Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Always

51 (23.8%)

Usually

37 (17.3%)

Sometimes

34 (15.9%)

Rarely

58 (27.1%)

Never

34 (15.9%)

Total Members Voted: 212

[slink]

Here is an example of something that changed my plans.  I had planned to use the main river for my water supply.  No-o-o-pe.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This meant that I had to stretch my fortress to the smaller tributary, upstream of the rain area.  It is less compact than my previous fortress, but the idea of locating crop land, water, and a defensible gate remains the same.  This entrance "courtyard" is underground.  I got tired of fighting off ravens and owls, and anyway the alligators ate half of my turkey hens and both of my dogs before I got properly started.  I wasn't about to spend time building walls.  The Dwarf walled in with a lever is a vampire.  The lever doesn't do anything except that it gave him something to do while the wall was being built.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Aspgren]

lately i've begun making a duplicate of the region before embarking. i use the duplicate as a means to embark on and survey a location so i can plan for it properly before going there.

like are there evil clouds? are there walking dead? how deep is this lake? how long does winter last before it thaws? how many miners and how many logs do i need to stake the foundation for a floating fortress? how deep is the aquifier? etc ... things i might need to know for a smooth opening.

[Vehudur]

I plan when I get to the initial embark before I unpause but besides this nicely planned and laid out nucleus of a fort the rest is just added on as needed.   Space is left for pump stacks from the magma sea.

[orius]

Partially.  I have a more or less standard configuration I use for my main entrance level, my agricultural industries and my main living area.  It's partially flexible to take advantage of water sources and soil layers, since setting up farms and wells will vary from site to site, but the main delvings of the fort can be easily moved around to accomodate them.

Main z-level is the entrance with a 3x3 entry hall leading to the first main chamber.  Trade depot is just outside the main chamber with a bridge in front of it to seal off the fort in case of surface invasions.  The main chamber is an 11x11 room which is used for an initial stockpile to empty the wagon and a basic drom until the first living quarters get dug out.  The wood industry, hospital, well, and main stairs are all connected to this chamber.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That was my older setup.  Here's a more evolved setup which places the depot off to the side to protect it better (and caravan guards usually don't end up on the bridge if I have to close it), I place a war dog pasture in the corridor next to the depot.  There's also a hatched-off access stairwell down into the resevoir in case it needs to get cleaned or serviced:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Level z-1.  Agriculture.  All the food, drink, and plant processing goes on here, as well as the textile industry, leather industry, and soap industry.  I place the main booze stockpile between the main stairs and the breweries.  There's a secondary 2x2 stairwell on this level which leads down to the pantries.  Farms and secure pastures will either be on this level or the level about depending on the site layout, with a seed stockpile between the surface and underground farm areas.  Poultry coops and breeding areas for non-grazers are here behind the butcher shop.  The current design is a bit more evolved than this, my coops are 1x1 rooms with lockable doors, breeding males and other animals get 1x1 pastures.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

z-2-4.  Main living area.  Bedroom block, dining hall, pantry, kitchens, workshops, and burial area.  Workshops and dining area get moved around depending on site layout.  The 2x2 stairs connects to the agricultural industry for faster hauling.  There's a smaller food stockpile behind the kitchen for ingredients like eggs, flour, sugar, quarry bush leaves, etc.  A quantum dump and the manager/bookeeper's office are located right off the stairs.  Workshops around the perimeter, and the main masons and crafters get assigned rooms to be close to their shops.  Burial chambers further out from the central area. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Stairs get dug into the corners and center of the bedroom block to connect to the lower two living levels.  There's a stone stockpile underneath the mason and craftdwarf workshops.  Other workshops on the levels below as necessary.  If there's a volcano, the third level will have the smelters and forges, with the magma chambers fueling them on the level below.  More food stockpiles underneath the main pantry as space is needed.

z-5.  Military barracks.  The main stairs opens into an 11x11 room used for militray training.  At the far end of the room a 2x2 stairwell is dug straight down until the caverns are reached and then sealed off.  Pitting chambers get placed here, and a jail if I feel I need one.

