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[teh sam]

Does anyone else find themselves continually restarting?

I don't think I have ever been past 6 or 7 seasons.  I always, ALWAYS find a reason to abandon my game and start a new one.  First I have to find an embark spot with enough trees, no aquifer, surface level flux, iron ore and lots of bituminous coal and/or lignite.  It also has to have a decent hillside/cliffside.  I cannot bring myself to make an entrance that goes straight down into the ground.  MUST be into a hillside.

Then, inevitably I find fault with my layout.  Or I piss off a trader or fill in the blank.

Anyone else this fussy, exacting, etc?

Please don't misunderstand.  I still have a blast every time (other than embark hunting).

[weenog]

You just haven't embraced the dorfen spirit of innovation, stubbornness and total indifference to nature yet, that's all.  If your embark site isn't to your liking, make it conform.

[teh sam]

The one time I made myself keep playing I did not do it in good faith.  I spent a year digging out a gigantic cistern above my dining room for a drowning machine.

It worked...  Except that damn mason who refused to wall himself inside the dining room with everyone/everything else rather than outside.

[Urist_McArathos]

I know precisely what you mean; I start digging, start working and by year 4 I usually find that I didn't make the entry tunnel long enough (so no room for my planned ballista battery), or that I breached a cavern and it really messed up my planned bedroom suite and I never adjusted for it properly, or an ambush I wasn't prepared for seriously threw a wrench into some long-term plans, or something along those lines.

I've learned the best thing to do is try not to be OCD about it, and just embrace the difficulty, hurdles, and hiccups along the way.

I also draw or sketch out my fortresses on graph paper or the like so I feel more confident before digging in what I want (I had some reliable plans that I'm currently redoing to account for minecarts).

[Bobnova]

Switch to adventure mode for a while, that'll cure you.

My forts tend to die, I have one now that refuses to die, but also is not interested in giving decent FPS.
I'm going to try taking the three acre General Stuff stockpile and quantumizing it with minecarts and see if it helps. If not I'll probably continue digging straight down and throw it all into lava if I can find any.

There is another that should be dead by all rights, it has ~30 beds and >200 dwarves. They do not seem to care, possibly because they know there is lava waiting to be plumbed into the top level of the fort.

A third only has two dwarves in it, despite having no monsters, no raids, no ambushes and no sieges, as well as having had 50+ immigrants.
As it turns out, waterfalls are far more dangerous than mere goblins or FBs.


Anyway, start in a more challenging spot, that'll help.

[Murgy]

Due to my personal tendencies toward this, I'm currently in the process of building an experimental fortress using "organic" designs. I'm finding that, while it's a difficult type of "non-pattern" to begin and hideous to look at during the fort's initial stages, it looks rather good once it has been smoothed out.

[Sutremaine]

One ef my forts is in the middle of its third or fourth year with everything still a mess. But when I removed all the folders and started a new world, I realised that it wasn't actually that bad. There might be no infrastructure whatsoever, but at least parts of it are dug out and all the first cavern is walled off. Luckily I just threw all the folders somewhere else instead of deleting them entirely, so I guess I'll go back and fix up the wagon entry and tell all the dwarves I haven't gotten around to processing to pick up a pick and go help out with the pasturing.

There's also the corpse rollercoaster, which I've done most of the designation for. I think it's the designating that saps my will to continue. Everything has to be just right, and trying to 'ghost' designations through cavern space is a pain.

[DavionFuxa]

Does anyone else find themselves continually restarting?

....

Anyone else this fussy, exacting, etc?

I use to be like this - before I started making my Let's Plays I wanted to make a Fort that had an opening of bedrock that I could mine into, leaving rough rock halls that I could smooth out and make into Fortifications facing inward, all to create a sort of inside Archer Killbox for which I could devastate incoming enemies with Marksdwarfs.

I basically gave up because I was getting tired of Embarks and I went to play a lot of Adventure Mode. Then I of course began some Let's Plays since I noted there were so few of them for Adventure Mode.

