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[Hyperturtle]

use dfclean to clean up the tiles.  I found that it can increase frame rate too.

I also built a number of wells--and fenced in the area (and have a farm in the vicinity) and they will clean themselves off and make a huge mess, but they do get clean.

Many dwarfs don't end up getting clean because of a lack of well/water access and soap access.  Build enough wells, water source designations, and soap, and you'll have clean dwarfs.  Even their status says they had a nice bath!

[LordBucket]

How do you go about it?

Embark on a flat map. Not having to level the ground will save much time.

I start with a dedicated mason/architect, and give both of my miners proficient masonry too. As soon as stone becomes available the dedicated mason begins 24/7 stone block construction that generally continues for years. Multiple masonry workshops, both above ground and belowground on top of the stone. When not digging, the miners join in masonry duty.

The dedicated mason is kept on stone block duty with a stone stockpile right next to him. While he's actively making blocks assign walls to built: start with a corner block in each corner of the visible map. Ideally you want the miner/masons to build walls as it's slower because of all the walking, and it's best to have the dedicated mason not lose any time to walking. Let the mine/masons do that.

From time to time add sections of wall. The important thing is simply to fill in between the corners to create a square, with drawbridge(s) blocking a three-wide entrance(s). Eventually you'll want something more complicated than that, in particular some "corridors" leading to/from the drawbridges to your forress entrance (assuming you're mixing above/brlow ground, anyway.) Don't designate it all at once. Do it in small sections or your primary mason may get involved and it's usually more efficient to keep him making blocks.

Once you're enclosed add stairs and start building a roof to a small section in or near the entrance for your barracks. Any hostiles coming inside will need to walk through your training dwarves (once you have them).

From here you're pretty much home free. Fill in the roof, add defenses, etc.

If you'll be building exclusively above-ground remember that things don't need to be enclosed. Workshops/farms/stockpiles can all be jammed together in one big mess. A small roof can be built on the opposite side for bedrooms. Also keep in mind that a single screen is not big enough to keep dwarves from being scared of things on the other side. You may need to build a second set of walls outside the first set. Do this before you start building up. Filling in entire levels of floor takes a long time.

What about flying threats?  Do you just ignore those,
or do you roof over your entire space?

Roof over, yes. And usually a second floor as well. But again...filling all that space in takes a long time. You can have a perimeter in the first season or so if you're fast, but a roof may takes years. As for flying threats...that's a bit of a problem at the moment because marksdwarves don't seem to work right in the current version. I've personally been playing 40d still partly because of that. It's more functional.

[Hyndis]

For above ground building you want a LOT of masons. I mean it. LOTS of them.

I keep my usual specialized dwarves, like craftsdwarves, jewelers, and metalworkers, but then have the rest of the dwarves be farmers, smelter workers, and masons. This gives me upwards of 75 masons. I build a dozen mason workshops and just churn out the blocks. Build a bar/block stockpile near the construction site that accepts only rock blocks, and disable rock blocks from being stored in other stockpiles.

With 50+ dwarves building at any given time construction goes extremely quickly. I usually wait until my block stockpile has filled up and then do a binge of construction, then wait a few more seasons until that stockpile fills again.

Skill doesn't matter much so its okay to make almost the entire fortress be masons. As an added bonus you'll have a very high chance of getting artifact furniture if a mood hits. Be sure to forbid everything except the valuable ore. Native platinum artifact statues are awesome. 

[Gus Smedstad]

Why all this emphasis on rock blocks?  Why not just build rough stone walls from the raw stone directly?  Sure, a wall built with blocks counts as "smoothed" for value purposes, but you don't care about that for defensive walls.

I'm constitutionally opposed to open-plan forts, above or below ground.  I just really like workshops having proper rooms - and rooms have the advantage that you can trap the exit if there's a Moody dwarf in there that you can't satisfy.

I'm currently having a go at a fort where I relaxed the rule slightly - it's allowed to have below-ground cellars for storage.  This has worked reasonably well with the gradual approach with a minimum-size wall to enclose everything.  It helped that I changed my architectural approach.  Instead of branching from a hub with corridors, I'm stacking shops on top of each other, and putting a dedicated 1x1 stair for each stack.  Policy is that every building gets a roof immediately, again for aesthetic reasons (plus it makes it easier to stack to shops).

