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[gunpowdertea]

Yeah, I also dislike pump stacks (too much work), so when embarking I like having flowing water above ground (brook, river...) or an aquifer, so there is unlimited water supply. To have a mister above the entrance sounds really useful, so I'll implement that in my current fortress (though this one has no flowing water... so on to figuring out water transport, I'll probably use minecarts to improve my skills there, too, though the only water available is in a FB infested cavern...).

My entrance usually has multilevel arched gates, gold roads, statues, tons of bridges and bars (porticullis, they don't stop building destroyers but slow the first wave down), ways to dump refuse onto invaders (while they are busy destroying the bars), gate houses with towers for archers. I also try to force the path to be clockwise when I'm lucky enough to have a lonely mountain type of embark, so the right side of the enemy is exposed (yes, has no ingame effect, I know).

[khearn]

My entrance is often a 3 tile wide ramp going into the ground. Sometimes it gets a wall around it with a gate. Sometimes I just leave it as a bare hole, hoping the goblins will think it's just a big rabbit hole and ignore it. That doesn't seem to work very well.

Aesthetics is for elves.

If it helps, the wall is usually made from blocks, so at least it's smooth.

  Keith

[Treefingers]

My last 0.34 fort fit everything nicely into a narrow stack of small, square floors, even the magma workshops. I then dug out a 16-wide moat around 3 sides (sheer natural cliff on the 4th) which goes all the way down to magma. The wall is two layers thick. As I dug down, I replaced the walls with glass blocks, and every 2nd layer down I made alcoves for masterwork obsidian statues. The wall faces looked something like this, but for over 100 Z-levels:

Code: [Select]

00000000000000000
00 00 00000 00 00
00000000000000000
00 00 00000 00 00
00000000000000000
00 00 00000 00 00
00000000000000000
00 00 00000 00 00
00000000000000000
00 00 00000 00 00
00000000000000000
00 00 00000 00 00
"0" is wall, gaps are where the statues went.

A 5-wide, two-deck down-ramp bridge leads across (at grade on the land side, about 16-lvls down on the fort side). The upper deck is for visitors, the lower (covered deck) leads to my dragon tower at the far end of the bridge. Weak weapon traps along the edges occassionally caused invaders from larger groups to jump of the side. Inside is a 10-high trade room with archer positions on the lower levels and legendary-made engravings on the bottom-most and upper levels. Floor is black bronze, depot is platinum.

I never got around to sealing the caverns, so they're open to the surface. It only really caused me trouble once when I got a flying webber for an FB who, because of the lowered entrance, never went near my dragon.

The narrow stack design turned out to be super-efficient, so I use it in all my forts now, even if I'm not doing the ubermoat thing. Design-wise, it was pretty interesting trying to cram all the usual stuff into such a tight plan.