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[KingKaol]

I am in autumn of year 3 now with about 60 dwarfs.  I've only been ambushed once.  This is the farthest I've played.  How long do fortresses last?

[Smew]

As long as you make them last, most of my forts never make it past 5-8 years due to different circumstances.

[Duke 2.0]

 Well, if you take care of your fortress and have the patience to last, some fortresses can go on for nearly a hundred years. In fact, the most common source of fortress doom is boredom on part of the player. Seems after 20 or so years goblins all die out and stop attacking.

 Me? A good 15 years making Healedabby.

[Dakk]

Fortresses have the potential to last forever, but fortresses tend to meet their doom by its creator's own designs, or sheer boredom. Accomplished fortresses tend to be +15 years old, bloodline game fortresses often survive for dozens and dozens of years.

[Quietust]

They last as long as you're able to keep them going. My current fortress has been going for over 24 years (much of which has been spent working on a megaconstruction), and I filed my last one away after 37 years (it was still prosperous, but it was horribly laggy and I had gotten bored with its lack of special features).

Both forts still get/got regular goblin sieges, even though my current one killed off all of the "important leaders" of the goblin civ ("This land has no important leaders") over a decade ago.

[smjjames]

Yea, I have a current fort that is over 20 years old and I'm sort of slowly trying to get started on a megaproject.

Only problem with megaprojects is that you have to start planning for it early I guess.

[kefkakrazy]

Hum. I guess that if the fortress is a hundred years old you are pretty much invulnerable even to most forms of tantrum spiral due to the fortress being unassailable and your people being orgasmically happy every day, such that even the death-by-old-age of your entire starting population wouldn't do much...

Which is why, yes, people start on crazy stuff. When I get bored with a fortress, I usually just abandon unless the denizens managed to really tick me off somehow; for instance, one fortress ground to a halt via tantrums, so I sealed the doors and opened the floodgates, then stayed there watching for three hours as the place flooded in its entirety (minus one z-level... argh!)

[Albedo]

They come with a lifetime guarantee. 

Hum. I guess that if the fortress is a hundred years old you are pretty much invulnerable even to most forms of tantrum spiral due to the fortress being unassailable and your people being orgasmically happy every day...

Ummm... no.  Not invulnerable, not by any means - but you as a player would have shown that you have some mastery over the art of avoiding spirals. 

They could still happen.  Happen all the time, when you least expect. 

[Skorpion]

How long is a piece of string?

Seriously, the major issue once you've figured out how to keep them safe, fed, drunk, and happy is boredom. The fort ticks along at a low FPS. The food's not gonna run out for about 5 years, and most of it's high-value prepared meals. There's a full year's booze stockpiled. The farms are still running. The local wildlife is dead, even the sasquatches and that giant eagle that was watching you from day one. The only thing dragging people down is that cat leaving dead spiders in the dining hall, and puking every time they step outside to haul things or make the archery elevator.
Then you realise that the only thing keeping you going is the magma moat project, which is looking like it'll take a few more years to complete because you keep running out of top-layer magma.
That's when you start coming up with stupid ideas to prolong the life of the fort. Such as paving the sky to stop cave adaptation and piss the elves off.
Or finding something to do with 500 bars of steel. (Seriously, I've been producing it continuously for years. I just ran out of iron bars. What the hell am I gonna USE it all for?)

If you get bored, you get destructive, or just start a new fort on another world.

[Shiv]

My forts last until about 150 denizens, then I start getting bored and either re-roll or start pouring magma/water into the bowels of the fort.  Then I start making a new fort which will, inevitably, share the same fate. 


On my current fort I started in a terrifying marshland so I was hoping that would spice things up, but nothing undead has spawned and the most interesting thing on my map is a hairy marmot.  I was thinking this fortress wouldnt' last long but then when I was building my entrance corridor, I struck a bottomless pit.  'Damn, now I have to dig some where else' I thought but then I figured, why not just build through it?  Put my mason to work and now I have a bridge and am building my fort within and around the bottomless pit, something I've never tried before.  Not really that hard except for the occassional batman, but it's new. 

Inspiration strikes at the oddest times.  Best part is there's HFS on the map somewhere, as well as magma and an underground pool, so I'll have to think of something to do with that.  Thinking of making a magma fall in the bottomless pit but I don't know that the flow will be quick enough to sustain it.

[DennyTom]

Well, if you take care of your fortress and have the patience to last, some fortresses can go on for nearly a hundred years. In fact, the most common source of fortress doom is boredom on part of the player. Seems after 20 or so years goblins all die out and stop attacking.

 Me? A good 15 years making Healedabby.

I feel the same. My successful forts usually survive for two decades and then I flood them.

[Vester]

A couple of forts ago I paved the sky over for the sole purpose of dropping it on my fort.

[XSI]

Forts can last as long as you want them to, a dwarf will last around 150 years starting their birth.

Most of my forts are around for 10-20 years.

[smjjames]

Speakiing of my current fort, I attempted to flood it but only succeeded in crashing my FPS to 0, and even though I tried letting it run a while, it's still damn slow and would be quite a while before anybody died.

I'm pretty sure I trapped everybody in with no escape, except for two dwarves that got stuck outside.

[Vulkan]

My current fortress is in the 12th year.

Nearly constant sieges, usually 2 or so a year with a hundred gobbo's a piece, has kept the population around 150-200 for years, and scared away caravans, or slaughtered them, as well as immigrants.

The king will be arriving soon, and I am making an upside down pyramid as a megaproject, it'll be his room.

There'll also be a smaller upside down pyramid nearby, not sure what I'm going to use it for though.