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[Jerm]

I'd like to get some opinions from you folks on how to select a site for a fortress.

I've been playing off and on for awhile, and the most frustrating part of the game for me is starting a new fortress.  I have the utility that lets me see on the world map where magma, chasms, etc, are located, which is very helpful.  Still, I find it exceedingly difficult to get *my* requirements met in a fortress site.

For starters, let me outline my requirements and mindset, and I'd love it if you would share yours.

I'm playing with a pretty vanilla "role playing / settlement management" mindset - not going for any wild achievements.  Just a fortress that works.
I'm a huge fan of magma, mix mountain/forest areas, small chasms, and aboveground river.  I don't like huge cliffs.
Lately I've been trying to do 12 square lots, 4x4 or 6x2.  My computer is fast enough (P4 2.8ghz), but I hate the FPS drop that I often get in later parts of the game.

A few builds ago there were more than a dozen good seeds on the wiki, but recently it seems that there are far fewer, and I have not tried the download bit yet.

So I guess this is a two part question:
How do you select a site for a fortress, and what specific things are you looking for in that site?

[Inquisitor Saturn]

The way to select a site is to use regional prospector and burn through map after map until you find what you want. It's frustrating.
Hopefully when they get around to adding the editor features(not any time soon) we won't have to scour the landscape anymore.

[puke]

or you could just pick a spot at random, based vaguely on the terrain and climate you want to play on, and live with whats there.

its frustrating and time consuming to search for the perfect spot -- ive tried.  but its actually pretty fun trying to build something on the fly without knowing what resources you might have.  the best stories come from people adapting around limited resources or non-ideal terrain.  not from perfectly stocked forts with some of everything in near ideal conditions.

[Lazer Bomb]

I always go for deserts or glaciers. I am never surprized by my surroundings. The good thing is that I can build crazy structures easily. The bad thing is I never find any water...

[Crafty Barnardo]

quote:Originally posted by puke:
<STRONG>or you could just pick a spot at random, based vaguely on the terrain and climate you want to play on, and live with whats there.</STRONG>

This is what I do.  I think that scouring the world for a specific site that meets some arbitrary 'requirements' is not only boring in and of itself, but it takes a lot of fun out of the rest of the game.  I like picking a site and not knowing exactly what is going to be in it until I get there.

[Silveron]

I tend to look for rivers/aquifers and trees. If I check anything else I'll look at the terrain map if I've a project in mind that requires cliffs.

[dresdor]

magma isn't that important to me, but I'm glad to have it (saves a lot of trees, and elves like that...so it's really not important to me).

I like to have an aquifier on part of the map at least, so I can dig to it and floodgate it to serve as a water source and to wet farm ground initially.

[Frankmanic]

Lately I've been founding forts based on the location of dwarfish mountain homes in the area. For instance, I've built a border fort to guard an approach to the mountain home, and right now I'm trying to find somewhere that actually has flux so I can build a steel refinery.

[Jamini]

I normally pick sites based around the critters there. Benign area's that border evil areas are fun to play on, especially if you get unicorns and ogres on the same map.  

[Mephansteras]

My ideal sites have water, trees, sand, a sedementary layer, marble, and granite. Magma is good, but not required. Don't really care about chasms, really.

Of course, I'll frequently do the "That looks interesting" approach as well, and try out suboptimal spots.

Most interesting spot I ever found was this awesome area with a river fork that had dug a huge canyon out of the surrounding area, so I started on this cliff looking down about 8 z-levels down to the carp infested waters. It had sand, iron, trees. Great spot. I was going to build a city suspended over the water. Sadly, the game crashed before I'd saved and I couldn't locate the spot again.  

[Jerm]

Seems like the two things that are *absolutely required* are water and wood.  I love aboveground rivers, and I like using chasms for drainage.  I havent tried an aquafir, and I've had mixed success with underground rivers.  

As far as wood goes, you gotta have it for beds, barrels, bins, and chairs, and to make coal, unless you can get magma shops going pretty quickly.  Trees seem important to me because I cannot imagine carrying enough from the beginning to do what you need, and just buying from the merchant afterward.  Do other folks do this though?

[BurnedToast]

You can bring a LOT of logs if you sell the anvil (and why not, you get another one easy enough). You can also generally order a decent supply from the humans, and the elves bring some from time to time.

in my current fort, I've not chopped a single tree in a decade and I've got tons of extra wood laying around (to be fair, I have magma though).

[MaxVance]

I'm glad I'm on a Mac. This way, I don't have Regional Prospector or reveal.exe so I can further torment myself. Anyway, I usually pick good (that is, unicorns and sun berries and such) areas with lots of trees. No, I don't make my dwarves live like humans.

[Derakon]

quote:Originally posted by Jerm:
<STRONG>As far as wood goes, you gotta have it for beds, barrels, bins, and chairs, and to make coal, unless you can get magma shops going pretty quickly.  Trees seem important to me because I cannot imagine carrying enough from the beginning to do what you need, and just buying from the merchant afterward.  Do other folks do this though?</STRONG>

Try playing on a glacier sometime - no trees and, unless you have magma or an aquifer, water is hard to come by. Bins and barrels are both "nice to haves", and my glacier/volcano map ended up with a lot of copper and a few iron barrels and bins just because I didn't have wood. But starting with the second dwarven caravan, you'll be importing gobs of wood, like, 30-50 logs per caravan, and at that point, wood really stops being much of an issue.

For that matter, you could get by without bringing any logs with you for the first year; you'd just only have three beds available, from deconstructing the wagon.

[Dwarf Fanatic]

Only thing.... Dis the aquifiers at a distance...