Ironically when I decided I would make a Dwarf Fortress again for the Let's Play to gear up an adventurer, the very first Fort I make I was able to achieve what I had set out out to do in the beginning with the above Archer Killbox idea; which was nice to complete though it never really got used.

My advice would to you would be to follow the advice of Bobnova, Urist_McArathos, and Weenogs - in that order. Switch to Adventure Mode or do something else for a while. Come back and make a Fort, and keep playing the Fort regardless of what you want to achieve (at least for a little while) and accept the hurdles, difficulty, and all that. Finally, if you get an idea of how to do something that you want to achieve but can't seem to grasp how to do it - innovate, find a solution, or do what you need to do to make it work. Maybe you won't make it work but that's part of Dwarf Fortress.

[PoeticShaman]

I generally view the first few levels of any fortress as being a lost cause; I tend to just expand as needed, adding bedrooms and workshops, or straightening up mineshafts and turning them into combined storerooms/work areas.  Each level becomes slowly more vacant as I move my dwarves deeper and deeper down, each time attempting to create a more perfect form of the one above.  (And the one above, of course, makes for an excellent maze to slaughter nosy invaders.)

I'm always dissatisfied with the state of my fortress as well, but my first priority is to create a self-sustaning system, the second to make an almost invincible military, and the third to dig a shaft straight down to the magma, where the fun really begins.  If you tell yourself that the first few levels don't matter, it makes it easier to live with everything looking like a mess.   

[ledgekindred]

What PoeticShaman said.  I dig in fast, get everything indoors, make a few rooms to hold my stuff and a few workshops.  Then after the first migrant wave or two, I "volunteer" a couple more miners and start digging out for real.

None of my forts ever have any thought put into planning.  I just start to dig whatever it is I need, wherever there's room.  If I need more, I find more space and dig some more.  The only exceptions, I guess, are that I put food and kitchens/butcher/still near food stockpiles, and I tend to build huge single-floor apartment complexes with upwards of 150 rooms for my dorfs.  (Yay macros.)

Once I get most everything up and running, I dig straight for magma.  I inevitably hit caverns on the way down, and usually just wall them off.  If I have room, I'll start to actually plan, and move parts of my fortress down near the magma. 

Basically, I wind up with entire fortresses-worth of construction that I'll eventually abandon and replace.  The first couple years results in an absolute rats' nest of tunnels, and once you get deep enough, it starts to look more orderly.  I love it.

[slothen]

all it takes is a willingness to adapt your design on the fly.

[thegoatgod_pan]

For me this applies to worldgen, i spent hours and hours in legends looking for worlds with a healthy amount of vampires, necromancers and werewolves, breeding pairs of dragons and rocs and other things that make a fort potentially awesome. My dream is a vampire queen/king with a necromancer consort running a kingdom that lives off breeding dragons. so far I have never made it

as far as abandoning goes...nah. I roll with the punches. The fort where I learned to pierce aquifers has three fail holes where the aquifer plug was done wrong/didn't work. I built clay pyramids over each hole and sacrificed goblins, aztec style. When the 4th hole took I revamped the pyramids with newly acqired marble. I still miss that fort. r.i.p. wrungknives, you were made obsolete by a few version releases

[Trance]

For me this applies to worldgen, i spent hours and hours in legends looking for worlds with a healthy amount of vampires, necromancers and werewolves, breeding pairs of dragons and rocs and other things that make a fort potentially awesome. My dream is a vampire queen/king with a necromancer consort running a kingdom that lives off breeding dragons. so far I have never made it

I had something as good as that. Vampire queen since year 40 odd, first necromancer was the civ's first general, and the queen's husband was a werebeast that ravanged the lands for a good three hundred years.

FTI - once anything becomes a necromancer, they leave the civ. So your dream of a vampire king/queen with a necromancer consort wont ever happen.