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Above-ground, exposed to the elements of the world.

3 (2.6%)

Underground, keeping my Dwarves relatively safe.

51 (43.6%)

Both (Your fort has significant portions both above and below ground.)

40 (34.2%)

It depends on the situation. (Some things are better suited for one side than the other.)

23 (19.7%)

Total Members Voted: 117

[ab9rf]

Except for megaproject fortresses, where I turn off invaders, mine are all underground.  Preferably they are in the side of a hill so there is only one gate to the outer world, heavily trapped.  Since the wagons can no longer go over trapfields in 34.10, I am currently also using a dedicated wagon opening to the side of the map.  This is aboveground for the length required to reach the side of the map from the place where walls can be built.  Aboveground crops are grown in a sunken pit, covered over with transparent rock blocks that transmit the light.  I'm not sure how they are made, but they are really neat.    Anything requiring pasturing is kept in areas with cave moss.

This is more or less what I do, although if the embark allows it I will sink a 31x31 pasture as well as a surface farming area and a statue garden to help prevent cave adaptation.  All shaft penetrations are surrounded by two deep walls built up at least two z-levels above the surface and with cage traps atop; this stops virtually all airborne invaders because flyers seem to always path just to the top of elevated structures if they want to go down into them, and so fly through the cage trap and get trapped.  Unfortunately, "transparent" roofs (there are no actual transparent materials in DF) do not prevent cave adaptation; the statue garden (at least) must be actually open to the air above.

I used to surround the entire embark with cage traps, but with the change in wagon pathing I've switched to two or three strips of cage traps with 3-wide gaps (offset between layers, of course) to allow wagons to pass.  I also use a serpentine approach for the wagon entrance with several switchbacks.  The invaders will charge right through the traps while the wagons serpentine around them. 

[slink]

I find your wall-top cage trap method interesting.  I once set my sky really low, at 5, and built walls almost all the way to the top.  The topmost level had to be surrounded with fortifications instead of walls.  It seemed to keep flyers out of the enclosed area.  It would be a pain to do that for 15 levels, though. 

[daneel]

Usually, I like to keep all my dwarves underground except for the military, and I build a small fort above the entrance containing barracks and a nice place to shoot at invaders from. Sometimes this is open to the air and then I build some retracting bridges so I can lock it down for security reasons.

Sometimes I build topside forts made up out of ziggurats. I usually loose a lot of dwarves to crossbowgoblins then.

[DTF]

Underground. Always. Only kill hungry soldiers follow enemies outside. And noone is cleaning up the mess afterwards.
This usually leads to having massive piles of bodies, bones and seas of blood and vomit at my fortress entrance just where the sunlight begins (weather = off). Home, sweet home.


And the cage-wall idea is neat. Giant Keas were one reason why I started building solely underground.

[wierd]

I usually go both directions.

A tall spire inside an enclosed courtyard covered in glass blocks, with floor grates installed so bees can get in and out on top, and a whole deep metropolis going down, and into the cavern layers below with captured and walled in cavern courtyards in the layers below.

[CaptainArchmage]

I tend to build a tower aboveground that expands whilst the underground is dug out. The result is you get quite a few important parts of the fortress aboveground, whilst the underground also gets dug out.

[Valkyrie]

Refuse's miasma, sieges, and caravans keep me tethered to the surface to some extent in pretty much every fort.  Otherwise, I'd be entirely underground, in the region of the 1st cavern level (I switched to 1-cavern worlds shortly after their introduction, for lag reasons).

I started out having short topside forts (~2-3 zlevels) with some archery positions, a meeting hall, refuse/butchery, some farming, and support infrastructure for the trap-heavy main entrance (mainly magma trap stuff) with the bulk of the fortress near-surface underground.

For a while I tried more surface-intensive forts, but they wound up boiling down to oodles of micromanagement only to gain more exposure to goblin archers, building destroyers, and flying menaces, while coating themselves with liquid-contaminants in 'light' areas dwarves would never clean (though that last part has changed in recent versions).  Next I tried moving to almost-fully-underground forts, treating the 1st cavern level as my "surface" instead of the sun-lit world.  That proved far more fun imo, but getting caravans & siegers to come down was problematic, and miasma-management was annoying.  Plus, this made caravans exceptionally easy prey for ambushes/sieges, so the surface became coated in loot.  Even regularly setting fire to the surface, or flooding it with magma, couldn't keep it clean for long.

Nowadays, I'm relatively close to where I started.  I usually have a 2-3 z-level surface fort for siege defense, surface hunting/lumbering, refuse & butchery, and caravan admittance.  The 'real' fort is then down by the 1st cavern level, which makes for a lot of hauling in any industries that require both realms.  I vary on where I put the farming and the trade depot - more fun to have them down with the real fort, but vastly easier if they're at the surface.

