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[Dwarven WMD]

The title may be a bit strange. Sorry, pounding headache.
Anyway, I mean how do you usually build most of your fortresses? As in how you build it, run it, priorities, etc...

I usually end up building above ground just for the hell of the extra room. Occasionally I build city-like fortresses, with towering apartment complexes, restaurants, things like that.
By that, I mean ghettoes, run-down cafeterias, cramped factories, and a giant wall of oppression surrounding the entire damned place with dwarfs with muscles the would scare a demon patrolling ever inch. It works against rebellion and crime until the whole place goes into a riot.

[tomas1297]

From top to bottom

The sky - MEGAPROJECTS!And towers.
Surface - Defensive walls,trade depot
Soil-Nothing,so I could make moats on the top level
More Soil-Farms and storage,filthy peasant graves
Rock-Workshops,kool kidz rooms,legendary dining room,barracks,kool kidz gravez
Rock-Rooms for filthy peasants,room from which you throw stuff into the arena
Rock-More rooms for filthy peasants,arena
Type 2 rock-Mining only
Type 3 rock-Mining only
Bottom-HFS More mining

[The Dog Delusion]

Recently, I've been building lots of cube forts. I'm hoping to hone my design a bit more so that I can build up the courage/patience/infrastructure to start some crazy megaprojects. I tried one megaproject, but I was a bit over-ambitious and it turned me off from those for a while...

Also, I have a "drunk fort," which I only work on when significantly under the influence. I checked it out one time while sober, and couldn't make heads or tails of what the flip was going on. Apparently, I built the workshop area twice (incompletely both times), and assigned up to three rooms to some dwarves, and no rooms to others. Also, there was a macaque-breeding program that had clearly spun out of control, and like 400 squares of farming plot, all dedicated to growing plump helmets for like 50 dwarves.

[tomas1297]

Also, there was a macaque-breeding program that had clearly spun out of control

Holy shit!Tell us about it.

[The Dog Delusion]

Also, there was a macaque-breeding program that had clearly spun out of control

Holy shit!Tell us about it.

As best as I could tell, they were at or approaching the population cap for animals, as there was like 3 pages of them in the creatures list. And since the wagon had never been de-constructed, and no other meeting place assigned, they were all just swarming around on the surface, presumably mating up a storm in the middle of a pack of socializing dwarves and off-duty guards... I had assigned well over 10 guards (in a fortress of only about 50), and for some reason, armed them all with different weapons (the ones that had weapons, at least). But anyways, at one point, a snatcher appeared and I could barely tell what was going on...either the monkeys just panicked and swarmed while one of the fortress guard killed the gob, or the monkeys swarmed and killed him. The remains were carried into the mayor's room, which is where the refuse pile was located. For some reason.

[tomas1297]

The remains were carried into the mayor's room, which is where the refuse pile was located.

I thought I was the only one.Well,that was an awesome story.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, I've only really built a single fortress, and then messed around with the starts of a small number of others, largely for the purposes of testing out some modding, but I'm developing some trends in how I make these things.  I'm refining my technique more and more towards vertical building.

I like to create a second-story enterance to my fort once I have some more labor and the materials for it, and just wall up my original enterance.  Instead of building a moat, I just make a constructed platform, ramps, and drawbridges, which is ultimately faster than digging a moat, since you're just using open air.  (If you use multiple drawbridges and platforms, you can still make a "catapult" bridge that dumps people into a pit/labarynth, however.)

I choose one floor to be my "traffic floor".  You can, ultimately, just make this one giant warehouse in the soil layer, but that looks a little ugly, and I prefer to have a set of geometric roads of varying width, all smothed, and sometimes engraved as a major traffic hub floor.  If this floor doesn't have the warehouses, I prefer to make a warehouse floor, preferably on a soil layer, with each massive stockpile dedicated to a specific industry (food, textiles nearby, stone, gems, metal, wood, etc.) and then a staircase in the middle of the stockpiles where small pods of workshops can be no more than a couple of steps away from a staircase, which itself leads to the warehouse for its type of goods within only 3-5 floors.  (Magma workshops are an exception to this rule for obvious reasons.  My magma glass workshops (B3) are built upon a linear trough of magma (B4), the floor above them is a warehouse (B2), and the floor above that (B1) has sand, so I just build my sand bagging glass workshops right on top of the sand.

