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[billybobfred]

Start with all crops. This makes farming much more difficult than it needs to be, especially in the beginning.

Head for the magma sea at the earliest opportunity, and don't do anything else of note until I get there.

That's all I really have, though admittedly they're not rules I made in the interest of increasing difficulty.

[DNK]

real life fortress are meant to be:  Impenetrable strongholds that were extremely well protected with traps,

I agree mostly, but name 1 real life fortress that had the following:

A room/area with a long, snaking, switchback-styled walkway over a pit that was lined with deadly traps from one end to the other. This isn't Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It wouldn't work in reality.

Most castles just have walls, murder holes, archer windows and crenelations, and little else.

[Flying Fortress]

real life fortress are meant to be:  Impenetrable strongholds that were extremely well protected with traps,

I agree mostly, but name 1 real life fortress that had the following:

A room/area with a long, snaking, switchback-styled walkway over a pit that was lined with deadly traps from one end to the other. This isn't Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It wouldn't work in reality.

Most castles just have walls, murder holes, archer windows and crenelations, and little else.

Good point, and I'll admit that the current trap mechanics are due for some renovations in damage reductions for realism.  10 large disks hidden in a wall with perfectly set precision and constantly being spring loaded are extremely unrealistic....but also very cool and dwarfy.

[Berossus]

name 1 real life fortress that had the following:

.) Dwarves
.) Goblins
.) Assfiends
.) Dragons
.) everything else that makes up 99.998% of this game.

[Starver]

Good point, and I'll admit that the current trap mechanics are due for some renovations in damage reductions for realism.

(Slightly ninjaed, it seems.)  Let's renovate Dragons for realism.  Can hardly move under its own weight (let alone fly!), and as for flames through its throat...

[slink]

• No rules.

I like this one.   

Most of what could be called my rules are actually just my ethos, involving which animals are to be slaughtered and how the Dwarves are to be treated.  Others are just common sense, such as not cooking the booze because it is much better used as a beverage.  Everything else that I fail to do is either something for which I have no need or something that I've never been very good at doing.  The fact that some of my practices make the game more difficult for me is beside the point, which is that the game is more fun for me if I enjoy fully what I am doing with it.

[thiosk]

No danger rooms.

1 marks dwarf squad- usu. 4.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I never use danger room, marksdwarves, or most exploits. Mostly dwarfpower, traps (at least half weapon), and occasionally some mega-deathtrap.

[fourpotatoes]

I don't have any rules I use on every fortress with the sole purpose of making the game more difficult, but on several occasions I've left the caverns fully or partially open, and when building (what was intended to be) a surface fortress, I decided that all significant structures required foundations.

Although I left the surface fortress unfinished (having discovered the tall, grand second cavern, perfect for building tall, grand chambers), I did some extensive construction work for which I channeled out holes to build things in. Large structures, including the walls, irrigation dam, the keep and the gatehouses, had supports running down to the bedrock, while lighter structures just had footings in the soil layers. As I developed the location, the aesthetic value started becoming more important than the challenge.

They're not necessarily hard-and-fast rules, but I have a mix of personal inclinations and design standards that have the effect of making some things harder:

• Dwarves are not expendable.
• The baron, if I select one, should be someone who deserves it, not someone picked only for their preferences.
• The captain of the guard should be a founder or have come of age in the fortress and should be effective in actual combat. Because of this and the prior two rules, I can't blow off mandates.
• No exporting metals or other non-renewable resources (other than rock crafts and certain gem-encrusted items). I hoard metals in case I need them, which means no selling metal crafts or valuable steel trap components.
• No exporting arms or sensitive technologies to non-dwarves: for example, I won't sell dwarven mechanism technology to elves, and I won't risk the (imagined) danger of catapult parts falling into the hands of my enemies.
• Magma and water systems must be engineered with active and passive safety controls, even if it makes operation less efficient and construction more difficult. Passive controls are usually doors, pressure reduction fittings and limits on where and how it can connect to the main fortress; active controls on my first magma weapon involved a system that would have automatically rendered it inoperable (requiring significant repair) by obsidianizing the plumbing just beyond the feed pumps, dumping water into all the cross-connections into the fortress and pumping any magma still in the system into two designated dump areas had it detected any leakage.
• All stone should be removed from areas that are going to be flooded.
• Except in rare extenuating circumstances, weapon and stonefall traps are not permitted in areas trafficked by civilians or soldiers, lest someone pass out on one.
• No (deliberately) robbing caravans: all dealings with the outside must be aboveboard.
• Except for experiments in a fortress dedicated to !!science!!, no dfhacking to e.g. summon magma, refill veins or make my enemies explode.
• Perpetual motion machines without a reasonable natural source of flow should be built from at least one pitchblende block. I often embark with pitchblende and graphite blocks in case I can't find any on site. While it has no game effect, I like to imagine that my dwarves have refined the uranium and built themselves a pile.
• No metal in tombs or important statues, except for lead coffins. This is because in the real world, people tend to salvage and melt valuable metals, and I don't want any temptation to loot my honored dead.
• No quantum stockpiling food. This is less for reasons of verisimilitude and more that I prefer to distribute prepared-food and drink stockpiles all over the fortress and don't want to spend the time making sure that they're all balanced.

