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[nimbus25]

I've decided that I play DF too boringly, same fort set-up, same progression, and I never do anything overly different ever. So I decided to try and make a castle for my first major large scale project. And a couple things I've noticed are:

• No amount of blocks will ever be enough
• Seriously there is a stupid amount of blocks required for a castle
• And roofs are weird and awkward

How do I make a roof properly for something like a tower? I don't want to just create a flat floor because that would be incredibly lame and boring, but I have no clue how to make a roof remotely fancy or interesting. Any tips?

[kontako]

You can make a flat floor and surround it with fortifications to make a crenelation, although if it's a spire you're after that might be a bit difficult. You'll need to use ramps to get that nice pointy shape, but I remember having trouble with a lot of them being unusable.

[RocheLimit]

Building surface buildings is great fun, except for the fact you have already come across: no amount of blocks is enough.  Shift up once and shift right once, just a simple 11x11 square: well, that alone is going to cost 121 blocks or 31 block jobs at your mason's.  Want to divide that into rooms?  Well it will still cost 121 blocks, its just some of those blocks will be built into walls instead of floors.  And that is a mere 11x11; that's not much room for a full-grown fort.  It is time consuming, risky, and the whole process just plain savages your fps.  And yet my best fortresses have been above-ground.  Can't recommend it enough.

A few design tips, not that I have really ever designed for looks before. 

• If you want sloped roofs, use ramps.  You can use them to slope your roof up to a peak or just up to a smaller roof.
• Use blocks to create crenelations.  They look pretty good in 3d fortress viewers
• Plan out colors before hand.  You can make use of flat roofs to put a pretty design down
• Try to add supports.  The structures may not actually need them, but they do make it look better
• Remember that enemies can fly diagonally-vertically through cracks formed between a built/natural floor and a built wall.  Be sure to top every wall with some other construction, such as another wall, a floor, or a ramp

For additional help, I would take a close look at Flarechannel http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=43679.0.  This fortress is pretty much the best I have ever seen.  And much of it is above ground.

[NW_Kohaku]

To make a roof is simple - create a "scaffold" of up/down stairs along the outside wall of the building leading to the roof, then order it filled in one ring at a time, building up ramps if you want a sloped roof.  I suggest setting up stockpiles for materials with wheelbarrows to ship material from one stockpile near the masons to a stockpile right next to your tower, or maybe even a minecart path if you will see enough use or can reuse enough of the track for more towers.

That said, when he says "plan out colors beforehand", he's not kidding.  When LoudWhispers made Silentthunders, he wound up having to strip-mine essentially the entire top two layers of stone in his fortress to keep it all "white stone" because he started building with limestone and marble. 

The only infinitely renewable materials are wood, glass (in green or clear when combined with extreme wood farming), ceramics (earthen or stoneware bricks), and obsidian.  Maybe weapons-grade metal if you're absolutely masochisticly determined to abuse exploits beyond all reason and want to set up industrial-scale bolt splitters and melting systems.  (And to be fair, it IS pretty metal if you tried to make an entire fortress out of steel.)  Beyond that, you'd have to set up cheat reactions to go beyond your natural excavation limits. 

If you want to use one type of natural stone, it's probably best to go for whatever is on the bottom layer of your embark rather than the top, since you typically find the last layer goes down around 60zs rather than the 7 or so zs the top layer goes down.  Remember: You get only 1/4th the boulders from digging stone, and can transform them into 4 blocks, so you're basically digging out as much space as you're building.  7 zs of material, even clear-cut, only gives you 7zs of above-ground space.

If you want to use obsidian, however, there's of course the significant advantage of it being "natural" stone when you cast it, allowing serious megaproject builders to create "cranes" that pour magma and water into moulds made of "scaffolding" walls, then carving their fortress out of the result. This further allows for engraving above-ground "constructions", and also creates a single black, shiny obelisk of dwarven might to present to the world.  Oh, and making the roof won't be a problem, either.

[PatrikLundell]

In theory, you can also get infinite amounts of stone from the dwarven caravans by requesting maximum amounts of the kinds of stones you want, as well as the maximum amount of blocks of these kinds. That takes infinite amounts of time to get, though.
That IS a less ridiculous strategy if you're going for color at limited scales. If the caravans provide stones of nice colors you don't have naturally you can get some colors that way. This goes for clay as well, of course (and even elves bring clay!).

[Saiko Kila]

If you have clay, then bricks are both infinite and gray. Gray like stone. Though in forested area I would choose green glass. You can also build from other replenishable materials, like soap (but this also effectively needs wood, and you can make castle out of wooden blocks)

Still, after mining some tree farms, and ending with thousands of boulders, I cannot really conceive how it is possible to run out of stones. Running out of particular type of stone is easy, but running out of stones in general, especially the layer ones (like gabbro)? And masons make block very fast, they don't need to be legendary.

As for roofs, use ass many walls as possible when creating roofs, because constructed floors have less functionality than floors created by a wall. You may also create bridges as roofs, they use less blocks. More time, though, and you cannot build on the bridges, but it's still good for rarely visited, big and flat areas.

[Valikdu]

How do I make a roof properly for something like a tower? I don't want to just create a flat floor because that would be incredibly lame and boring, but I have no clue how to make a roof remotely fancy or interesting. Any tips?

You must construct pylons a ziggurat.

[NW_Kohaku]

It depends on what you will use to view them.  There is little incentive to make elaborate sloping spires if you aren't going to view them in a 3d program. If you are using Stonesense or any of the 3d visualizers, they often can display stone in more color than just the 16 colors base DF offers, so even the difference between "white" limestone and "white" marble will create an ugly patchwork effect.

Hence, I would make whole buildings or projects from single materials, which can require massive quantities of that material depending on the scale of your megaproject. If you're building a 100 z-tall, 60x60 tile skyscraper, then making a glass exterior isn't just cool, it's also one of the few materials you're never going to run out of, while an upper layer stone of 8 zs would be extinguished in the attempt unless you had a very wide embark.

Also, keep in mind that not all roofs slope at a 45 degree angle. You might make a steep roof of about a 60 degree angle spire by having ramps, but going up two zs per x or y inwards.

[nimbus25]

Yeah, I downloaded Armok Viewer because Fortress Overseer is outdated and I don't like Stonesense much :/
As for colors, I did make sure to create minerals everywhere in world gen purely to get lots of pretty colors of stone, so, while minor, I CAN save on major building materials (Limestone for floor & Granite for walls is what I was doing, minus any artwork).

[Linkxsc]

Aboveground forts are often kinda tedious to set up all the constructions for. But I personally love doing them.

Next patch that drops I plan to do a Japanese themed aboveground fort. Probably 21x21 for the main building, and about 10 z levels tall.
The 4z high walls surrounding it will be lined with bridges facing inwards. Normal days, the bridges will be open so sunlight can grace the courtyard. If rain or seige however. Ill lower them as protective shutters.

Edit. For whatever reason my phone delteted half my post.

 Ut yeah. So if you really want aboveground. Go somewhere with clay, forget about blocks. Might be a little more labor intensive, but clay is the most renewable material of all.

As far as roofs. Theyre annoying to build. Usually i do walls and ramps to make pitched roofs with the occasional dormer. This saves me from having to floor the interior of the roof at first, but it can be floored later to make other rooms.

Other times, if i'm doing a flat roofed building, i sometimes just do a pridge to cover it. As it saves material, and is built in 1 chunk rsther than calling all your dwarves to stop constructing other things, and come construct this.