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[Foa]

You use 3x3 rooms? I just make 2x2 pods with a door in the corner next to stairs.

You need 3x3s for your dwarves or it's going to be hard to greaten the room value for a legendary.

And also if they have all the furniture they need, they'll be happy.

[Kazindir]

I have a problem in planning forts. I want to make a HUGE fort with 100's of dorf's but I just know that the features I want (magma tube, underground river, veins of minerals, cliff structure) will ALWAYS get in the way! I want to adapt to these features, but I still want my fort to look not too haphazard, like there is some element of organization in it at all times.

Some help please?

Free your mind!


Seriously I think it is easy to go overboard worrying about efficiencies. It's much more fun to just build what you need, where you need it, developing up your fortress over multiple stages. Theres no need to have a grand ultimate plan and stick with it - my fortresses tend to have many plans, as I tend to play lots for a few days then take a break for a week or so before coming back. This way the fortress ends up wihtout a single overall design but with each section with it's own "style" almost, depending on  what I happened to be trying to achieve that week.

It feels a lot more dwarfy to me - I end up with abandoned areas and half built ruins littering around - relics of the ancestors! (Even if it was only last year :p )

[Mondark]

I don't think anyone's mentioned the DFMA in this thread yet, which has a lot of fortress maps to look at.  I've gotten some good ideas from there in the past.

[kurisukun]

Suggestion.

Before you dig out an area, ask yourself the following questions:

"What's above this tile?"
"What's below this tile?"
"Can I put an up/down staircase here?"

If the answers are "stairs, stairs, and yes"  (Or can be made "stairs, stairs")  Then do it.   Giving your dwarves freedom to move over the Z axis is the key to a perfectly laid out fortress.   Forget a central stairway collomn.  EVERYWHERE should be stairs!


Basically... your dwarves should be able to fly freely through the underground, moving between workshops and stockpiles (the only stable pillars)

[Magua]

This is only my own experience, and is entirely anecdotal with no quantitative measurements at all, but my opinion is that moving away from one central staircase gives your dwarves efficiency at the cost of increasing their pathfinding, thus getting less FPS. 

The moment I start building secondary stairways through my fortress, my FPS begins to dive.  Just my two cents.

[Erom]

It's fairly easy, given that DF uses a fairly naive pathfinder (the pathfinder itself is about as efficient as possible, but it runs far too often without any real route caching) to demonstrate that lots of staircases means lots of possible paths means lots of pathing lag, yes.

[kurisukun]

It's fairly easy, given that DF uses a fairly naive pathfinder (the pathfinder itself is about as efficient as possible, but it runs far too often without any real route caching) to demonstrate that lots of staircases means lots of possible paths means lots of pathing lag, yes.

Really?

Crap.   That explains my 15 FPS.   ><

[Jude]

I have a problem in planning forts. I want to make a HUGE fort with 100's of dorf's but I just know that the features I want (magma tube, underground river, veins of minerals, cliff structure) will ALWAYS get in the way! I want to adapt to these features, but I still want my fort to look not too haphazard, like there is some element of organization in it at all times.

Some help please?

Free your mind!


Seriously I think it is easy to go overboard worrying about efficiencies. It's much more fun to just build what you need, where you need it, developing up your fortress over multiple stages. Theres no need to have a grand ultimate plan and stick with it - my fortresses tend to have many plans, as I tend to play lots for a few days then take a break for a week or so before coming back. This way the fortress ends up wihtout a single overall design but with each section with it's own "style" almost, depending on  what I happened to be trying to achieve that week.

It feels a lot more dwarfy to me - I end up with abandoned areas and half built ruins littering around - relics of the ancestors! (Even if it was only last year :p )

This, I like the scattered, meandering fortress design. Of course, it could be raping my FPS...someone should do experiments to find what the most FPS-efficient fort designs are.

[LegacyCWAL]

You need 3x3s for your dwarves or it's going to be hard to greaten the room value for a legendary.

And also if they have all the furniture they need, they'll be happy.

