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[Urist McScoopbeard]

Hallo!

So the city of VeiledTreasures has been founded. A semi-underground Dwarven city of canals, it's based on the city of Venice (and an earlier attempt at an aboveground canal town), with the water being pumped down from a brook-turned-aqueduct which runs through the middle of the massive skylight in the center of the city. Now, I've got some plans for the Palace/City Center/Town Hall/Council Buidling, but I'm just not sure how to justify the living space of each dwarf. Based on my PC's performance I think I can definitely fit 80-100 dwarves in to the city, and probably more like 100-120--so each dwarf can have quite a bit of space.

The last thing I want to do is lock everyone up in Dwarven slums, especially the all important miners and craftsdwarves. But like I said, I'm just not sure how to determine how much space (since there is quite a bit) that each dwarf deserves.

Obviously the founding seven will get mansions, but even then, how to determine WHAT these abodes will look like? We've got plenty of stone and space to work with.

Thoughts for a system?

[Telgin]

Lately I've been building blocks of 3x4 living spaces for my populations, without any real justification for why they're the size they are.  I do try to maximize efficiency by building them in buildings of 2x5 rooms, at least when building above ground, but below ground I just tend to build them wherever there's space to dig them out at that size.

In my experience, you can easily fit a couple hundred homes of that size on a 4x4 map, although it might take a couple of z-levels to do it comfortably, especially with a canal system like that.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

See, I mean more like villas and brownstones. Like a mansion for one of the "founding seven" might be like 30x30x3--the Palace proper alone is roughly 45x45x3, not accounting for possible expansions. Which is where I'm running into problems, I've got tons of space. The peasants might get shuffled into a couple of slums or apartment buildings, but since there are/will be lots of craftsmen, I'm having trouble simply determining how much each dwarf gets.

I don't need hard numbers so much as a system to rank each Dwarf's... worth to the city.

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

You could organise everyone by profession, in lowrise buildings surrounding halls/courtyards where the relevant workshops are. 
Just build whatever size feels comfortable.   

[Rowanas]

I would recommend building neat rows of, say, 3x3x1 (for example, make the base housing unit whatever size you like) houses, and then when you want to grant a dwarf a more important space, you knock in a wall or install a staircase and boom, sudden living space upgrade. for assigning them, you can always put the no-account dwarves well.. anywhere with space. They'll get moved around whenever someone more important gets a housing upgrade.

Anyone who performs a task that you actually care about, say your chief miner, your primo bowyer and the like, simply get a wall knocked through to double their living space, or get a staircase added that gives them an upper/lower floor displacing whoever is already in there.
Anyone responsible for the crafting of an artefact gets 3 rooms assigned, made up of whatever combination of additional floors and knocking through walls.
Dwarves that create especially useful artefacts get 4-room accomodations.
Finally, each level of nobility gets one more room than the room of the lower grade, so the expedition leader/mayor gets 5, baron gets 6, count 7, duke 8, royal/royal consort 9. This neatly handles the problem of jealousy, as each rank of dwarf gets just what they need to have a nicer place than their mates, and it also means that you can assign dwarves that require extra rooms, like mausoleums, offices etc a room of their house, reducing the need for specialised graveyards, office districts and whatnot.

I'm a strong believer in all military dwarves getting a barracks spot, regardless of rank, so no houses for them.

[CaptainArchmage]

Generally I give dwarves 3x3 or 5x5 bedrooms. Better off dwarves get 7x7 rooms, and my first fortress I was truly proud of (my third one or so) had that size for everyone. My first rooms were 5x5 for a dwarf. My first attempt to build houses for dwarves was back in 0.31.12 I believe. Each dwarf had eight 5x5 rooms laid over two floors (11x11 footprint excluding rooms), but the staircase and well room was shared between two houses. Upper floor was Bedroom, Dining Room, Office, storeroom; lower floor was for workshops and material storage.

These days, if I do that I typically just do four rooms or so for a house - Bedroom, Dining Room, Office, Well Room. Better-off dwarves might get multiple bedrooms for a large family, and possibly a statuary or personal storeroom.

If you have barracks, you can order the dwarves to sleep in there (I believe, when on-duty). Also since dwarf fortress maps are huge, since DF2010 (when I started playing), the reasons not to do full on houses are typically restricted to "Framerate" and "Efficiency". Now, if only we could have public transport in DF...

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Ya, I'm not 100% sure, I think I'm going to go back to an earlier idea I had of basically giving well-to-do Dwarves Villas with courtyards.

So, the system will go something like this:

1.) The workshops, storage, tenements (for peasants, farmers, and fisherdwarves), and other public buildings (like the canal pump station and inn) will be located on the central canal.

2.) Very important dwarves like non-ruling nobles, the seven founders, and particularly industrious craftsmen/miners will get roughly ~15x15 villas directly behind the central canal buildings. These will include most of the rooms a dwarf can own except maybe tombs, and also extra kitchens, fountains, libraries, etc.

3.) Active craftsmen or otherwise semi-important dwarves will get brownstones. I'm not quite sure what these are going to look like yet, but probably just 3-6 rooms stacked on top of each other.

4.) Prepping for a baron with a huge ~45x45 palace. There is a statue room, a huge dining room, a dwarven parliament, and tons of bedrooms and offices upstairs.

