So I recently dug up the savefiles for a fort I had been playing with a year or two back but put aside. I actually had to revert to one of the seasonal backups, couldn't find the latest save, but that's just as well as I had been running into some troubles (which I vaguely recall) and have been pre-emptively resolving them.
Basic situation is as follows. Fortress name is Nariden (Rawpaddles). It's the fifth year of the fort. The map is a full size one, 16x16. (FPS right now, with 120ish dwarves, tends to be about 15-20, 40 when paused. It's a bit slow but playable.) There's a mountain spur jutting in from the west, falling to a saddle then rising to a peak about 3/4 of the way to the east side of the map; the fort is dug into the south side of this ridge. There's a brook originating in the southwest and running eastward, with forested hills on the south side of the brook, and the lower slopes of the mountain to the north and east are also nicely forested. Plenty of wildlife - deer, marmots, cougars, grizzly bears (including one that earned a name before dying), raccoons, although I haven't started training any hunters (that's in store for later). There is an underground lake near the center of the map that one of my exploratory tunnels ran into (top level luckily, so no flood), with quite a few frogmen and lizardmen and olmmen. Also, there is a chasm somewhere in the map, but it is completely covered over by the mountain - I am going to have to find it by digging. I keep seeing messages about Giant Bats and Giant Cave Swallows having kids, and seeing dead ratmen and cave swallowmen showing up on the units list, so there might be quite a population in there by the time I find it. An underground war with the chasm peoples sounds fun. Pretty sure there's no magma, aside from whatever HFS might have.
The basic fort layout is roughly a cube in the center of the map, centered at about the level of the brook, with 3x3 stairs marking the vertical axes and 3x3 hallways lining the edges on most levels. The main level is the great hall, which is a 3-level open dome supported by pillars, 95 wide at the lowest level. Five years in and this isn't _quite_ done yet; the miners and engravers keep being needed for more pressing business. Below that are 4 levels of storage rooms with a level of workshops between the 2nd and 3rd; above it are the dwarven quarters. Lowest and topmost level are the waterworks; a series of tunnels made to channel water all around the uppermost level of the fort and drop it wherever needed (for example I have six floodable/drainable holding tanks/swimming pools/farmable surfaces), collecting it down at the bottom and pumping it back up to the underground lake (which I'm using as a reservoir) This is still not really functional due to the large amount of stone-smoothing and pressure-plate installation and plate-to-floodgate connections and pumps I'm having to build - the plan is to have a system that is mostly automatic in moving water from place to place and never letting it get deep enough to overflow anywhere. The water will be under pressure everywhere, because things are more fun that way.
For a long time the only direct connection between the fort and the outside was the main gate, which goes through a bow-shaped floodable drowning chamber, past the depot room, across drawbridges over a deep pit, and past various siege weapon and marksdwarf setups. (These fortifications aren't complete yet but they haven't been really needed yet) There's also a set of floodgates I can seal off the entrance with (which, being left open, I actually completely forgot I had installed until I found a lever and couldn't figure out what it did - I avoid putting notes on my levers because things are more fun that way; I color-code them instead) but I plan on using those only in cases of real emergency. I realized a while ago there wasn't enough water in the underground lake to fill all my waterworks systems so just recently finished a second tunnel, tapping the brook - coming out underneath it in winter while it's frozen, so I've channeled out the staircases and am installing hatchways and floodgates and will be ready in time for spring to let in the water in a controlled fashion.
The thing about this fort I really did wrong was the farming. Early on I had a couple burrows dug into an earthen hillside while doing initial training and workshopping and excavating the entrance halls. Once the goblin ambushes started happening, I knew I had to move underground for good, but without water to irrigate ... thing is, I knew pretty much what I wanted in terms of the waterworks system from the start, but I made the mistake of trying to do the whole thing all at once, rather that figuring out how to do it piece by piece. So it's taken years, and I had no way of getting mud onto the room I wanted to farm. So I literally set up a bucket brigade, ferrying water from the brook to deep underground. Took ages, and it got to the point where it was evaporating as fast as they were adding water so I never did get the last 4 or so tiles muddy, but the resulting field (with a dedicated cook, brewer, and thresher) has kept the whole fort fed ever since; the hillside burrows and their fields have been abandoned for years.
The big map is nice. For one thing it gives me plenty of warning when seiges arrive; I can engage in some decent tactics, moving squads from one part of the map to another and defeating the gobbos in detail rather than having to panic as they all converge on the gate - the latest seige, this past summer, showed up right after the human caravan arrived. I thought at first the humans were going to get massacred, but no; the axegobbo and troll squads got intercepted in the hills and torn to pieces, the macegobbo squad reached my gate at the same time as the humans, and we had a nice little pincer movement between my guys and the caravan guards. At that point, the third gobbo squad - crossbows - was just getting down below the treeline after crossing the mountain. They decided to go away instead of finishing the visit, which as they were crossbows, I didn't mind. Sometimes I have problems with ambushes but I have some strategically placed traps on the mountainside that tend to catch them while they're sneaking around - it's not uncommon for the traps alone to rout them. I've never had more than a dozen or so dwarves under arms but it's been enough. Actually, speaking of dwarves under arms, I should mention the thing that made me invest time into this fort into the first place: my very first artifact was an iron spear - "Ensebotik, the Basic Sheen". Later I got an artifact platinum spear also ("Ringeddashed the Silvery Armory"), which being studded with all sorts of gemstones and worth 165600 keeps showing up in all the artwork and engravings, but iron is a proper metal for weapons ... I just finally got a dwarf trained up to Spearmaster and got him to equip Ensebotik. Looking forward to seeing him in action with it. He's already got more kills (18) than any of the others, and that was with a -Larch Spear-.
Latest artifact, just completed, is a throne with two images of Ringeddashed and also one of the dwarven queen. Ready for her whenever she comes by.
All in all it's a nice little kingdom to play in. My main goal right now is to get the internals of the fortress stabilized, which means finishing to excavate various things, getting the economy going (it _should_ trigger this next year), finishing the waterworks, and generally making it internally self-sufficient and getting the population growth to be supported by the kids growing up rather than depending on migrants (seems I've had enough deaths to get a reputation for danger). Once I've reached that point I can start setting up hunters and experienced combat squads to patrol the surface and pre-emptively crush incursions.
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 5972580 times)