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[Passive Fist]

I have made DF kind of boring for myself, and I'm in need of some discussion about it, and how to change.

I tend to kind of brute force things. Like my farm plots are often way too big, I want too many workshops, I dig out too much stone/metal to efficiently move, that kind of thing. I can tell this is the case because when I need something done quickly, or with as little labor as possible, it doesn't work out. Let me give an example.

On one map I had a sloping mountain face showing lots of coal and iron. I decided that it'd be worthwhile to mine out the good stuff and bring it inside the fort. So I used DFHack's dfvdig.exe (I think this is a completely acceptable method of mining ores) and a small crew of miners and dug out the stuff that was visible from outside.  When I was done I went to my stocks screen to designate it all for dumping and found I'd mined six thousand units of iron ores, and another two of coal. This was a huge mistake! I couldn't mass-dump it into my quantum stockpile without it taking years, and making dwarfs venture outside to fetch it for a regular pile would waste a ton of labor and add an unacceptable risk. Nevermind that I could never use that much ore in the first place.

So that's an example of one kind of overkill. There is another problem that makes my game boring and this one is tough. It has to do with fort design.

My forts are all boring square shapes. Big square rooms for storage (a block of four 10x10 rooms), tiny rooms for workshops, a big square dining room with a big square water cistern below it. I don't know if I'm like other players but if something won't fit into the space/shape I have available I often just go without until I can find a more suitable location. For ease of designation my system is great, but it is mightily unsatisfying. On top of this I seem always to have like one or two floors for housing, one for wood and stone production, one for food and cloth, so each bit is segregated from the rest. Kind of seems like a good idea but everything always feels so plain and predictable.

An example in the other direction is also relevant since it will give you some idea about my games.

The most fun (not Fun) fort I ever had was one where I discovered the ingredients for bronze early on and outfitted a group of soldiers. They went on duty to keep the first cavern layer safe while I walled it up. This was immensely satisfying. I was murdering dudes and there was glorious slaughter, some danger, some giant cave spiders, and I was just generally enjoying the hell out of it. Much more interesting than trying to avoid the caverns, that's for sure.

So what do you guys do to keep your forts spicy and invigorating? Have you found any highly fulfilling ways of doing things?

[ungulateman]

My forts don't get far enough for me to get bored.

Try digging straight down to the caverns and make an 'aboveground' fort in there. A little castle inside the caves sounds like a lot of fun.

[Sizik]

Don't dig hallways. Use dug out mineral veins instead.

[KFK]

When I get bored, I build above ground, lake-front condos for my dwarfs.

[Grimlocke]

I spend most my time building overly complicated architectural and engineering projects. Example, when I dig an underground fortress I start with a lot of miners and dig out a giant cavern in which I then build the fortress from constructions. I also never make square rooms unless they are 5x5 or smaller. Anything bigger needs some some fancy shape, multiple z-levels tall, with some pillars here and there and some floor murals of colored stone.

Once I got my basic fortress built (this can take a while) I usualy start digging out stone to build outside buildings, start dumping horrible microcline and start up a constant flow of metal industry. I make the best armor I can, best weapons I can and the best trap parts I can for my maximum of 6 weapon traps. After that I just start adding all sorts of useless extravagance like replacing all my barrels with brass ones and replacing stone murals with that of some colored gold alloys I modded in.

Oh and my caverns are allways open, all layers of it lead down to a single entrance point. I like those trees there, and crundles and other cave creatures are hillarious. Nothing like poking fun at a flying skinless squirrel that squirms and fidgets.

tl;dr version: I add in plenty of useless complexity, doesnt need to be functional, just gotta be pretty! I know I can just dig out a big square and be done with the dining room thing, but that wouldnt be half as much fun. Its also a lot harder to oversize it by accident.

[existent]

When I hit the point that you're at, Passive, I just started modding.

[Kinoko_Otoko]

Try designing a fortress before you embark, with QuickFort. I had a fortress design I spent hours on to make it efficient and to allow manipulation of strange moods in 40d, and I just started playing again so I re-designed my old fort in Excel. I have a digging plan laid out and ready for QF, and another, layout file for reference. I can clean up the layout file if you want and post both of them, but you'll need Excel or OpenOffice's equivalent to read them I think, unless there's another one I don't know about.

Try playing the game slowly by limiting the number of immigrants. Set the population cap at 20, and you'll only get one wave of immigrants; you'll only need one crafter of any type this way as you can take the time to level them each up to legendary. You'll also get enough strange moods to level a few without any real effort; if it doesn't bother you, you can use Dwarf Therapist to trigger strange moods when the mood counter is ready, in order to control who gets them. You can get by with two dining halls and only one bedroom, build a piece of artifact furniture into each (Dwarf Therapist is also helpful here, until we have display cases to add value to a room from non-furniture). Assign each bed and each table in these rooms to be individual rooms encompassing the whole room, and even WITH the drop in value from rooms overlapping, you'll have every dwarf sleeping in a room like a personal palace and eating in a personal legendary dining hall.

Once you have the legendary crafters you need to keep a stable fortress and assure your income forever (legendary brewer/cook/grower, legendary stonecrafter, possibly legendary metal/weapon/armorsmith, a couple of legendary soldiers) and a secure fortress setup you increase the cap and allow more dwarves in. You can go however fast you want this way without worrying about losing dorfs or getting unmanageable sieges. It's also nice to be able to stop worrying about everything simultaneously once you have a more or less self-sustaining fort, and focus entirely on leveling up difficult professions like the whole tailoring/dyeing/threadmaking combo, and work towards masterful cloth items made from masterful thread, masterfully dyed.

