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[Grand Sage]

So, I have been playing in a fort for a while now and am thinking to myself, I can probably fend of the annual goblin sieges by now (though i have had quite a big loss in the last siege). Anyway, not quite sure what to do next, I came to think of the new tavern/library/temple update, and then it struck me: what if I made the dwarves stay underground and build a human/goblin/elven(?) town on top! sure, it would take a few in-game years to get the first long term residents to become citizens, and in that time I would probably need my dwarves to help out above ground, but eventually I should be able to have enough non-dwarf citizens and mercenaries to maintain order, at which point my dwarves can retreat to there caves and tunnels (Which really is the most fitting description for my fort) and focus on hidden fun stuff. But here's the thing: im not THAT experienced with the game, so I got a few questions that I hope some of you might know the answer to:

Has anyone tried this before? (and did it work?)

What about...

marriage and, eh, reproduction? Do humans/elves/goblins ect. do that yet?

the population cap: what counts in terms of residents, citizens mercenaries ect. and does the cap apply to visitors?

If it does: can I take HFS with the ~100 adult dwarves I got? I know some awesome people (Sethatos: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=156319.0) did it with ~30 dwarves, but what is realistic?

can you think of other problems?

thx in advance
-Sage

[cyrohound]

Any sentient creature of the same species can have children if they are married and not gay/sterile (which happens more often than you might think.) If you're serious about this, you need TONS of whatever blocks you're building out of. But it isn't uncommon for people to do above ground forts as a challenge. There are plenty of Lets Plays about it. Also be aware that it may take you a long time to get residents of different species, or at least, enough to  have a stable population of goblins/elves/whatever. Remember, having 2 of the same species isn't enough, they need to be married.

You should also be aware that anything above ground is considered outdoors for the purposes of temperature and farming, even if it's technically indoors. So don't put any waterfalls up there if you live somewhere cold enough for water to freeze in the winter. Otherwise you'll get some dwarf/elf/whatever playing in the waterfall and then vanishing/dying as the water they're in instantly freezes. I've had it happen more than once.

Your citizens have their own population cap. The vistor, invasion, and monarch (should you grow rich enough, or dig deep enough to get a monarch) all have their own caps and ignore your population cap. Although the monarch's entourage that would normally accompany the monarch to your fort is affected by your population cap, strangely.

Maybe 30-40 dwarves is enough to take out the clowns if you have very good equipment, training, and add some things (traps, siege weapons, ridiculous domesticated war creatures, etc.)to swing the tide in your favor. If your dwarves aren't legendary in their chosen weapon skill, dodging, and striking, I wouldn't attempt it until after that's happened. After you actually get to the fun stuff you'll need to have a permanent squad wherever you put the breach, as small troupes of clowns will still come through periodically. Also, don't try using dwarven atom smashers, they don't work on things as big as the clowns.

You may also want to have an emergency measure in case your squads fail. An artifact door (artifacts can't be destroyed), will stop the clowns from leveling your base. If you don't have one then you'll either need to have an emergency lever that leads to a collapse switch, or a bunch of idling dwarves to just build a wall before the clowns get to your main base.

Don't forget to have plenty of slabs to engrave if you can't retrieve your dwarf's bodies. You wouldn't want your captain of the guard coming back as a vengeful ghost. Build slabs at a mason, then engrave them with the dwarf's name at a crafts workshop, then place the slab, but pres x on the slab menu to expand the list and see EXACTLY which slab you're placing (this way you won't place an unengraved slab instead of a memorial slab). You must do this to each individual dwarf you can't bury, and it takes awhile if you, say, lost 40 of them to the clowns. Your memorial slabs can also be turned into memorial gardens (basically the same as a statue garden), by pressing 'q' around one of your engraved slabs.

[PatrikLundell]

As mentioned, getting breeding pairs of visitors->citizens requires a fair bit of fiddling/luck. I've done it by screening petitioners against yearly exported legends mode info (loaded into Legends Viewer) to only accept petitioners who are married to a living spouse who is also a performer/scholar who's moving around a lot (and thus has a chance to end up in your fortress). Despite that, I haven't gotten a sustainable base of pairs of any one species (I think 3 pairs is enough). Note that you can get babies out of a citizen performer/resident merc pair, but it's a bit tricky, since you have limited control over the merc, but apart from the second party of a couple I didn't accept mercs.
In addition to the technical problem, the blasted visitors tend to overstay their welcome, blocking the influx on new blood.
You can, of course, ignore the long term aspect and boost your elf/human/goblin population by hiring any performer petitioning, in which case you should get a reasonable "above surface" population fairly quickly (provided you're in a world that actually provides you with a reasonable number of visitors, of course).

