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[Nobbins]

Black = Walls
Red = Doors
Blue = Stairs between upper levels
Green = Stairs that lead underground
Grey = Floor

I'm building a castle with that layout, of course, there will be a difference between levels to some extent, and an underground area for farming and quarrying. Think it's a good design, and, do you have any other designs?

[Garth]

Can we perhaps get a better picture?
I can only barely see the dots representing the doors and such.

[Retro]

[imagewashere]

Black = Walls
Red = Doors
Blue = Stairs between upper levels
Green = Stairs that lead underground
Grey = Floor

I'm building a castle with that layout, of course, there will be a difference between levels to some extent, and an underground area for farming and quarrying. Think it's a good design, and, do you have any other designs?

I can see it just fine, actually. It's a good design for the walls - but don't forget that all castles have a keep (the part that looks like 'the castle' in movies, etc). Right now you just have impressive walls.

I'd move the underground access ways to someplace more central, though.

[Dude_Jebawe]

You'll need a keep for your castle. Something like this, maybe:



Just a suggestion, of course. You can design your keep any way you want.

[SkyRender]

If you're trying to design a castle for practical defense, there's lots of ways to go.  You should definitely set up the ramparts and watch towers according to the natural terrain to optimize existing "natural walls".  Also, keep in mind that multiple entrances are a good idea only if you're near the center of your map and can raise all of the entrance bridges simultaneously with one lever.  Even then, you'll want to post guard dogs on chains around the corners of all entrances to protect against ambushers and thieves.  Overall your design seems solid enough, though.

[Duke 2.0]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You'll have to zoom in, but these are early floorplans of Healedabby. It was built around studies of real life castle floorplans and made to include everything a fortress needs. Although I never did get it work the way I wanted.

[Slappy Moose]

MAKE IT BIGGER

[NW_Kohaku]

Hmm... I remember playing what I think was called Castles II so long ago...

My favorite castle design could basically be summed up like this:

XXXXXXX
X          X
X  XXX  X
X  XKX  D
X  XDX  X
X      X  X
XXXXXXX

K = keep
D = gate
X = walls

Cheapest castles on the market, and essentially as effective as the bigger ones.  Better, the smaller courtyards let archers near the keep fire over the outer walls, and made ranged defense a breeze.

Ah, well, anyway, I assume the point of all this is to actually fit your entire fortress into the aboveground "castle proper".

If we're talking about that, keep in mind that real-life castles were often designed specifically for the land they were built upon.  Many would be built into narrow plataeus  overlooking the only road that would pass through a mountain range, so as to give it both strategic importance, as well as making it more difficult to simply position an attacking force to hit the fortress.

When castles really did have moats filled with water, it was often because they built their castle out into a bend in the river, then dug a channel around the other side of their castle when they were done.

...

Hmm... now I want to play on a map where I'm near the ocean and a human town, where I would be building a lighthouse and a fortress that protects a harbor (even if I have to dig that harbor myself).

[Nobbins]

Thanks for the advice. It's a pretty flat desert next to a river. It's not to bad, actually. I can even get clear glass, not that I will. This is my first "Going successfully" aboveground fort, so I'm feeling happy. No migrants in two years, as I'm on spring of the third. Kobolds invaded the first year, and left behind a spear and a shield, which I'll use for military lizards. Two children, one had his life claimed by geese. Fscking geese.

EDIT: massive kobold siege, killed all but two of my lizardmen, witch I modded in myself, and an elven caravan. So now I have a ton of cool shit, but only two tantrum-lizards... =[

Reclaim seems like a good idea.

[NW_Kohaku]

Honestly, I would just copy down the worldgen information, regen your world, and start over from scratch.

A flat desert is probably not the best place to put a castle, honestly... you want the high ground, after all, it prevents the seige weapons from being easily carted up to your walls.

Still, if it's near a river, you can divert part of the river in a large loop, and make a "moat".  If that's all sand, then all you have to do is dig a big channel with a couple ramps leading upwards on the outer end (just in case a dwarf falls in), and it shouldn't take your miners very long at all to complete.