I have no idea how it will be during an attack yet.  It's only year 2, and I haven't even seen a Snatcher yet.

 - Gus

[Hyperturtle]

When marksdwarfs worked, I would make various outposts with fortifications as the walls.  They would span a few levels, and contained food and drink, as well as ammo.  This worked pretty well, as it would soften up anything that approached. 

A small hill with a few zlevels, hollowed out, worked nicely as well, and sometimes I would be lucky enough to have them close enough together to link them with bridges and then set up a drawbridge and/or fortifications along it, so the hills worked as turrrets of sorts.

[Egregius]

Tbh I always make hybrids: I start underground, but because I like the route to the surface (farms/wood) to be as short as possible, I don't have much of a hallway of Doom. So instead I take to building something defensible above ground (eg entrance gate guardhouse). Or at least I get inspired to do so.

In v0.28 I once started in a human town to open a dwarf restaurant: my sole trade goods were cooked meals. I purposely took a map with a crossroads and no access to stone (due to aquifer), so everything had to be built out of wood. Because I took a 2x2 map for FPS purposes there wasn't much of a forest (legendary woodcutter got through it in no time), and building was SLOW. Making floors and roofs eats up a lot of wood indeed. Luckily, there were pre-made human buildings I could build my dwarf houses in between (saved at least the walls!) and I 'temporarily' borrowed the city hall for stockpiling purposes. Never got around to finishing a defensive wall around the whole town.

[Firehound]

Why all this emphasis on rock blocks?  Why not just build rough stone walls from the raw stone directly?  Sure, a wall built with blocks counts as "smoothed" for value purposes, but you don't care about that for defensive walls.

I'm constitutionally opposed to open-plan forts, above or below ground.  I just really like workshops having proper rooms - and rooms have the advantage that you can trap the exit if there's a Moody dwarf in there that you can't satisfy.

I'm currently having a go at a fort where I relaxed the rule slightly - it's allowed to have below-ground cellars for storage.  This has worked reasonably well with the gradual approach with a minimum-size wall to enclose everything.  It helped that I changed my architectural approach.  Instead of branching from a hub with corridors, I'm stacking shops on top of each other, and putting a dedicated 1x1 stair for each stack.  Policy is that every building gets a roof immediately, again for aesthetic reasons (plus it makes it easier to stack to shops).

I have no idea how it will be during an attack yet.  It's only year 2, and I haven't even seen a Snatcher yet.

 - Gus

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing correctly I believe is the reason. you see very few actual fortifications made of a bunch of random rock piled together and mortared until solid in RL.

[Retro]

I never bother, but a big benefit is that blocks can be stored in bins.

[Foehamster]

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing correctly I believe is the reason. you see very few actual fortifications made of a bunch of random rock piled together and mortared until solid in RL.

I think the rough walls are just fitted irregular stone. Its still pretty solid, especially with mortar, but the gaps between stones can be a bit irregular; kind of like a mosaic, except there's no purposeful design.  Block walls have tighter, regular seams and an all together smoother face and would require less mortar.  Technically neither needs mortar, but its difficult to fit a rough wall tightly without lots of labor.

Defensively you could pick at and eventually pull out a few stones from the rough walls, while the block wall will be a bit more difficult.

[denito]

When I built a giant magma cistern in 40d, I made it in the shape of a hollow inverted step pyramid.  This takes advantage of the fact that every wall makes a floor on the level above it, so they could stand on top of the previous Z level's walls when they build the next Z level wall.  For a cistern, this had the advantage that every added level made it that much more voluminous.  For a fort, you could make your walls like a non-inverted step pyramid, which has the advantage of requiring less of a roof for each Z level step you make.

[Xzalander]

My usual order of things for Above Ground fortresses (excepting standard stuff farms etc) is to :

Stage One
A Build a pit 5x5 2z deep (Soil Mining Training)
2x2 downward stairway in the middle of the pit (for stone access)
A 6x6 wall around the 5x5 Pit with a 1 tile door.
Build a second Floor above said Pit including roof. (No roof access!)

