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[Urist son of Urist]

I'm not sure if this idea has been brought up before, but I recently tried it out in a fort of mine with great success.

On dangerous maps, or crowded maps, or dangerous and crowded maps, ensuring that the caravan gets to your depot can be a pain.  On dangerous maps they tend to get eaten by zombies a lot, and on crowded maps you either have to smooth out 10,000,000 boulders or chop down 10,000,000 trees to get to the edge of the map.  And with the trees you either have to go back and chop them down again a year later or build a big long road.

So, taking inspiration from Dragon Age, I built a road underground to the edge of the map with a ramp entrance/exit, cleared a little area, and it worked wonderfully.  Caravans move along the roads quite nicely.

NOW you're thinking with Dwarf portals!

On a side note, this seems like a good way to annihilate invaders, given that, by walling off your main entrance and forcing them to use the road, you can make them enter a narrow killzone the length of the map.  Fill your Deep Road with traps and show the Goblin/Hippy/Human scum the what-for.

[Derakon]

Yep, this works pretty well. Biggest problem with using it for a deathtrap is that all the corpses end up underground, which creates either a ton of miasma or a ton of refuse hauling jobs. Then again, if you're planning to use the goblin bone and skulls for crafts, you'll be hauling the corpses anyway.

[Fossaman]

I'm planning to use an underground road as the main entrance for my current fort, to preserve the above-ground aesthetics. For bonus points it's going to pass through an artificial lake, and there will be flooding levers.

I'm curious, is your road in connection with all of the map edges, or have you sealed things off so that that's the only place with depot access? That would force caravans to spawn in that spot, yes?

[qoonpooka]

I'm planning to use an underground road as the main entrance for my current fort, to preserve the above-ground aesthetics. For bonus points it's going to pass through an artificial lake, and there will be flooding levers.

I'm curious, is your road in connection with all of the map edges, or have you sealed things off so that that's the only place with depot access? That would force caravans to spawn in that spot, yes?

No, unfortunately that's a myth.  Caravans will spawn on whatever side they please - but if there's only one accessible route from that side of the map they seem to spawn there.

[slink]

I'm planning to use an underground road as the main entrance for my current fort, to preserve the above-ground aesthetics. For bonus points it's going to pass through an artificial lake, and there will be flooding levers.

I'm curious, is your road in connection with all of the map edges, or have you sealed things off so that that's the only place with depot access? That would force caravans to spawn in that spot, yes?

Attaching the entrance to the depot area to one, and only one, edge of the map using bridges seems to work as long as there is a flat area suitable for the wagons to spawn.  It seems to require a natural surface at the edge.  I have tried using a constructed surface and that has failed.  Also, it must be aboveground for the rather obvious reason that the edge isn't open underground.  Someone posted that they tried to use the exit edge of a dammed underground river and that didn't seem to work.

Migrants and liaisons will still require a separate entrance, although they are content to exit the map through the caravan edge-attachment.

[loser]

I have used roads like this to connect the depot to the map edges.

First I built them in the air.  This 'flying depot' design had a lot of problems and I don't recommend it to anyone.

Then I built them underground.  The problem with this was that since they were underground I was unable to get all the dwarves on the correct side of the depot air lock.  And when I tried to carve out the space between the roads and the surface, I found that I had put many rooms and essential passages in between, and otherwise royally messed that up.

Finally, on my current fort I planed the top layers of the fort around leaving room for the roads.  I still managed to mess it up a bit, of course, but not in any terrible way.  Now there are deep, dwarf-carved canyons running from the map's center out to the edges.  Once the wall around the edge is done, I would be ready to get the dwarves on the correct side of the airlock.

However, this is a metal-poor map.  I lost the dwarf liaison to troglodytes in autumn 201 & the humans only bring so much.  I need the goblinite.  So I'm going to have to set up some way to lock down the passages to the edges of the maps and allow collection of precious iron bitz & gubbinz.

Each of the passages is three tiles wide with a fouth row of tiles channeled out.  This allows me to later put in separate underground passages parallel to the first, separated by fortifications and that channel.  From these new passages, marksdwarves would be able to hosed down anyone in the passages who my be unwelcome.