Unless you want to later go in and dig a tunnel to some extra lumber areas (or just dig another moat around the area and make a drawbridge), you would want to make this area very large, so you can get some in-the-fort lumber production going, although that depends on how much vegetation you can even get, and whether or not to just rely on importing it from the trade partners.  Obviously, if you have terrain features you want to keep, like a magma vent, you want that inside your castle, as well.

If you want to be even more authentic, keep in mind that it's pretty much not possible for pure stone castles to be more than 5 stories tall, and every stone wall will need to have a wall below it.  Technically, you might want to make the walls even wider as they go down.  Floors that you construct should be made of wood, you just can't support stone floors without multiple supports or arches.  Wooden walls should be fine, so long as they aren't too large or far away from a supporting wall.

One of the beauties of castles, though, was that they allowed for very small garrisons to defend against vastly superior numbers.  Many castles were designed to be defended with only 30 soldiers against as much as a thousand attackers.  (Which is pretty much why seiges are a joke in DF - for traps to be balanced out, you would need to have hundreds of attackers storming your gates.)  They were just too expensive to build to put too many people inside.  So just modify your init file, and make sure that the population limit is really small... you want a baron, because what's a castle without a noble, but beyond that it's too much, so set the limit to something like 80 or 100 dwarves.

... Hmm... I'm really getting into this, I have to make an above-ground castle, now.

I'm going to go genning looking for a place where I can build a castle on a mountain overlooking a human trade road, as part of a strategic defense and/or threat upon a powerful human empire.

[Nobbins]

Well, the castle failed, epicly, after having 70 people come on a reclaim mission, lagging it down and making it impossible to manage. Authentic-ness is not what I'm going for, really, just a really badass above-ground fort. And what better fort is there then a castle?

I also realized that 24-tile long walls between the large rooms was way to much, so I'm shrinking it down to 14, to save rocks, time, and space (for modular awesomeness).

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, authentic-ness is just for added challenge.  I figured the reason someone would do something like this would be because they were bored, and wanted to do something cool to get excited about, and I figured that the more you forced yourself to get authentic, the more exciting it would be... but then, not everyone thinks history is exciting.

What you need to do is... well, know your limits.  You're going to need to start out with basically just a walled-off area just big enough for what you need, and just plot out what you want to work out ahead of time.  A square wall will give you the biggest area per tile you have to work given the way that DF handles movement.  Of course, since you'll be expanding this wall, you might want to start out with a rectangle that you expand into a square between seasonal attacks.  You COULD dig a ditch, or even go for your moat early, but since there is not yet any "un-dig", it would wind up cramping your style later on.

Once you are able to dig in your moat, even without walls, if you have a drawbridge, you can simply stay away from the banks, and even without a wall, you'll be safe.  Make that drawbridge walled in on your side so that the attackers have to go through your traps to reach your little castle-building mason outpost, like with a normal fort, and they'll be just as screwed as anyone trying to ram through a few layers of traps without that special trap-ignoring token is.  Just be sure to dig that moat in a semi-organic looking way, if you're like me, and are anal about not having everything look square and boxy and neat and symmetrical.

Also, how much of a FPS hit is too much?  I can handle a drop to around 12 without TOO much trouble... I just switch to my web browser and talk in between occasionally checking my game, since it doesn't pause when it isn't on top.

[Nobbins]

Well, I'm on a brook, so I usually hit around 300 with the absense of geese. And I'm the opposite, I like everything square and neat. =[

Anyways, barracks done, as is the kennel room. The bottom floor is chalk, while the top is gypsum. It's going along much faster with the smaller halls, and, with some luck, I may be able to get a charcoal-based smelting industry going. "Sparse" is still a ton of cactuses. =O

[Hakar]

MAKE IT BIGGER

Make it dorfier! Cover it in spikes!

[Nobbins]

As soon as my fort can be defended from sieges. =/

On that note, I have two offices, half of the skeleton done, and some of the upper floor started. A barracks with thirteen beds, all lizardmen in tact, three married couples, a kennels and an archery range.
Not too bad. =D