If there are levels above the first level, they get used for storage areas connected to the main stairwell.  If it's a flat embark, then I place the storage for trade goods underneath the depot if possible.  The well will be built on a water cistern several z-levels deep.  This cistern will get fed by a river or an aquifer, or murky pools if nothing else is available; haven't done a setup yet which actually required cavern water.  There's a starwell in the cistern in case it needs to be serviced, the stairwell also goes down to a drainage channel that empties into a cavern or aquifer.

Below everything else goes the mines.  I set up a grid pattern and passages on the first level of the mines to connect to the main stairs, and there are shafts all over the level going straight down, stoping just above the caverns.  There are more passages below to get around the caverns, and I also dig fortifications high in the caverns to expose their layouts safely.  Small breakrooms with beds, tables, chairs, food and drinks are placed about every 10 levels for dwarves who need to go deep.  Finally, if there is no volcano, a magma based metal industry will be located down near the magma sea.

I use Prospector from DFHack to see what minerals I have to work with, this helps me determine how I need to set my defenses up early on, and what I will need to trade.  I also use reveal to see where the soil layers are near the surface to set up the farming plots and pastures, but it gets turned off once that's done.

[AWdeV]

Haha planing. Good one. I embark, look for a nice spot to strike the earth and go to it. I generally put workshops and stockpiles on the same level as the entrance, but I'll go down if that doesn't work. I tend to have a basic template for the living and dining levels and I set that up in stone but that's it.

[UncleCern]

I typically will designate pretty much all the basics before I even unpause: entry tunnel, central staircase, depot space, first dormitory (which later becomes barracks 1), living quarters, dining hall, food preparation, growing, and stockpile, workshops, finished product stockpiles, raw mats stockpiles, military equipment stockpiles, danger rooms, archery ranges, hospital, fortification access tunnels, etc.

Then I disconnect the designations from the central staircase by cancelling the ring of tiles around it, and when I want to dig something out, I just redesignate that one or two tiles.

This. But usually all goes to shit like in my last fortress. Things which screwed the design were: aquifiers, evil terrain resurrecting all corpses, forgotten beasts, hundreds of zombies on the surface (so I had to make a big net of underground tunnels reaching surface in different spots).

One can plan but wildlife or other FUN things will usually ruin the original design. It's "adapt or die".

[telamon]

I always embark in regions with relatively deep soil layers, so I use the soil as my throwaway zone and let that develop in whatever way I want it to. That space gives me buffer room while I plan out the deeper developments of my fortress. Ideally every single thing whose walls are carved from stone is predetermined. I don't like having to plan an entire fortress right from the outset, and since soil walls are worth very little, they give me a good space to get set up so I can really invest some time into the parts that will matter.

Lately though I threw that entire plan away by climbing to the top of the only mountain in my embark map and digging straight down from the top of the mountain. The weird shape of the mountain (it's like 10 z levels high so there's plenty of stuff goin on in there, and its bottom level is about half the map in size) pretty much ruined any hope of me planning out cool stuff inside it, so I intend to hollow out the whole thing over time and use it as my throwaway zone.

[Nil Athelion]

Plan each fortress?  No.  Have a plan for how a fortress should look? Yes.

All of my fortresses are centered around a 3x3 up/down staircase.  The first thing I do is a 3x3 downwards staircase, then 20 levels straight down.  The surface is reserved for defenses, as is the layer immediately below that.  The dirt under that is a massive room for farming and anything for when I am too lazy to dump boulders.

As soon as I have enough room to bring in my embark junk (and recently logged wood), I hatch up the top, and that 3x3 stair case gets dug deeper.  If I hit caverns, I build walls around the 3x3 staircase, and build up/down stairs through any missing air.  Eventually I hit magma.

Once I have that spine, things are just built off of that, generally within eleven squares of that staircase.  Workshops go in the cardinal directions, and the 11x11 areas (easy to designated with shift) are the related stockpiles.  I generally have about 100 levels up and down, not counting caverns, so that's 4400 squares of stockpiles, and 1200 3x3 workshops.  Space never seems like a problem.

Beyond the spine, I may build further 3x3 staircases (eleven squares between them and the spine), and perhaps expand another 11 squares past there.  But frankly, that area is for whatever stupid stuff I dream up.

Housing tends to be 8 or 24 3x3 rooms, centered around the spine.  Doors link the rooms via every corner (each door touches 4 different rooms).  Housing generally takes about 5-to-12 z-levels.


