I took a fairly different approach to a human fortress. I knew defense would be an issue and making everything on the surface would make things tricky, so I started my fortress in an existing village where I had retired several of my best adventurers. The village had been ravaged by wolves and foxes lately, so most of the population was dead and there were many abandoned homes as well as plenty of salvage lying around. The best of my adventurers actually started in this village, so it was his home village, together with his companions and the other adventurers that joined him decided to rebuild his village but also create a kind of Ninja Dojo (I am using my own mod which adds a playable oriental race with japanese weapons). The idea is to build this depopulated village into a secret training center with weapons, armor, items, and whatever else might be useful to my adventurer when I un-retire him afterwards - provided he survives the trials to come.
The fortress is built in the center of an existing village, so I already have a meeting hall and several abandoned homes to use for my starting humans. The meeting hall has beds so I can deal with migrants. The town's pikemaster is nearby as well as my adventurers and thier companions, making a powerful defensive force though the area is untamed wilds, so frequent attacks by wolves and foxes and other creatures are common. It is a forest village, so there are plenty of trees. Salvaging all of the equipment off the dead provided me with an ample treasure horde to buy any items from caravans I may need. There is no stone on the map and the aquifer is only 2 levels down so I will need to buy all the stone I need. We have a farm going already, with strawberries and rat weed growing so far, though we hardly need food with all the dead racoons and wolves lying around. We have 2 cats, a kitten, and a handful of dogs, one of which is a war dog, so we can handle vermin as well as any other minor nuisances.
It's still summer of the first year so I haven't been tested by winter yet. We already had a kobold thief try to make off with some of the loot lying all around but he was chased off by my half-elf thief before he could grab anything. We've got a well-shaft built but need mechanisms to build it. A trade caravan is on its way so we should be able to buy some stone from them hopefully. I repurposed one of the abandoned shops into a trade depot and dug a 2-level cellar complex below the town center which we are using to store all the loot. I converted the food shop into a food storage with cellar. Should be plenty of room for food in there. I haven't actually constructed any structures out of wood so far, but I will probably need to soon since the other buildings in the town are spread out a bit and it will be more efficient to build closer in. I haven't built a wall yet. I was able to get a lot of resource points to bring plants, seeds, and livestock by giving up my anvil. I figure we're probably not going to be forging alot of metal right away and we can just buy an anvil later if we need it.
All of my starting humans have weapons and armor skill so they won't get killed too easily if they are caught away from the area protected by the adventurers and surviving population.
I don't expect this fortress to get too big, it's mostly just intended to provide a base of operations I can operate out of when I re-activate my primary adventurer and raise an squad to take on a titan that has been terrorizing the capital of my civilization for years.
As for neighbors, the area has no notable hostiles, though I expect goblins and kobolds as usual. The Orcs are far away and there are elves and humans nearby who I should be able to trade with. There is also a barbarian clan up in the mountains nearby who may trade though I'm not sure about that since DF tends to make the [civ_controllable] races untradeable.
I'd visualize it for a screenshot but right now it's not too impressive. Just a bunch of buildings in a forest centered around some murky pools and a well in the middle. Once the actual structural work on the academy begins, I'll probably be joining together most of the existing buildings and re-arranging things for efficiency's sake. In the meantime, my humans seem to be fairly happy and efficient. It is a bit odd that my lumberjacks are using naginata's to chop down trees, but I guess it works. Maybe I should have allowed them to use normal axes. On that note, does anyone know what medieval japan used for wood-cutting axes?
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Topic: Human Fortress? (Read 3933 times)