This is basically how I play. As you can see, I'm more concerned with being perfect and efficient than with respecting 'rules'. I play DF like it's Sim City; a building exercise. I guess I'm not very dwarfy in some respects, but anyway it's something different.

...

Also, an easy megaproject that anyone can do and which serves a purpose, is a giant stone tower rising into the sky to hold your extra stone. For those of you who don't like abusing quantum stockpiling of stone but do like clean floors, just turn a portion of the stone into a tower with floorspace for more stone. If you ever actually run out of stone you can just deconstruct some of the tower.

In 40d, since underground was still undeveloped, I made sure to embark on a location with underground water (for towercaps) and then flat out made my own giant underground park. Three big overlapping round rooms, which tapered down a couple levels, each of which had a giant stalactite in the center. I can't remember if I ever got around to doing this part, but I had a drain in place a floor below their bottom level (and an attached drowning room) and the idea was to flood the entire thing, and then drain only the top floor or two, leaving a series of lakes. I actually had the plumbing all set up. I don't know if there's any real reason to do something like this with the current underground system already being pretty interesting, but it's an idea.

...

From the way you're talking, it sounds like you might want to build a self-sufficient fortress and then set about conquering the underground instead of building megaprojects. You can use part of my strategy to do that if you want - prepare your fortress slowly, train some military, and then go out and conquer. If you do that you should copy your save at the point where you're ready to begin conquering but haven't yet, so if you screw up you can do it again (or if you just want to try doing it differently).

[Passive Fist]

It really helped me to get out in text what was going on, I now realize. So I've taken to the caverns, trying to find a spot where I can easily farm and seal up a bit so I don't get my dwarfs heads' bitten off, instead of building just below the surface.  This is giving me interesting structures to work around and demanding that I start up metal and military as soon as dwarfenly possible.

I expect that I'll be lining my walls with gold blocks or something equally extravagant soon, once I can figure out a viable embark for this goal.

[Calculus]

I usually just play the first three years, and then start another fortress.

[existent]

I usually just play the first three years, and then start another fortress.

Same. I've never actually been sieged, and I've only hit spoiler metal once.

[Kinoko_Otoko]

One other thing: I've never used wood fueled forges or smelters. I've also never (seriously) embarked on a tile without some magma. Wood economy is for surface lubbers. Now that magma is universal, you should try building your fortress a handful of Z levels above the magma sea... below the actual cavern system. Use a pump stack to get it to your forges.

Building around the natural caverns sounds fun too tho, actually.

[Passive Fist]

Thinking of basing my fort just above the magma sea actually. Concerned about magma men though, can't they just pop up through a magma workshop and murder everyone?

I've done a few test embarks and the first and second cavern level are usually empty of dangerous wildlife in the early seasons of the first year. Makes getting up the first wall pretty easy, although it basically removes at least one dwarf from your labor pool to do it. The ground is already muddy and there is plenty of wood.  I think I'll build an underground road system in the soil layers and completely eschew the surface if possible.

[existent]

Thinking of basing my fort just above the magma sea actually. Concerned about magma men though, can't they just pop up through a magma workshop and murder everyone?eschew the surface if possible.

Only channel out one tile to the magma. When you're building the workshop, place the impassable tile over the hole.

[HatfieldCW]

I find myself in a similar situation, but I embrace the stagnation of my fort design, for now at least.  Having predictable, unimaginative designs for rooms and workshops allows me to focus on making the hospital and military work, which is still a bit out of my reach.  My current megaproject is to have a military consisting of four ten-dwarf squads, with defined uniforms, and the infrastructure to provide those uniforms.  I'm trying for really specific stuff, like blue cloaks for all my axedwarves and red cloaks for my crossbowdwarves and green cloaks for my swordsdwarves, etc.  I havent' gotten my dye industry quite right yet, but I have fun trying.  I'm also experimenting with automation, mechanical constructs and burrows, but I'm still terrible with burrows.  My dream fort has one of those sweet water clocks that drastically reconfigures the fort as the seasons cycle.  I imagine a Winter Gate that opens onto a frozen river or lake, and a Summer Gate that grants easy access to the outdoor farm plots, opening and closing as the year progresses, with my military scheduled to perform different sorts of security patrols in accordance with the fort's "mode".

Little exercises with interface and infrastructure like that keep me engaged.  In terms of design, I'm trying to minimize empty space and adopt a "lean production" philosophy instead of having 30 tables and chairs laying around waiting for me to dig out the new dining hall.  Irregularly shaped rooms, storage in walled-off bits of cavern and preferential harvesting of stone should benefit me in terms of both form and function.  Also, I strive to be less anal about down-time.  I catch myself hating idlers, thinking it's StarCraft or something and those bums are costing me money, but more and more I think, "Bring on the booze," and try to allow them to party and socialize more, as long as the work is getting done.

[Kinoko_Otoko]

I don't know if things have changed in 2010, but in 40d magma men actually had to travel into your fortress from outside, so all you have to do is make only one entrance to the magma pipes under your workshops, and put a magma proof fortification in it to keep them out. Building floors on any open channels also keeps them out I believe.