For my residential quarters, I build them right in the middle of the fort.  My road floor has a dining hall, and later, a great hall with a zoo and statue garden and waterfalls right in the dining hall.  (Haven't actually completed this yet...)  The homes are built vertically, just like how most people do them, but I could simply knock down some walls and combine some smaller dwarven apartments together to make my noble's quarters.  I tend to go for the dramatic, however, and build my noble's rooms into the cliff face of mountains, especially on the tops of the mountain peaks, where I can make some balconies, or some window-walls to survey the lands before them.

I dig straight down from the residential areas to the lowest floors to make my tombs and prisons.  I suppose it might actually be a little faster to put the tombs in the stoneworker's district, since the furniture for it (coffins, cabinets) are generally made of stone, and the prison would probably be best put under the food production district.

The working districts are arranged in a wheel around my residential district, so that I have the most efficiency in transport.  I don't exactly make my road system an actual circle with spokes leading to the main residential district, but maybe I'll do that in a future fort.  I do, however, have a special "trade depot" warehouse for the trade depot that effectively is its own district.  (Since it is near the enterance, it also has my animal stockpiles and kennels, as well as my death pits, halls of death, spikey death, smashing bridge of death, and arrowslits so that my marksdwarves, quartered above it all, can rain bolt-based death upon anything that survives the rest of that crap.  It takes up a lot of room.)

I also tried to make a massive "greenhouse" district, so my foresting could be done underground (never go to the surface again), but this wound up being so incredibly consumptive of labor, that I wished I had put it off for several years while I got my magma industry running.  Still, it might be worth leaving a large quarter open for expansion in that regard, if you don't have a underground river, or don't want all your wood to be tower cap.

In summation of a long, rambling post, I don't try to divide my fort by Z coordinate, but by X/Y coordinate.  Stacking leads to more efficient hauling jobs, and running from the very bottom of the fort all the way to the top will probably take less time than running past a fair-sized warehouse.  Running even fifteen floors straight down is like running past only 5 workshops... 4 if you put walls or spaces between the workshops.

[Skorpion]

In what fashion?

I dig as I need to dig. I erect masonry defences, then tear them down and rebuild them differently. Then add causeways and platforms.
Above-ground, they look like a scar on the landscape, with the original cliff/landmass obliterated by digging and building.
Underground, a twisty mass of tunnels. Later on, it's a huge straight set of corridors scattered with bedrooms and huge sprawling storage areas.

So, utilitarian and brutalist.

[Aspgren]

I do it differently every time.

What I like to do before embarking however, is to browse through the legends and find the civilisation with the most kick-ass gods and goddesses. I have a strong preference for animal gods and my latest fort had two of those. One of them being a bat.

After embarking I look at which gods are worshipped. I wanted to roleplay and I figured the gods would decide what my fortress priorities would be. I count it like this:

If a dwarf worships a god, that god gets a vote. It gets additional votes for every friend he has and it loses votes for every grudge. (this is how well he makes his case to the others)
... after counting them all the overwhelming majority worshipped the goddess of revenge. Okay... so I checked the legends. Exactly who will I be trying to get revenge against? ... apparently the only thing that had happened to the civ with the kickass gods was that they had been attacked by animals. Mainly cougars.

So I dedicated the first years of the fort to hunt and destroy every living animal that would venture into my domain. Farming, constructions, military and trade be damned!

[Chaoseed]

I dig a trapped 3-wide tunnel into a trade depot, then make some 5x5 rooms, one of which is an open-air statue garden.  On soil levels I make farms, then dig out huge storerooms for stone, blocks...usually a jumbled-up workshop area in there too.  And a "livestock pen" that I toss all the animals into...let them breed and pull them out every now and then to butcher.  I like to make 5x5 stairwell rooms with 4 stairs and an engraved pillar in the center; also 3-wide tunnels leading off them.  Also, I worked out a cool design for a big magma workshop area.

Oh, and:

I have a "drunk fort," which I only work on when significantly under the influence. I checked it out one time while sober, and couldn't make heads or tails of what the flip was going on.

Sigged.

[Spong]

I've lost count of how many I've started but they all seem to have been practice ones as I keep restarting - not out of boredom though - something either goes horribly wrong or I realise that the area I'm in isn't quite as good as I thought when I started.