I'm not opposed to danger rooms, but I don't use them anymore. I stopped operating my first danger room regularly because the constant combat reports covered up reports of actual danger, and I stopped running it permanently when the militia started having children. I never got around to finishing the second, and I haven't laid out barracks for danger room installation since.

[Damiac]

Although I just started, and my last fortress was CRUSHED by a huge goblin siege at year 3 (my military was not wearing enough armor...), I do intend to play by certain rules, to correct for seemingly inbalanced game features:

1. No Permenant sealing off of the outside world (Actually, I'm going to adopt the "must farm outside" rule, as that sets a sort of time limit, although I will still allow underground farming, just outside the fortress walls) 
2. No messing with AI pathing (meaning no making them walk back and forth, no long winding trap filled hallways)
3. No danger room
4. No Atomsmashing or cave-ins
5. No perpetual motion machines
6. Limited trap use (some stone fall traps scattered outside my drawbridge are ok)
7. No melting exploits to generate infinite metals
8. All raws in normal un-edited state, although I'm not opposed to modifying raws to fix seemingly broken features, like making fingernails have a regen rate.

These rules are for one reason: To preserve the challenge of the game for myself, so as to have more fun, due to having
more !!FUN!!.  So I certainly don't hold it against anyone else if they play in the way they consider fun.

I expect as Toady continues adding to the game, many of my rules won't be necessary anymore, for example, I know he plans to add some ability for monsters to break through walls/dig into your stronghold, so then I won't need to restrict myself from sealing off the world.

[dwarf_sadist]

I usually change my house rules at the start of each embark. Mine include:
1) Playing on the surface. No mining into stone, only channeling. Digging into soil is fine if it's to make a storage pit or basement. If I need more space, I build up.

2) I never have floating platforms supported by one support. Unless of course, I am playing Ewok style and ONLY have buildings in the sky.

3) Tribal; only hunt, fish or gather. No farms. Surface only, no mining, no smelting. Stone, wood and bones.

4) Mole People; no digging into soil, only stone. No farming except in the caverns. Nothing on the surface.

[Urist Mcfortwrecker]

sorry for necro but this is a good thread, and i think its worth the necro.

I try to make my fortresses based on real life castle building strategies, although im fairly liberal with it. Im not opposed to a switchback within my fortress, but its used for soldiers, not traps, so that my enemy comes around the corner, gets a shot of (modded to be nerferd) bolts and then faces my sword and spear armed dwarves. I try to minimize cage traps, but im not opposed to weapon traps if they make sense, though i tend to limit it to simple traps, like one giant axe blade swinging through the corridor. my fortress also has a two tiered design like many medieval forts, an outer wall where soldiers defend before retreating to the keep for the last stand. So generally this strategy i dont find is cheaty, even though its brutally effective, because it works historically. I try to keep giant stockpiles of food and drink in the castle, as well as a well, to keep dwarves alive for months during a siege until i can break it for a resupply.

[anzelm]

Time for some questions. Suppose I use the following rules in one fort:

• no traps
• always allow path to fort
• no danger rooms
• standard pop cap (80+) from the start

Next, suppose that I don't have iron available on-site. Considering the painfully long time to get reasonably well-trained and equipped military (well-trained = they can face a siege and live to tell stories), how do I survive against the goblin onslaught? They get a limitless supply of cannonaxe fodder, while my warriors are non-expendable. Is there some magical strategy I'm missing?

[ZzarkLinux]

Make 2 bronze chain leggings, then melt them both. Repeat.

[Tacomagic]

•For embark setup, all dwarves are assigned 4 skills randomly by dice rolls (or random number generator). The first skill rolled is set to competent, the other three are set to novice.

•Dwarves may only be assigned labors they have at least novice in.  (With the exception of allowing 2 miners and 1 farmer to be assigned untrained at embark; the game is nearly impossible without this exception).  Noble jobs being the exception.

•Dwarves may only be drafted into the military if all their skills are already covered by other dwarves.

•If there is at least 1 dwarf with Master or higher in a skill, a non-trained dwarf may be assigned the labor as an apprentice to the master dwarf.  Only 1 apprentice may be given to any 1 Master.  Once the apprentice hits Adept, they're considered a journeyman and no longer require the master.  This frees up the apprentice slot so that another may be trained.

This rule-set makes things very interesting because you'll find yourself having to exist without certain skills due to rarity (such as mechanic, pump operator, and wood burner).

To make things even more interesting, randomize your embark location and reduce your embark goods to 40 units each of food and alcohol, 2 picks, and a training axe.

Another exception that's almost required is to toggle on dwarf for architect to build the trade depot and then toggle him off, otherwise you may spend several years without one given how rare architects are in migration waves (My last fort where I did this, it took 4 years for an architect to show up).