[Hyndis]

Dragon Age is very dwarfy!

Underground fortressess sealed off from the surface, with a trade depot outside that routinely gets attacked by bandits. Inside you have rivers of magma flowing everywhere, even magma pouring down through the middle of rooms for lighting. (Genius, really!) Nobles are detached from everyone else and regularly issue mandates that invariably end up in the slaughter of many lower caste dwarves. Craftsdwarves who are useful are privileged, the and the underclass dwarves are recruited as arrow catchers.

Also, the continual sieges from goblins.

There are even fey moods!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Caridin, blacksmith, has entered into a fey mood!
Caridin, blacksmith, has claimed a forge!
Caridin, blacksmith, has begun a mysterious construction!
Caridin, blacksmith, has constructed the Anvil of the Void, a magic anvil!
Branka, furnace worker, has gone berserk!

[Sphalerite]

No, unfortunately that's a myth.  Caravans will spawn on whatever side they please - but if there's only one accessible route from that side of the map they seem to spawn there.

No, it's not a myth.  I have used the method of using bridges and channels to force caravans to appear in only one spot on many fortresses and have never once had a caravan refuse to appear on the side of the map I wanted it to.  It may be that if your map is bisected by some natural impassable barrier like a river that a caravan will only be able to appear on one side of it, but otherwise it does work to force the caravan to appear in only a specific spot.

[ed boy]

Since you cannot mine out the edge squares of the map, is there any way to create an underground entrance to the fort that does not go above ground at the border?

[Emily Murkpaddled]

Divert an underground river, floor over a chasm? Something like that maybe? I would definitely call it a bug if either of these worked, however.

[darkflagrance]

Since you cannot mine out the edge squares of the map, is there any way to create an underground entrance to the fort that does not go above ground at the border?

Someone once reported that underground tunnels built by civs (goblins or dwarves) during world gen that go off the map can be used by caravans to appear on the map.

[Fossaman]

That would honestly be a pretty epic thing to have in your fortress.

[Bryan Derksen]

Dragon Age is very dwarfy!

Heh. I happen to know that there are a number of other Dwarf Fortress players in the Dragon Age dev team, though I don't know whether DF had any direct influence on how Orzammar and the Deep Roads wound up being designed (both of them draw heavily on the same "traditional" Tolkein Dwarves for inspiration). I had planned to recreate Orzammar in DF to post on launch date, but I wanted to wait for the new version of DF to come out and sadly that wound up being after DA:O came out.

I'm quite fond of the Deep Road design in general and use it in a lot of my forts simply for general mining access, not just for caravans. A three-tile-wide, two-tile tall corridor, with the lower Z level  being five tiles wide and lined with pillars to support the upper level's overhang, very easy to designate either by hand or by macro. Optionally with channels down the sides behind the pillars to fill with magma, depending on whether there's any on the map or whether I plan to have the road run through a built-up Thaig area. I've also used a version of the Proving Arena in a number of my forts as a combination dining hall/training barracks. I use it in one of my forts to slaughter goblin captives with my army of tame werewolves.

[Urist son of Urist]

Sadly my deep roads are a bit less ornate than that.  Five tiles wide and mostly in sand, although there IS a rather elaborate system of ramps on the northern edge of the map (I built a tunnel to each edge, except the western side because it was close enough that it was easier to just smooth some boulders out), reaching up to the peak of a mountain, 'cause I felt like doing something more complicated.

Next time I'll have to try something a bit ornate.  Maybe similar to that design.

Hmmm...multiple fortresses?  Although it would probably be best to still have only one entrance, since I doubt the goblins would consistently oblige me by dividing their forces.

[smirk]

Someone posted that they tried to use the exit edge of a dammed underground river and that didn't seem to work.

I tried this myself once, actually. Wagons and other traders aren't willing to ARRIVE by such a route, but are perfectly willing to DEPART through it. So as long as ye can get them inside when they first arrive, then you can seal yer main entrance with no berserk-trader worries. I kept that fort up for at least 5 years after discovering the trick; I can only imagine how many poor caravans in that riverbed despaired of ever seeing the surface again...