Using dwarven engineering plus a migrant group exploit it's possible to conquer the HFS without risking any dorfs in a fight, although the breach is always a risk to the miner doing it. I did have to use a ballista to eliminate a couple of fire based campers, though. I don't remember how many dorfs I had, but it was probably around 30, and everything took forever (probably around 7 years to wall off the circus).

[Grand Sage]

Wow, thx for all the info! I would love the artefact door solution, but all my moods are children going to the craftdwarfs workshop. And yes, i do have a lot of children in my fort. As for the clowns, i think I can wait until I got the legendary squads up, since I haven't even breached the first cavern layer yet, partially because of my FPS (down to 42 and haven't even reached the population cap yet...). I hope I can get that up a bit when I can throw all the corpses trash into the first-best lava that I find.

Oh, and I definitely plan on getting some nobles and eventually the monarch to my fort, but that might first happen after the execution ballista and the above-ground tavern.

As for the city, I thought of stone roades and wooden houses, but perhaps that is to much wood? only  about 1/4 or 1/5 of my embark are capable of growing wood, but if i start to hamster it now... anyways, I figure some parts of the original city might be made by dwarven work-force, just to speed things up a little.

A few more questions: When I have a Baron, how soon can i negotiate peace with the gobbos? As far as i can recall, I was never visited by a goblin diplomat. Its very hard to cultivate an above--ground city and train a legendary squad or two while fending of annual sieges. (not that they are a real problem, but since my fort doesn't even have a door...)

Also, I have been thinking about using mine carts to transport goods between the dwarven empire and the city, but i have never seen anyone use them are they bugged?

I can definitely see this becoming longer project the more i think about it 

[cyrohound]

If you're planning on having treehugging elves in your fortress, wooden walls might be a bad idea. I mean, I had an elf get bad thoughts near dwarven beds because they're made from wood. And I don't even have a choice in those (except that one gold bed a random moody metalsmith made that now resides in what will someday be the king/queen's bedroom.) It might be alright as long as your furniture is made from something besides wood, as elves don't react to Wooden Trade Depots. but you're going to need to test that, and with the amount of blocks you need for houses it might not be practical. Not to mention cutting down too many trees is a guaranteed way to go to war with the elves, which defeats the purpose of building housing for them.

You yourself cannot negotiate peace with anyone, as far as I'm aware. But check the civilization screen 'c' and make sure you are actually at war with goblins. They send raids no matter what, but if you're at war they come more often and are bigger. If you are stomping your opposition enough, they will send a diplomat with a peace treaty, which lasts a year. You can't ever get a diplomat, not even in a migrant wave. I mean, rarely a diplomat might get demoted and sent to your fort, but he can't actually be promoted to diplomat again. If your fortress is small enough (fortress size being judged more by exported/created wealth than population), you might not even be important enough to be approached with a treaty and you'll just get a message saying you are now at peace.

You don't really see cart systems very often because they just aren't practical in most forts and I've yet to meet anyone that understood the route system. I tried them once, but I didn't understand how the route system worked either, and still don't. They have some advantages. They store 5x what a wheel barrel does and move fast. But they also require a dedicated track system, and I had SO MANY dwarves get run over by carts filled with galena that I eventually just dismantled them. They turned that one route I put them on into The Great Dwarven Autoban, if the autoban had pedestrians being turned to putty on a regular basis. Maybe you'll be smarter at setting it up than me and have a successful system.

But as far as I'm aware, no one has tried getting a stable population of non-dwarves in a fortress. Although the tavern update hasn't been out as long as the other stuff, so it's not a shock. I also haven't seen any videos about minecarts. So you might just be making Dwarven History! Go forth and make your mistakes proudly! Post some screenshots here too, I want to see what your big above ground city looks like when it's all done. Let me know if you figure out minecarts! I'd love to make an actually safe (for DF) minecart system.

[Grand Sage]

Yeah, I ment to say when will the gobbos send (!) a diplomat, hehe . Screenshots are a sure thing provided that ill get there. And with my fort as it is, the above-ground city might even turn out more organized then the fort. As for the tracks, I noticed a "restricted area" system in my last fort, (its under designations, called "traffic areas") which may be used to avoid accidents. Or I could just not mark the tracks as part of the burrow, as I will need to assign anyone to a burrow anyway to keep them above/under ground respectively. And if that does not work.. well, every dead dwarf means about an FPS more . Oh, and i posted about a strange thing that happened in my fort here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=163692.msg7418070#msg7418070 . Apparently there is some sort of family feud going on or what do I know... sounds dwarfish though!

[cyrohound]

Oh, it's well documented that dwarves can make mistakes while sparring and hurt/kill their partners, espeically if you don't give them training weapons (I never do). I've never had anyone die, but I've had a few people wind up in the hospital with broken bones and blood loss and such.