At some point, to make sure everything is stored properly and workshops are set up efficiently, they'll have to be moved away from the central canal, at which point all space is on a first come, first serve basis.

[Bradders]

Need to find that GIF of that commercial with the ultra rich russian guy in his mansion, on his golden couch with a miniature pet giraffe "Opulence - I has it!"

You guys call 3x4 apartments luxury?  Those are my base size single-dwarf rooms, in which I stick a bed, table and chair, coffer, and cabinet or two, and engrave the whole thing over (eventually).  I usually have a central donut stairwell shaft going from the surface to magma sea, and I fiddle with cavern layer spacing to ensure that I have at least 15 z-levels between surface and the first cavern layer.  In the top few floors I build the food production, crafting, dining hall, library, temples etc. but the bottom 10 levels above the cavern form the Dwarven Hive - each level digs out a short hallway N-S-E-W, in a plus sign shape, to accommodate apartments on both sides of the 3-wide halls.  Corner rooms are 5x5's, with one corner knocked out to match it with the 3x4 and 4x3 rooms above and beside them.  The larger corner rooms are reserved for married couples, and the top 2 levels of the Hive are reserved for noble positions - militia commander / Cap o' th' Guard / militia captains on one level, chief med / manager / broker / bookkeeper and legendary crafters on the next, all peasants below.  With 5 rooms per quadrant, 4 of those per level, and 10 levels, you can fit all 200 dwarves' living quarters into that space, with room to spare thanks to marriages and children.  Married couples need the extra space, I throw in a bunch of extra beds etc. so the dorfbrats don't just crash out on the floors.  Mirror this design around a central axis:


######     # = walls
#TC B#     D = Doors
D    #     B = Beds
#H  F#     C = Chairs
######     T = Tables
#TC B#     H = Coffers/boxes
D    #     F = Cabinets
#H  F#
######
#FB F##########
#    C#F B#F B#
#   CT#   #   #
D    C#  C#  C#
#HH   #H T#H T#
########D###D##


The Expedition Leader gets an adequate office, but when a Mayor is appointed I start the Throne Room and Royal Quarters - pillared, angled and curved carved walls, vaulted ceilings, gems and ore left in place and smoothed and engraved upon.  Separate chambers for the royal dining hall and bedchambers, each complete with personal access to the kitchens and hospital ward, respectively, and all royal rooms adorned with encrusted masterwork furniture and statues, and lots of engravings.

[Dunamisdeos]

Anyone of lasting significance in my current fort gets a large 3-room house, as well as an alcove or even a hall in THE HALL OF HISTORY. A particularly impressive military dwarf or a craftsdwarf that attains legendary through either a long grind of crafts or the creation of a single highly PRACTICAL artifact would garner this remembrance.

The home involves a main room and a bedroom/dining room that can be reused for future heroes (Their family lives in it if the outlive the hero in question). The hall consists of a small 3x3 or 6x3 area in an ongoing multilevel construction including engravings and/or statues representing their accomplishments as they happen. In my fort as it stands now this is limited to the founding 7, but I've built halls depicting dozens of dwarves or groupings of dwarves (a prolific squad, for instance).

[mikekchar]

I've been doing something similar with my current fort (just starting, really), but the main thing I worry about is walking time.  To me, although it makes sense to build individual abodes, I think it also makes sense to ensure that a dwarf doesn't usually have to walk a day's travel to do something.  Walking speed is 900 ticks per 100 tiles (or 9 ticks per tile).  There are 1200 ticks per day, so that's just over 133 tiles per day.  If you make a house 35 tiles wide, it takes over 6 hours to walk from one end to the other :-)

Scale and time is a bit wonky in DF, but I really think that a dwarf should be able to go to work, do a task and get home in a day (even if they won't do that).  They should be able to get to and from the tavern in a day.  They should be able to get to their favourite temple and back in a day.  That kind of thing.  So for me, that's the limit -- every "normal" location the dwarf would go to should be at most 40-60 tiles away.

This requires you to build up sections of your fortress and think about how many dwarfs you will maintain in those sections -- and then that will determine your final house size, on average.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Ya, after doing some test runs, the villa idea is perhaps a little too much. It just takes up too much space on the main level of the fortress. The palace will remain huge and awesome (currently sitting at ~45x45 and ~65% finished) as I just got a baron, but perhaps I will dial things back to some manner of brownstone. Not quite sure how I'm going to lay things out in a visually pleasing manner, but I'm definitely going to downscale.

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

You could make it a bit more vertical, like Amsterdam, or a really nice favela.

[Dunamisdeos]

I always consider the room number to be the main luxury, and make all rooms 3x3 with maybe a little extra alcove on one end or another to give it character.

Really cool dwarves like Mr. Beard get vaulted ceilings.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

You could make it a bit more vertical, like Amsterdam, or a really nice favela.

That's the idea honestly. Though I'll probably still try to fit a couple of big mansions on the first layer, once I complete the grand staircase into the caverns, I can maybe consider a smaller geographical footprint and instead make the second and third level neighborhoods middle and lower class, literally.

[FantasticDorf]

Using display stands with favourite dwarf objects (especially if valuable) helps to improve a bedroom quality marginally rather than just packing it full of more furniture or something silly like a full scale statue in the corner, a display cabinet with the family artifact heirlooms i find to be a particularly helpful addition denoting who it belongs to & improving their living experience.