In my last fort I used several 'house rules'...I found that they complicate things in an interesting and fun way:
- a maximum of 5 cage and 8 stonefall traps
- there must always be one main access into the fort that is not closed off.
- enemies may only be killed by siege engines or the military. Thus no drowning rooms, invader smashing bridges or other means of mass murder.
- moats must be at least 3 wide and 2 deep before enclosing something
- all moveable bridges need to to be 'powered'. Powered means that you may only raise or lower a bridge if it has an engaged (pulsating) mechanism next to its base (to the side or below). This means you need to construct a lot of complicated power transfer tunnels...it was a lot of fun to rout power all over my fortress while trying to keep access to the 'powersystem' as restricted as possible....
- I used the goblin mod (neither the thoughest now the weakest goblins...somewhere in between). I was amazed how much this added to the enjoyment (combined with the 'open access')...I had to scramble to train up my military which led to a lot of overall urgency
- workshops: Must be powered (same as bridges) to allow a dorf who is better than 'novice' to use it (=unpowered workshops may only be used by novices or lower)
those are the overall rules....for that particular fort I wanted an immense central hall, about 40x60 horizontal, 12z-levels into the earth and capped by a dome several z-levels high....the hall is ringed by the eating 'ring' which looks down into the pit...two waterfalls thunder down in the central part...the forges open into the central hall as well, showering the feasting dwarfs with sparks and the clangor of hammers...while the captive goblins that are caged next to the tombs (which - of course - overlook the central hall as well) are howling in their madness.
well, I managed to defeat most sieges while still whithin my main entrance, but several times some critters broke through and did wreak quite a bit of havoc
here is the link to the map archive if anyone is interested...
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-2928-firegateofmenace