I use 3x1s, and jacking up the room price is pretty easy just by engraving the floor and putting expensive furniture in there.

Seriously, one ☼green glass cabinet☼ will send a room's value through the roof.

[Reynard]

It's a pretty good idea to divide your fortress by industries. Your plant/food industries have their workshops (brewery, kitchen, mill, farmer's workshop, butchery, ect.) and related dwarves' bedrooms clustered the fields - your woodworking shops would be a part of this as well depending on whether you can get indoor tree farming. The magma-based stuff is all clustered around your magma, of course, along with bedrooms for those workers. I like to keep my stoneworking industry mobile - workshops are constructed and deconstructed on the fly to follow the miners, or wherever is convenient. Military stuff occupies the connective hallways and the entranceway, along with the supreme dining room.

[Ashery]

3x3's bedrooms are used as they're the same size as a workshop. This allows me to create a very basic modular design that can be used for every floor. 3x1 bedrooms would also work, but are a bit to cramped for my tastes ;p

[Maltay]

i am trying to plan my next fortress and i want it to be set up very well. So please post a SS of your fortress or the general idea. Also how wide should a hallway be to minimize congestion for 200dwarves is 3 spaces enough?

I use hallways that are three spaces wide.  I make staircases at the intersection of hallways such that there are eight up / down staircases and an extra block in the middle.  I can later cap the up / down staircase with a skylight using this middle block and have it shine down the entire length of the staircase to help prevent cave adaptation.  As you can imagine, my fortresses look very grid-like.

[Maltay]

You use 3x3 rooms? I just make 2x2 pods with a door in the corner next to stairs.

You need 3x3s for your dwarves or it's going to be hard to greaten the room value for a legendary.

And also if they have all the furniture they need, they'll be happy.

My rooms have four spaces.  One for the bed, one for the cabinet, one for the coffer, and a clear space in front of the door.  This minimizes their value when the economy kicks off while simultaneously providing all of the required furniture.  Still, as rent prices are a static multiplier and do not fluctuate based upon supply or demand, I inevitably disable rent.

[Andir]

If something gets in the way, you can jus dig/pump it out and build walls and floors and whatever to make the place consistent with the rest of your fort. Everyone is doing that!

Oh man... My dwarfs love natural walls.  Stripping those down and putting up artificial walls is heresy!

I dread having to mix constructed and natural walls.  I don't know why.  I like to dig the entire thing out without patches of built walls.

I normally section off a vertical silo of housing at the end of my main hallway.  A square area like so:

Code: [Select]

    nobles
     ...
XXXXX...XXXXX
X...X...X...X
X...X...X...X
X...X...X...X
XXXXD...DXXXXXXX
X...XSSS........
X...XSSS..... main hall
X...XSSS........
XXXXD...DXXXXXXX
X...X...X...X
X...X...X...X
X...X...X...X
XXXXX...XXXXX
     ...
    nobles
with the rest of the layers like so (12 above and below if allowable, otherwise I create two living silos):

Code: [Select]

XXXXXXXXXXXXX
X...X...X...X
X...X...X...X
X...X...X...X
XXXXDXXXDXXXX
X...XSSSX...X
X...XSSSX...X
X...XSSSX...X
XXXXDXXXDXXXX
X...X...X...X
X...X...X...X
X...X...X...X
XXXXXXXXXXXXX

That sets aside 197 rooms and I designate my high noble rooms off either side.  I then put my workshops in a similar configuration with a surrounding ring of storage rooms and stairs well away from this silo for noise.  I usually end up with a three prong setup where one arm is the housing, one arm is the workshops, and the other is entrance/farming/dining/depot/military.

[IronValley]

Current fort:

Year1-2:
Minifortress in soil layer, just to get food production up. Setting up basic arms productin. All immigrants are miners.

Miners: DIG HOLE!

Basically just digging a massive hole in the ground using the ramp method.
The goal is to give each dwarf a clear window to look trough into the center of the pit. Included a magmafall, and waterfall.