My usual habit is to make a short entrance (with serrated disc traps) into solid rock which goes down via ramps, followed by a 20 tile long and 3 tile wide bridge over a pit (that goes all the way to the bottom layer), the bridge is flanked on either side by two 'arms' of 2-z-level high fortifications which link directly to my main underground keep that the bridge leads to (there's also usually a drawbridge here) - the front of the keep facing the bridge is again fortified, its 20 tiles wide and 2-z-levels high like the 'arms'. The main entrance is 3 gates wide and once through that you're into the main military complex: barracks, crossbow ranges and prison facilities all link here. The military area is similar to most areas of my fortresses where I operate on central 'plazas' with walkways round the edge but that go several z-levels deep, they all have several rooms surrounding them, often open-sided on the edge that connects to the plaza. I also build lots of elaborate bridges and walkways - the overall effect is that merchants visiting get to see the workings of the whole fort just through going to the depot -looking over the edge of the walkway they can see down and into the multiple layers of workshops busying away - all different industries, I imagine a nice golden glow coming from the forges many hundred meters below. The same with the trade depot, usually positioned on a wide walkway the merchants can see all the huge stockpiles on multiple layers going down into the abyss - the full wealth of the fortress on display as workers run amongst the stairs, ramps and walkways to bring the items up to trade. Its all very cinematic .

[Sutremaine]

Usually I just plunk down rooms wherever (just rooms... no corridors), dig holes in the walls as traffic requires, and dig out rooms above and below busy workshops. This fortress, in which I WILL attract a legitimate ruler for the first time, is built to take advantage of 3D pathing. The trade depot and barracks go at the top, then there's a storage layer for trade goods, then the bedrooms / dining area, and then stacks of workshop areas. They're 39x39 with room for 12 workshops around the edges and the corridors are wide enough to double as storage rooms. As an added bonus, the first design (the large one) in the 'fractals' section of the wiki's bedroom design article turned out to fit perfectly onto the workshop stacks. It's a good omen.

[Kaelem Gaen]

Non-Inebriated Drunken Monkey style, really no rhyme or reason, without much "efficient" building.  I call it the Man-made-cave style in the long run.   I take advantage of Z-levels in that more layers mean more space ... I also tend to have aquafirs everywhere I go....  Pain to build through, easy for water when the booze runs out.

One thing I always do though is have an Open-air gathering area, under ground, with a wall built around the top but no roof so my dwarves don't get cave adaptation and vomit over everything.

[NW_Kohaku]

Odd... one of the things that slowed me down in making my first fort was that I wanted to know what my final fort layout (or at least, the layout around 7 years down the road) would look like before I struck any dirt at all. 

I set up my enterance with the expectation that it would be walled over later (it's now an extension of my above-ground farm), and I tend to make my first workshops in my warehouse floor, where I can just bulldoze them and expand my warehouses when I'm ready to go more thoroughly vertical.  I will also start with only a pair of districts - residence and industrial, and then split those off as I dig further out from my starting point (usually, stone is the first industry that is built in a distinct district, then wood, then trade, then metal, leaving only agriculture in the original industrial district, which will be nearest my main residential area, anyway... the second, true entrance to my fort will be in the trade district).

I generally hate to have to put up walls on anything but the warehouse layer (and walling over the original enterance, but that's unavoidable.)  Ultimately, I tend to wind up engraving even my textile sweatshop floors and walls, just to give my weavers something nice to view while spinning the loom.

A way to help myself visualize is to simply start designating floors for digging, but leaving out stairs or the couple of tiles that would start them down the corridors/rooms.  That way, I can designate multiple floors that I won't have time or stone storage capacity to work on years in advance of the actual work that will take place.

[garfield751]

Recently I've been playing on maps with exposed magma pipes. what i usually do is to kill of all the magma critters and then i build a obsidian foundry to create obsidian to turn into blocks for building. i only dig if i absolutely need to or if plans for a building calls for it. for the initial housing and mess-hall i usually build small 1x1 rooms and 10x10 mess-hall. on my current map my goal is to have 4 20x20 foundries in a 48x48 section of the map in about 10 dwarf years. the first one took about 3 because i had to build the pluming and gather wood for the walls and bridges.