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[Lord Dullard]

I'm looking to improve my methods of fortress-building. I'd like to hear from those players who plan out everything ahead of time.

How do you plan things, specifically? What do you build first, and why? Do you plan *everything* with an outside program and implement it section by section, or do you start with a general idea and work off your current surroundings?

Do you keep your working dwarves in a temporary living/work area until you get your permanent infrastructure up?

[hous3y]

My style is to use scalable designs. A 3 wide hallway on the soil level (if present) with four 5x5 to 10x10 rooms. One will initially be the communal barracks/meeting place, a large storage room for everything but refuse, an area for some workshops/furnaces, and then a farm.

As the fortress grows (first wave of immigrants) the communal area becomes a legit barracks and I bore out 2x2 rooms for everyone else off of the main hallway. The large storage area becomes the kitchen/still/butcher/food storage. The makeshift workshop area becomes a storage place for finished goods, furniture, and weapons. I drop a 2x2 plot of up/down stairs near the end of the hall and then clear out a large work area on the next z-level down.

I've not had much problem with fortress design and planning in and of itself but rather transitioning through different projects. Once I get a couple legendary crafters/smiths and a large army I don't know what to do with the excess bodies guzzling up my alcohol. They just spend time drinking, sleeping, and giving birth to children much like the miscreant burdens of human society... And don't even get me started on nobles :

[DarkMagnus]

Err, I don't necessarily plan everything out beforehand, because you can't know exactly when and where you'll run into animals/chasms/veins/other features that can be major factors in the fortress proper- even if you use regional prospector. (which I do)

I do like to start by designation, though. First I choose a large overland area, and designate it for clearcutting and plant-gathering. Then I build into the soil three small rooms, a bedroom/diningroom, farm plot and storage chamber. Once that's done I start planning out the fortress proper.

Usually I have a wide open area in the center of my fortress for production with massive stockpiles in the center and workshops in chambers all around. This means all production is generally in the center of the fortress and as close to everything else as it can be. Kobolds/Goblins also have to travel through highly populated areas to get near my children/valuables. To this day I haven't lost a single item/child to theft (using this strategy). There's a small room dividing that area and the apartment complex (fractal bedchambers, always cool once fully smoothed/engraved) that I use for stone dumping- since right now dumps can contain massive amounts of stone in single spaces, I can undesignate the stone I want to use and suddenly it becomes a compact stockpile.

After that I'm usually nearing 80 dwarves, so I build some fortifications, survive the onslaught and grow from there.

Also, it's incredibly beneficial to build a mining shaft somewhere near the middle of your fortress. You get a good idea of the layers of rock beneath you and if you don't happen to have a chasm, that's useful. Any time I hit Gabbro/Bauxite or other useful layers I go into super mining mode.

Also, your first six dwarves, in my experience, should be Miners/Warriors, with the last an Appraiser/Organizer/Social Skills Guy. This allows you to spend the first year burrowing out your fortress proper, and once help arrives you have a six dwarf guard with obscene stats.

I have no idea how much of this helps you, but I felt like writing it all out, heh.

[ June 14, 2008: Message edited by: DarkMagnus ]

[martinuzz]

quote:Originally posted by hous3y:
<STRONG> I don't know what to do with the excess bodies guzzling up my alcohol. They just spend time drinking, sleeping, and giving birth to children much like the miscreant burdens of human society... And don't even get me started on nobles :</STRONG>

Here's an example of what to do with them: http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/movie-616-drawbridgeexecution

[pushy]

I'm looking to improve my methods of fortress-building. I'd like to hear from those players who plan out everything ahead of time.

How do you plan things, specifically? What do you build first, and why? Do you plan *everything* with an outside program and implement it section by section, or do you start with a general idea and work off your current surroundings?

I have a general idea. I always start off in a magma area, so I start off by finding a suitable place to build the magma buildings and work with what I've got from there. I don't build those buildings right away, but they're usually going in a soil layer so it's quick to dig out an area for them As it's a soil layer, farming tends to be fairly nearby, layout permitting (murky pools and stuff). Trade Depot is outside or very near the entrance, clearly separated from the rest of the fortress. If there's space for an outdoor arena then I'll try to incorporate that into my design as well...in the end, once I've got my entrance trapped to the hilt, the grand design goes out the window a bit Workshops are built a couple of levels down as and when I need them, and not placed in any particular fashion to improve productivity efficiency or anything...bedrooms are built far enough down that noise from the workshops won't bother them...but that's it, really.

Do you keep your working dwarves in a temporary living/work area until you get your permanent infrastructure up?

Yes, definitely. Living quarters are among the first things set up, but until they're done I tend to build a little row of beds somewhere near the fort entrance. Until I've dug out a proper place for them, workshops are built wherever there's room for them (even if that means working outside and carrying materials back and forth; grossly inefficient but only temporary)

[Labbolino]

I recently started building fortesses in a symetrical tower structure. It isn't the efficient way of doing it but I like how it looks and it helps planninng ahead. You just use the existent layout and go deeper level by level.
That way you are still able to improvise if you hit something interesting on your way down and you  don't have to worry about bad design decisions if you have to add something quickly.

[Tamren]

My strategy? Draw everything in paint.