My logic is that going up and down z-levels is just one square of movement.  And I want to get to the juicy red stuff, so why not just build my fortress along the staircase?  And it keeps me from having to scroll, too.

This has become amazingly easier with the 2012 release.


But beyond that?  I guess I like to build a wall around my fortress, and then a level above that with fortifications?  I guess I plan on having at least 18 squares of farmland to support my fortress?  I plan on having magma?  I plan on having metals?

But there's really no plan specific to a particular fortress, just my general script and then all the adjustments I make.

[Bronze Dog]

I've just started my first fortress in a long while. I have some megastructure plans that are mostly fixed, but the rest of the fortress is going to be a modular honeycomb design. I'll use the soil layer for a lot of the early workshops, stockpiles and such before moving stuff to a hopefully efficient long-term layout. I plan to crack into the first cavern layer before I plan the lowest levels. I once broke through to the cavern while I was digging out my first bedroom cell, which caused its share of trouble.

[Kinezin]

I always try to plan everything out ahead of time, so I don't have to worry about it later, but there are times when unexpected things happen like caverns for instance and I was planning out a barracks and hospital on one of the cavern levels to use it for later, but as the dwarves were digging it out I didn't realize that the areas that I had designated were open and well, some monsters from the caverns got into my early fort and it didn't end up so well for me, so now I am a bit paranoid at starting and designating areas above cavern levels and then working my way down later on when it becomes more apporiate, though I guess I was just trying to 'rush' that fort, was a good learning experience though.

[FrisianDude]

Lol, 'plan.'

[GhostDwemer]

Not much of a planner myself, except maybe in the "Modular, LEGO like system" way. How do you planners deal with terrain features? You have a nice plan, then boom! cavern system comes up at z-8, and every cavern has at most one z-level between it and the next. You've got nowhere to put your pretty planned fortress, but me, I'm like, 3x3 cavern pillar? You're a stairwell, hmm, we can shove some workshops into this corner, oh a magma tube all the way across the map? Alright everybody, pack up, we're moving the whole fort half a mile to the north.

So, what? Terrain features get in your way, do you just abandon, or do you modify your plans?

[Uronym]

I've never planned a fortress before (as I stated in the OP), how would one go about it? It sounds really fun, I'd like to give it a try.

[Jingles]

Not much of a planner myself, except maybe in the "Modular, LEGO like system" way. How do you planners deal with terrain features? You have a nice plan, then boom! cavern system comes up at z-8, and every cavern has at most one z-level between it and the next. You've got nowhere to put your pretty planned fortress, but me, I'm like, 3x3 cavern pillar? You're a stairwell, hmm, we can shove some workshops into this corner, oh a magma tube all the way across the map? Alright everybody, pack up, we're moving the whole fort half a mile to the north.

So, what? Terrain features get in your way, do you just abandon, or do you modify your plans?

Depends how stubborn you are.  Some time you build it according to plan come hell or highwater, and ignore the features.  This is painful since it often involves lots of complicated digging and construction work.  However  If you have a grand unified plan it is also a must.

For more modular or vague plans then you approach it with the terrain features in mind.

Both lead to cool forts so its no loss either way.

I've never planned a fortress before (as I stated in the OP), how would one go about it? It sounds really fun, I'd like to give it a try.

I suggest you decide on a theme for your fort and then focus on that.  For instance one of mine was as a sort of Dwarven Spa retreat where dwarves would come to relax or regain health and so I made a big bathing complex and the rest of the fort was designed to support.  Or a grand Monastery in the mountains with large halls and a small group of very focused dwarves etc.

Also you obviously choose suitable terrain that fits the theme and construction aspirations.

[dragginmaster]

I typically will designate pretty much all the basics before I even unpause: entry tunnel, central staircase, depot space, first dormitory (which later becomes barracks 1), living quarters, dining hall, food preparation, growing, and stockpile, workshops, finished product stockpiles, raw mats stockpiles, military equipment stockpiles, danger rooms, archery ranges, hospital, fortification access tunnels, etc.

Then I disconnect the designations from the central staircase by cancelling the ring of tiles around it, and when I want to dig something out, I just redesignate that one or two tiles.

^^this^^