This will become your Keep. Where in all indoor farms are grown and you dig for stone only.

Stage Two

In a 10tile diameter from the Keepwalls, build a 25x25 Outerwall.
Beyond this 25x25 Outerwall a 27x27 3Wide 10z Trench. If Aquifer/River/Magma Pipe is present it may be easier to make a 3zdeep trench and fill the bottom Z with liquid.

Build Depot with in the Stage 2 Zoning along with Workshops. Stockpiles, Masons and Magma based buildings are expemt as pathing the stone etc isnt worth the aesthetics.

Stage Three

Build small 5x5x5 houses, 1 Door glass windows two floors three bedroom +1 bathroom. (Dohoh)


For epic make it so that you can pump magma into the Stage 2 Courtyard when sieged. And have fortifications/grates that drain it back to the recycle system.

[snelg]

You could get a plot on a lake or oceanside and build out over the water. Could still create a semi-defensible chokepoint, and by using bridges you can section off the city even further. It's the tenochtitlan build plan. Just be careful that you don't completely disconnect a building while it's floating over the water..unless of course you're into that sort of thing

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Been doing this a couple of times, it's making it quit easy to defend the fort itself.

The only real problems I had (except for the first one when you couldn't designate lots of stuff to be built at the same time) was when I built one level above the water and couldn't reach it for fishing/water purposes (new constructable down-stairs should be nice). The first fort I built like this starved as I couldn't fight off the first siege and they blocked all resources because the military was under-developed and the only way to get resources was to get out of the fortress and onto the mainland. The second fort had several animals leashed in the countryside with traps surrounding them as a warning system which worked really well against ambushes.

Also, as people already mentioned. Above ground forts take a lot more time to get up running and defend than those underground. But it's a nice challenge and well worth to try out.

[Thief^]

Aboveground is fun.

Posting for watch.

You don't need to post to watch, just press the notify button at the top/bottom of the thread.

[Gus Smedstad]

For a fort, you could make your walls like a non-inverted step pyramid, which has the advantage of requiring less of a roof for each Z level step you make.

For aesthetic reasons, sure.  But if you're talking about practical advantages, a pyramid doesn't reduce the amount of roof you need.  No matter what your topology, the roof requirement is the same.  First floor gets the floor for free, and requires a roof for every tile.  Floors above the first use the roof below as floor for free, but require a new roof, so it doesn't matter if they're built side by side or stacked.  The main thing that affects your total roof requirement is the corridor tiles you have beyond the minimum number of tiles required to hold your functional areas, since the corridor needs roofing too for security.

So far with my current fort (still only year 2, just traded with the spring Elves), All my buildings have roofs, but I've accepted that my streets are open to the sky, as is the still lightly-defended entrance hallway.  I've got steel production going, and I'll be forging my first steel discs for weapon traps soon.

Biggest problem right now is that my standard Corridor of Doom™ calls for a 20-level pit, and I've got an aquifer on level 3.  I could make a really big cave in, but it's adjacent to stuff I don't really want to destroy.  So I'm considering a massive pump project.  So far, I've yet to have a successful pump solution to the aquifer level, but in the past I've always been dealing with it with just the initial 7 dwarfs, not the 40+ I have now.

 - Gus

[Osmosis Jones]

My method for the 40d games was to build a small defensible hole in the ground, with maybe a small bit of forest walled off as well. This keeps me going for the first 4 or five years while I build up my military and set up my obsidian farms. Then I switch to optimised production of obsidian blocks, and start building in the area I had set aside for the castle, using mason gangs and local block stockpiles (blockpiles?) guarded by patrolling soldiers. It takes a while to get going, but once up I could churn out the majority of the outer curtain wall in a season, all of high quality, uniform construction.

In 31, it's been similar, but I lost my first real fort because I had underestimated the magnitude of the military nerf, and lost my soldiers, masons, haulers and mayor to a 3-squad wave of ambushes. It was Fun (tm), so I'm taking it slower this time round.