It is easy to plan out massive fortresses when you can try out things and shapes beforehand. All you need to do is use the magnifying tool to zoom in until you can see every pixel. Every pixel in paint represents one tile in fortress mode. Its also handy to use the curve and circle tools since those shapes are almost impossible to freehand.

Map tiles are 48X48 fortress tiles so a 2x2 fortress would be 96x96. Match your picture to your map size and off you go!

[Quift]

I use normal graph paper.  about 10 pages to design firs the production layout and the logistics for the given fort depending on what kind of production I wish to have and in which quantity.

then I make the generic floorplan for each floor, I normally do symetric forts so that I can use the exact same layout on every floor and easily readapt everything by moving rooms and workshops around. To have every room superimposed also means that I can easily knock out floors etc to build multi storeys rooms whereever I wish.

The bedrooms are also superimposed in a laid out plan depening on which shape I wish the fort to have. normally about 20 bedrooms per floor and I build new floors so that I alwasy have one bottom one ready for the new immigrants. Waterworks and power circuits go around and outside the general structure.

[Aqizzar]

I've found Paint useful for planning out fancy above ground constructions and apartment blocks, but it gives me eye-strain for some reason.

Repeatable standard floorplans with lots of symmetry seem to be the preference.  Does anyone here actively plan to make a rambling manor style fortress?

I've recently fallen in love with a floorplan built around 6-wide hallways and 3x3 blocks of 7x7 rooms with doors anywhere, vertically scaleable with lots of staircases, and THLawrence housing thrown in where I want it.  I was going to make a code-map, but forget that noise.  So, here's a picture of a brand new fortress-

The two wide hallways get expanded as the population grows.  Warehousing goes near apartments while industry is always separated by a hall to reduce noise.  Usually there will be a level or two of just rooms, connected by internal stairs, inbetween levels with halls.  I've considered making the halls multiple Z-levels tall, or with open air channels in the middle.

It's probably not the most efficient, but it's very clean, organized, gives lots of useful-sized spaces, and looks like an underground city, rather than a sprawling, ad-hoc commune.  Obviously there are problems with adding waterflows, and working around terrain shape.  Curiously, I insist on putting the entire operable fortress in stone.  Soil is for farms and trade-warehousing - I just don't... trust... soil as a home for my dwarves.

[SHAD0Wdump]

Heres a hint with paint,flood the background with black.It also gives it a more DF feel.

[Frobozz]

Also, your first six dwarves, in my experience, should be Miners/Warriors, with the last an Appraiser/Organizer/Social Skills Guy. This allows you to spend the first year burrowing out your fortress proper, and once help arrives you have a six dwarf guard with obscene stats.

Any more details you can give on this? I was thinking it would be nice to start with more miners since it still takes me about a game year or two to layout my fortress like I want, but this would allow it to be done much quicker. I guess you take along a lot of provisions to survive initially right? Or once the game starts do you set a couple to grow/gather food just in case?

[Duke 2.0]

 What I usually do:

 Make my first structure in a soil layer surrounded by trees. Make the basics for survival the first yar and the first immigration wave.

 Turn all useless guys into masons. Make sure you have enough stone furniture beforehand.

 Find a new place to settle in(Perhaps near the magma pipe? Where the prospector said there would be a chasm/underground river). Set the miners to begin mining out the new place.

 Create a tower over each spot. Don't care about how fleshed-out or large the tower is. Just make sure it's at least five z-levels high. Make a bridge between the places. Set stockpiles inside the towers, Workshops at the base of the towers(Noise intensive at the top) And housing complexes underground.

 How I do things.

[Daniel Charms]

I start with a general idea of what I want to do. I don't care much about efficiency or good defenses; I just like creating interesting shapes. I built one fort around a central staircase, but this proved rather inefficient. Recently, I've been trying to build "natural" looking fortresses, with bending hallways, sometimes several levels high, so that they would resemble a chasm. Bridledtongs is my latest attempt at creating something like that (it's a mixed design, actually). I first plotted the (first two) floors by designating them for mining. Then I blocked it all off and gradually let the miners dig it out. Not everything was planned out at the beginning, though. Some of the details were worked out during construction. Some things (like the dining room and statue gardens) were later additions.

[RPharazon]

I accommodate my fortress design according to the surroundings. I usually try to get some cliffs, but if it's completely flat, I dig some stairs that lead to a chokepoint, with a 3-wide defense hall before it.

I usually dig a 3-wide main hallway, and the depot to the side of the entrance, closer to the workshops.
One side of the fortress, usually the side on the right of the main hallway, is relegated to bedrooms, which are usually 3x1, with a door, bed, and coffer. Sometimes the 7 founders get 4x1s with a cabinet as well.

On the other side of the 3-wide hall, I build workshops, usually in rows, but still seperate and sealed off in case of a mood.
I build relevant stockpiles right by the relevant workshops (bar/block by the forges and furnaces, finished goods and refuse by the craftshops, and various other joinings.

I usually try to get a soil layer so I don't have to irrigate to make a farm.

[Freddybear]

I tend to lay out 11x11 blocks along a grid of 5- or 3-wide "highways". The 11x11 square can be subdivided into 6 3x3 workshops with walls and doors, or into 12 1x3 apartments (two rows of 6 with a 3-wide lane between, or an open 11x11 space for storage or farm plots.