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[StubbornAlcoholic]

Lately I've found that my excitement with my more developed forts has been dwindling. My embarks either seem tough-then-too-easy once I get settled, or I go the other end of the spectrum and pick some Armok-forsaken Hell-on-Earth that means I'm usually dead before I can even think of fun ways to survive.

Or even worse, I pick a kind of crappy "challenge" map that ends up being boring because it's just a kind of limp ceiling on fun. Like a place with no wood or metals, which sounds exciting until you realise it just means you can't make beds and your soldiers are more crap than usual...and not much else.

I like Normal Savage biomes for their less-fantastical-but-dangerous animals, but I never seem to see giant bears or the much-maligned Giant Desert Scorpions.  And even some evil biomes seem quite passive once you get your fort carved out and the obligatory drawbridge in place.

So what do you guys pick when you want a heavy Dwarven challenge where you'll learn lots of new skills and tricks? What sort of environment leads to your most interesting forts? I'm curious

[i2amroy]

Evil biomes, usually a site thats fairly easy in it's other aspects (wood, sand, etc.). Alternatively you can pick a site that is more difficult in other ways but has a necromancer or two that will come visit. The key is to find your particular level of !!FUN!!. Some people are just fine starting with a no-picks embark on a terrifying glacier and surviving with all sorts of fun, and others prefer calm biomes with invaders turned off.

[MrSparky]

The most exciting embark location I picked ended up being dead before midsummer.
Started on a haunted mountain volcano. Was harvesting wood and getting the entryway dug out when suddenly: Undead Badger Conga.
They took out my woodcutters, farmers, and the hammerman/expedition leader. The miners were fine until the corpses of their friends came to life and started chasing them. One of the corpses was trailing 2 tiles of guts.
From the time the badgers appeared until the time I decided to abandon I kept hearing the Benny Hill theme in my head.

I actually like my forts to start out boring and not get exciting until a few years in. It's hard for me to cheer for a team before I get to know them.

[Asra]

I think it really depends on whether or not I'm walling myself in at the beginning, since if I do that it's basically easy from there on as long as I build some sort of air-lock to my fort. I think the most exciting embark location I picked was on a map with husk-making fog that got ahold of an entire migrant wave.

[Spectrelight]

My current fort is in a pretty interesting location. The west side of the map is a calm mountain with a volcano, rising almost 70 z-levels above the surroundings. The east side is a haunted shrubland. Between them is a mirthful desert. I don't have the constant tantrum spiral I'd get on a fully evil map, but I can't let my guard down too much because very dangerous creatures sometimes wander in from the east.

[gchristopher]

I edited world.dat and used dfhack to get the embark I wanted: an ocean spanning straight across the center of the map, with evil swamps on both shores, and then good forests on either side, all savage. The swamps reanimate. The ocean and swamp share a thralling cloud weather. I haven't found an example of both evil creeping weather and evil rain, so I'm afraid to try modding that in.

Resources are plentiful, but I put 8 layers of sandstone under the soil layers with no ores for those layers, so you have a .. 9? layer aquifer to pierce for most of the map, unless you dig under the ocean, in which case it's only 3 layers of aquifer. Under that is a lot of dolomite, for its high melting point, then a completionist assortment of regular stone layers. For some reason, the caverns are really deep. Not sure why that happened; I haven't parsed out the underground regions yet. I lined up the relative geology depths and terrain elevation so the entire map has homogenous minerals for each layer.

I moved a necromancer tower into the neighborhood.

For normal modding, I used Modest Mod plus giving elves and humans [BABYSNATCHER] so they're always at war with dwarves. Siege thresholds depend only on production, removing population and trade requirements. Also lowered the population and trade thresholds for titans and semimegabeasts to 1 so they can appear any time.

Basically it's a lovely ideal mineral treasure trove underground, but about every bad thing the game is capable of throwing at you is present somewhere on the map. I was trying to pack all the good and bad as possible into one area.

[enizer]

currently, i'm playing on a volcano, on the shore of an evil ocean, there's a cliff down to the the beach, and it's a reanimation biome

so if i get bored, i designate the corpse stockpile to be dumped off the cliff, and voila, instant zombie horde incoming

[MattStriker]

Savage desert (oasis) biome, right in between two goblin forts and a tower. Kinda pedestrian by DF standards, but I'm still a newbie .

Fun fact: This place has occasional giant desert scorpions wandering around the map's edges. I looked up what they do. This might get interesting .

[Bhargo]

a volcano bordering a necromancer tower. Zombies to the north of me, goblin sieges from the south. Breaching the caverns made it worse, so many forgotten beasts.

[evictedSaint]

My favorite way to play is:

You can only use what the map provides, or what you start with.  Set migrants = 0 and wait until the first two hard-coded waves. 

Once you have every migrant, dig yourself into the dirt and close yourself off to the world, vault 101 style.

No merchants, no invasions; the only way you can survive is if you can build a self-sustaining fortress.  Building a completely self-reliant fortress in less than a year is nearly impossible, and a constant challenge.

Bonus if you do it in rock (no soil -> harder to get farms, you need mud).

Bonus if you make the surface appear untouched.

Bonus if you build under a river (wait till it freezes, then burrow straight down).

Dfhack is recommended, so you can autodump any dead liasons down into your fort to prevent ghosts.

[MrSparky]

Dfhack is recommended, so you can autodump any dead liasons down into your fort to prevent ghosts.

Why not just engrave slabs? It's not like you ever have a shortage of stone.

[Bronimin]

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[fractalman]

difficult to say...it's either my second to last haunted glacier run (which had just enough underground beach from the frozen ocean to keep my dwarves supplied with booze), or my most recent run, which has exactly one un-haunted embark square,zm what happened to all my previous embarks. 

I'm at year 5 and I've already walled one forgotten beast into a corner, trapped a titan in a cage trap, and discovered adamant when I dug into the magma sea.

When I get the chance, I'm going to have my core military force train on undead peregrine falcons. AFTER I get them steel armor...which I may simply buy from the dwarven caravan, since there's no coal on the map, and I'm not sure which cavern layer the untrapped forgotten beast is in...

[Gaybarowner]

Any biome with huskifying clouds

[fractalman]

Any biome with huskifying clouds

...too much fun, tyvm.  Passive reanimation is bad enough, what with the inevitability of an unslabbable trader ghost showing up, and the inability to close a coffin tightly... 

IF coffins were fixed, then maybe...