Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Albedo]

Okay, I've been having a lot of fun (mostly glitches, sadly) with my latest forts, so it's time for a new one.  And I landed in a desert.  A brook* dividing flat sand from flat stone.  A fun challenge.

(* Will the brook last the summer? The water holes are already dry at the beginning of Spring and it's hot, Hot, HOT)

I have several ideas for defense, but the best involve building a 3rd dimension from stone - and I won't be there for a while.  Meanwhile... suggestions?

Eventually I'm thinking of a long-ish entryway for the Trade Depot that dives under an upper balcony for archers and a separate lower balcony below that for siege - but for now, for the first year... what? 

I guess it's like that drill where someone draws a scribble on a piece of paper, and you make a picture out of it, but this landscape is blank, and while I'm not that, nor is anything screaming at me as the way to go.

Any ideas are welcome, or I'll just stumble blindly forward.

(Sand seems to go down only 1 layer to flux, for what that's worth, so spanning the brook with under-ground tunnels seems a natural, walling it in to include AG farm plots and an early statue garden to keep my dorfs acclimatized to the horrid fresh air.  I'll slowly move about 40 tiles to over the magma pipe where there is terrain once the... wildlife gets thinned out.)

[Marko]

Walls are your friend. Dig up stone below and construct away to your heart's content!

[Jim Groovester]

The brook is a water source. It will never dry out.

As for first year defense, build a tiny curtain wall with whatever available materials that basically just surrounds your stairwell or rampways, and then just expand it out as needed.

Unless you have orcs knocking on your doors, then that tiny wall and a miner and woodcutter militia will be able to deal with most threats until you get a proper military and a proper above ground defense.

[Osmosis Jones]

Dig your keep from out the ground, by ramp digging away the surrounding soil until you have an impressive buttressed keep.

[Lesconrads]

be dwarven - go underground!
Also a moat in some healthy distance to not screw your farming-projects. Maybe some minor underground cave first, then moat, then the actual fortress out of the cave.

Then - walls. But not too high... i've read, that 1 z-lvl is effective enough for your archerscrossbowers.

[pokute]

I dig a 1-tile wide moat first with drawbridge for quick defense

Later, I build walls on top of the moat, effectively sealing it off so I can dig through the basement to my liking.

If you're not short on space, I'd recommend building battlements (walkway behind fortifications) all along the top.  If you don't have much space, then just build wall towers at choice spots.

[Albedo]

be dwarven - go underground!

Heh, ya think?

Thanks all - most of the advice mirrors my own thoughts, but I was hoping to avoid the whole masonry end of things for the first year, at least until I have my first wave of laborers and apprentices. 

On a desert map, there is no moat large enough that it will give me enough trees in the enclosure.  Towercaps asap, I guess, and glass for everything possible too, once I have that up and running.  Which, again, won't be real soon.

I was hoping for some clever underground entryway that would serve quick double-duty for defense without being overly complex, but I'll come up with something - I always do.  A night's sleep has at least given me a fresh perspective.

Thanks again.

[Vilien]

Build a castle out of glass.

[Shadowgandor]

Make a watery death trap for invaders, you have a brook, right?

[dornbeast]

Okay, I've been having a lot of fun (mostly glitches, sadly) with my latest forts, so it's time for a new one.  And I landed in a desert.  A brook* dividing flat sand from flat stone.  A fun challenge.

If there's room for a 25-tile square in the stone, I'd recommend carving a channel around that square with stairs down so you can collect the stone, and using the stone from that to build a drawbridge.  The long-term defenses include a wall on the outer edge of that square, smoothing the outer ring of the stone square so you can carve fortifications, and putting archery targets in the outer ring of the tower so your marksdwarves can practice.

Yes, they will shoot up a z-level.  This is the basic model of the fortress I'm using right now.  (Digging ten z-levels down, making one side wider than the others, and having an access down the wide side so marksdwarves can shoot at the invaders as they go through the weapon traps...that's all enhancements.)

[Albedo]

Glass, a death trap... yeah.

 Um, for those who don't read topic posts, let me sum it up so we don't waste our time.

1) SHORT TERM, 1ST COUPLE SEASONS, 7 DWARFS.
2) WITHOUT BUILDING UP TOO MUCH.  MINING > MASONRY.
3) I HAVE LONG TERM PLANS.

But thanks for the effort, tho.

db - a channel and drawbridge may be the way, esp since I'm close to the open pipe with a half-dozen imps and a magma man.  (Can they cross a simple, unimproved brook?  I'm sure they can "fire" across it.)

So, essentially you have a series of firing balconies that perforate anything working it's way down your entry ramps? Cool idea.  Like an indoor shooting gallery.

I dug in where the sand meets the rock, so I've got my higher-value rooms (dining hall) in stone and the rest carved cheap and quick out of sand.  Down 1 is, indeed, the flux layer, so that's higher value too - but I'll be migrating the whole thing closer to the magma pipe as I go, where my magma-works will be.  Not sure how much "foundation" work I want to put in at this exact location, but that concept might be adaptable to work over there.

(I like to get a functional base level while I do some exploratory mining, nail my first season of trading, and then, essentially, start again in my preferred location with 2 Legendary miners plus slop.  For me it works better than scrambling to fit it all into stone with proficient miners.)

(If an archer fires up a level at a target, does that count as the arrow "falling" a z-level to recover it?)

[Byakugan01]

I would just dig a moat around your entrance. But be careful-if, like me, you hollow out a space immediately upon digging down, make sure you don't channel an area the same size or smaller than the area you hollowed out. For one, cave in are a risk like that, and two, if you add water (or magma) from an infinite source to a moat which cuts into your main fortress..

[Vilien]

Glass, a death trap... yeah.

Constructions cannot be destroyed, no matter the material used.

[azrael4h]

Glass, a death trap... yeah.

Constructions cannot be destroyed, no matter the material used.

I think the op is more stating that this is for the very early game, and glass isn't something he wanted to deal with. Otherwise, he'd just build a massive wall around his site out of quarried stone. Since he says mining > masonry, I'd say glass making goes even further down on the list. Also, no mention of magma, and if no magma, then no bothering with glass on that desert map.

A channel with a drawbridge will handle most defensive needs nicely; just be careful that the channel doesn't cut into sections of your fortress, or into the brook.

[malachi]

For REALLY easy "defense", mark the entrance to your fort as a meeting area and let your dogs handle everything (works well against thieves and lesser animals - bears, apparently, eat dogs for breakfast, though). You could combine this with a mostly finished moat (or a moat + bridge) for more efficiency (put the meeting area at the bridge / opening in the moat).
Also, I'm pretty sure a dry moat works just as well as a watery moat (with the added bonus that your dwarfs won't fall in and drown - now the fall in and starve for even more fun ).

Other than that... If you know where the magma pipe is, make a few obsidian swords (craftsdwarf workshop) and keep them stocked at strategic locations throughout your fort (near the dining room, bedrooms, entrance, anywhere else your dwarfs like) and then have your dwarves equip them whenever something attacks (probably less useful against marauding flame bags).