extensive modding scene. It is in development, and you may experience crashes especially with certain mods. The campaign isn't finished or fully realized. Still, fun. http://www.datarealms.com/

On the highly graphic'd, 3D front, I've heard good things about Red Faction: Guerilla, it has destructible terrain and buildings and I think that's the case in multiplayer as well. However, there is no mode where you build a fortress or a base or anything, AFAIK, and the PC version still isn't out yet. I don't know if the PC version will be modable, there is a worsening trend where developers are making FPSes impossible to mod (Far Cry 2 springs to mind).

I believe there's some kind of Fort Defense: Source or something mod where you can build bases, but I never tried it. What I have tried, and enjoyed, was Source: Empires. Working with a team, the commander can plot out bases, defenses, and research up a tech tree, allowing other members of the team to customize and build ever more powerful vehicles. If the other team blows up your commander's APC, you lose. You kill theirs, you win. Personally I'd say it's fun either way so long as the match has some good fights and such. -- Caveat about its DF-alikeness though, there is no terrain deformation, and a round takes anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to complete so no matter what you build it's like a sandcastle on the beach. Strictly temporary.

edit: You know, I wonder if we could get a sticky somewhere that explains Dwarf Fortress is not planned to be multiplayer ever, that it would be very hard to make that multiplayer work right or be fun, and that there are all these alternatives out there (like succession games) to scratch that itch. It could have a title like, "Before you suggest multiplayer Dwarf Fortress, Read This First!", and might reduce the frequency of threads like this that pop up.

[Demonic Spoon]

Why not play two fortresses simultaneously... on one map? 

I'm currently playing a game with my uncle in which we split everything in half from the start. We found a river with nice, even landscape on both sides. We dug a tunnel under the river and sealed it off as an airlock. Then my three dwarves (the Ironhands) stayed on the eastern side of the river and his three (the Copperveins) went to the western side. The seventh dwarf is our broker/mayor, and she switches fortresses every year. We take turns getting caravans and we pick immigrants elementary-school-style. We've ironed out the kinks that we've run into (mostly with merchants and immigrants), and it's actually worked remarkably well so far.

We switch it back and forth like a succession game, except far more often (we sat and played the first season or two together; now we switch almost annually) and we're only allowed to control our dwarves. It's sort of a friendly competitive multiplayer. We obviously try to be the biggest and the best and the richest, but we help each other out (for a price, of course) if necessary.

If you people are interested, I might make a thread about it.
But if not, you can figure it out yourself.
It's lots of fun. I highly recommend it.

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=37805.0

[smokingwreckage]

If you want a game with building and so on but which also has first-person shooter action, I strongly recommend Natural Selection, a mod for Half Life. It takes some effort to set it up with bots for the alien team, but thereafter you can have endless fun ordering your buddies to go here, build that, die less you're costing us money.

I mention this because Empires came up and NS offers a much tighter and more intense game than Empires, though not as expansive (nothing wrong with Empires per se but NS plays really well with 4-6 per team).

If DF to you is about building a base and defending against attack, then there's the Open Source RTS game "Spring" which has about a dozen games/mods built for the engine. "NOTA Spacebugs" and "CA Chickens" will be of great interest.

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom was a builder-type game and it had multiplayer, but while the game was great the multiplayer aspect sucked- no real interaction was possible.

[Ironhand]

Awesome, somebody else beat us to it.

Oh, wow. They did it the hard way, though.
With no river to split the map, and a magma pipe to fight over.

[ChocoHearts]

Well, what about Sauerbraten? Multiplayer, real-time editing of world geometry, and weapons.

Granted, the style's a little more "modern" than DF, and there's not much to keep one from nuking the whole place, but we're all friends here, right?

Blockland also is online multiplayer building stuff, though it costs $20. But it's got a huge modding scene.