The underground forts just seem to provide so many more options, and its so much quicker to progress on most construction project.  And you still have easy access to wildlife, FBs, and trees, without needing to worry about kobolds or goblin ambushes.  Magma, water, and ores are (more) readily available without long hauling trips or pump stacks.  And no cave-adaptation issues, either.

[dbay]

I generally have the majority of my fort (industry, residence, etc.) underground, but with a gigantic fortress on top with arrow slits, draw bridges, etc.. This is probably because I like settling in flat areas rather than in cliff sides, and above ground towers and things let me shoot invaders.

[daveralph1234]

I build my entire fort infastructure underground. The only thing I keep on the fortress is essential a bunker-like enterance using bridges, moats and fortifications, with a trade depot in the center. With the recent addition of minecarts, I can easily transport up trade goods and if nessesary transport surface wood to the fort. My design is bunker-like primarily in the sense that it's very compact and other than the trade depot, is just there to guard the enterance to a long stairwell going down into my fortress.
Sometimes I build more elaborate above ground fortifications with towers enclosing above-ground farms and ponds (for fishing/emergancy water source). only once have I had my actual fort infastructure above ground, I went with a large tower like design (kind of like the obsidien monoliths goblins used to build in 40d)

[WCG]

Since the wagons can no longer go over trapfields in 34.10,...

Whoa! Is this true? I haven't seen anything about this. It's not on the wiki - that I can find, at least.

Are you sure about this? Is it all traps, or just some types of traps?

I'm waiting for the Lazy Newb Pack before upgrading, but it will take me some time to remove/reposition my traps if the caravans can't cross them now. (I haven't actually used the traps, most of them. They're mostly for backup.)

Can anyone confirm this, please?

[crazysheep]

Since the wagons can no longer go over trapfields in 34.10,...

Whoa! Is this true? I haven't seen anything about this. It's not on the wiki - that I can find, at least.

Are you sure about this? Is it all traps, or just some types of traps?

I'm waiting for the Lazy Newb Pack before upgrading, but it will take me some time to remove/reposition my traps if the caravans can't cross them now. (I haven't actually used the traps, most of them. They're mostly for backup.)

Can anyone confirm this, please?

Confirmed on my end, traps block wagon access in 0.34.10.

[weenog]

I usually start with a small shallow camp surrounded by a defensive palisade, which gradually grows into a box warehouse sitting on top of a weird and twisted subterranean hive city.  Military, most of my meat industry, the backbone of my clothing production, that kind of thing stays upstairs where there's light and no miasma.  Traders and invaders are dealt with on the surface too.  Rest is underground.

[daveralph1234]

Since the wagons can no longer go over trapfields in 34.10,...

Whoa! Is this true? I haven't seen anything about this. It's not on the wiki - that I can find, at least.

Are you sure about this? Is it all traps, or just some types of traps?

I'm waiting for the Lazy Newb Pack before upgrading, but it will take me some time to remove/reposition my traps if the caravans can't cross them now. (I haven't actually used the traps, most of them. They're mostly for backup.)

Can anyone confirm this, please?

Confirmed on my end, traps block wagon access in 0.34.10.

This is correct. Traps now block caravan movement.

[Starver]

From what I recall of the thread I saw about this, I gather (or at least ISTR that I gathered) that pre-.10 saves run in .10 had passable traps if they were already built in location during play with the earlier version, but traps would start to block if constructed (or deconstructed and reconstructed) within .10 itself.

I don't remember any conclusion over whether this might be a deliberate game-changing aspect, or just a side-effect of some other alteration.  But, either way, it appears that a "blocks wagons" bit appears to need to be set by trap-building, as opposed to whatever "check for obstructions (now including traps!)" method would have nerfed even other-version-built saves.

(I'd also suggest that there's a possible experiment to be done in taking a .10-sourced save and trying to run it under a pre-change version to set traps, seeing if the blocking exists then, and then back in the new version again.  Assuming it is even possible to back-version, in this way, it might indicate whether it's something applied by the runtime, or by a possibly modified version of trap-object itself in some way.  Although I've a feeling that it's not the latter.)

[WCG]

Confirmed on my end, traps block wagon access in 0.34.10.

Thanks for the info.

From what I recall of the thread I saw about this, I gather (or at least ISTR that I gathered) that pre-.10 saves run in .10 had passable traps if they were already built in location during play with the earlier version,...

I'll probably remove the traps anyway, if that's how it's supposed to be. But that would mean I wouldn't have to remove them now, before I make the switch.

I don't mind doing without the traps, but it's extra work that I don't need right now. Given that it wasn't my mistake, but just an unexpected change to the game, it would be nice to leave it until my mechanics weren't so busy. (My experienced mechanic suicided at the waterfall, like so many others of my dwarves.)

Thanks again for the info.