[Grand Sage]

What?? I have never heard or seen anything alike... and my dwarves have been sparring for years now. besides that was in the heat of combat and a member of this community has led be to the responsible "bug"

[PatrikLundell]

I've never heard of goblins sending diplomats...
However, they WILL sort of send diplomats in the next version, to demand that you hand over artifacts the have flimsy claims on.

You get a lot of trees over time if you don't block regrowth, and there are 3 caverns with cavern trees as well, so you should not run out of wood in the long term.

Burrows are useless as a means to keep dorfs inside a border (and they're not intended to do that either). Dorfs need to have the source and destination inside the burrow, but they will then take whatever path they like (or rather, what DF think is the "shortest") between those locations, without any consideration for burrow boundaries whatsoever.

Traffic designations are suggestions that are sort of adhered to unless the dorf needs to make a detour e.g. due to meeting someone. Also, cats, visitors, and diplomats don't care one whit about traffic restrictions. I've used pressure plate operated doors to keep critters out of my mine cart tracks, but I've been told statues will allow mine carts to go through without letting dorfs through (I use impulse ramp powered mine carts, not guided ones).

[anewaname]

The route system is not complicated, the wiki demo shows the steps. Accidentally running over dwarfs is easy and requires some planning to avoid (others can help you with this or point you towards useful posts on the subject). Also, using high friction trackstops at the bottom of a minecart ramp is important when moving heavy goods like ore over different z-levels. The first time a loaded minecart rolls down a ramp, jumps off the tracks at the bend, and plows though your farm plots, dwarfs will explode. On the other hand, this can be weaponized for plowing through invaders.

The benefit many players exploit minecarts for, is to create quantum stockpiles (thousands of items stored on a 1-square stockpile). My favorite use of this is to have a 5 square track running from the magma smelters to the magma forges. This means that all those metal bars from smelting pile up in one square next to a few magma forges. No clutter and short-distance hauling.

The usefulness of minecarts for hauling goods from one area to another depends greatly on there being a reason for both ends of the minetrack to stay in place, and for the dwarfs used for the loading to stay on the loading side. So if you only have flux and iron ore on the west edge of the map, you could set up a minetrack from the west to the center of your map. Then start a mass digging. As stones accumulate, start using the minecart. Dwarfs will load something into the stockpile/minecart, walk a few steps away, then go back to load more. Minecarts are more efficient than wheelbarrows when used heavily at once, but less efficient than wheelbarrows when use in little amounts.

[cyrohound]

What?? I have never heard or seen anything alike... and my dwarves have been sparring for years now. besides that was in the heat of combat and a member of this community has led be to the responsible "bug"

It happens to me periodically, and I turn off DF hack and other mods even though I run the lazy newb pack (they caused too many crashes). But again, I've never actually had anyone get a serious injury from sparring that couldn't be solved with 2 months of bed rest. The injuries are caused by practicing wrestling, mostly. Usually someone will just get knocked out, wake up in hospital, and go about their business as usual afterwards.

From the DF wiki http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Training "Because the Wrestling skill can cause dwarves to be tossed thrown, giving your soldiers a helm and body armor is strongly advised (see Injury)."

[Grand Sage]

Ah I see, I generally try to keep my dwarves from wrestling as it means they will do it more in combat (right?) and not gain weapon skill as fast (right!).

Thx for the link anewaname, and the interest you people have shown for my fort! Ill see if I cant fiddle out those minecarte routes sometime soon-ish.

As for quantum stockpiles, I am generally against "exploits" of that sort, which is also why I plan to get rid of my trash in a more !!Fun!! way than atom-smashing. (magma works for that, right?)
The reason I still want minecarts is so that the above-ground people never even see the mystical dwarves (and visa-versa i suppose). I guess that means ill have to power those tracks by wind or water power.

also, thx for the info on burrows, I thought they litterally wouldn't move out of those burrows once assigned, because I almost starved my monarch once, but your explanation makes a lot more sense. (dont worry it wasn't a dwarven monarch, just some goblin queen)

[Grand Sage]

I got another question for my fort: As I am aiming to make a squad of assassins (mainly because... FUN), I was wondering if there was a feasible method for obtaining daggers (or any knife-like really)? It seams that the kobolds wont EVER return if you scare the first ambush away...

[mikekchar]

Easiest (and probably most fun) way is probably adventure mode.  Start at your fortress, take a whole bunch of goods to trade, search the world for daggers.  There's a bunch of annoyances with retiring and unretiring the fortress, but for me this kind of quest makes dwarf fortress 10x more interesting.

[Grand Sage]

I know, but the stuff that could happen while im adventuring... also, im really curious if someone can tell me if ill ever have kobolds again, but maybe this isn't the right thread for that.