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[Hyndis]

There are two approaches for the game:

1)  Overengineer everything to absolutely absurd degrees.
2)  Damn the magma, full speed ahead!


I use approach #1. My fortresses are decades old before I even breach the first cavern.

[Vertigon]

I'm usually a callous monster in DF, playing almost the stereotypical demanding Old Testament God. I build opulent structures for a few chosen or for no reason at all, and most dwarves live squalid lives in the tunnels of my fortress.

I love doing this. I dig random lines right under the surface with my mouse, ensuring crazyness, and have squalid sewer-ish homes for most of the dwarves, and aboveground build temples and palaces and whatnot. I like to think of it as a testament to how humanity hides its filth in a show of splendor and glory.

[Jayce]

Maybe its just because i understand the game now,but df seems to be getting easier.

[jerank]

In my fortresses, everyone lives like a king. Gold furniture and generally both a bedroom and an office. Nobles get their stuff made of wood, over lava tubes, suspended by retractable bridges. Without supports.

[NW_Kohaku]

I think my problem is that I'm far too sensitive for Dwarf Fortress. I hate it when my dwarves die for any reason, so I tend to be ultra-ultra-ultra careful whenever I expand. The first thing I did upon breaching the cavern was to bunker down in a tiny area and seed the passages with an obscene number of stonefall traps, which killed a lot of early opposition. I took the penalty of hugely cluttered workshops and expanded very slowly, always making sure that I had secured an area completely before moving on to the next, building small stockpiles behind me and walling off sections that had no further usage. By the time really hostile and deadly wildlife showed up I was more than capable of defeating them with a crossbow-oriented military. Forgotten Beasts were locked outside the fortress, or lured into obsidian farms. By the time I was getting champions I'd already gotten several megatons of steel and iron due to magnetite deposits. The iron was used to train up my smiths to legendary +5 skill, and the steel used to forge an all-masterwork series of armor suits for my new axe and speardwarves. Essentially, I turtle on DF like nobody else. If a plan hasn’t had absolutely every last variable ironed out of it (including dwarven idiocy), it won’t be used. My early defences generally consist of war animals, with little to no dwarven military support. Buying/capturing elephants are always my first priority, as is getting them to breed. Elephant calves make excellent cannon-fodder, and give a nice haul of meat and bone if they die in the attempt. After seizing everything from an elven caravan three or four times in a row, they almost always start bringing savage-area tamed wildlife with them and stop bringing worthless cloth and wooden werapons. It’s a great little strategy for building up a non-sentient defence force while your military trains up to champion level with no risk to itself.

You're not alone, there are SOME of us who play as compassionate overlords.  I give my dwarves good housing (even if they don't even bother to sleep in it right now), generally good enough for a noble when I have been going for a couple years.  I build to make an interesting fractal pattern, so all the dwarves tend to have similarly valuable rooms, although some smaller, cheaper rooms remain from the initial wave for those who can't afford better, although typically, that's just some rooms that have unsmoothed walls and crappier beds.

I'm also modding in things like potted mushroom sculptures (custom workshops) to add a little color to the lobbies and communal areas of the fort.

Anyway, all my dwarves are assigned jobs based upon their own preferences - if you like pig tails, you get to be a weaver.  Everyone gets masterwork dyed clothing, and the only time my dwarves will ever fight is if they are already legendary, and suited up in solid steel, and just get put in the fight so that they have something to cut their teeth on. (I don't really like the bluemetal.)

One of my earliest orders of business, after setting up the farm and some basic living quarters and a little stockpile area, is to just plain out carve away all the ramps or construct walls to enclose my entire aboveground area, and ensure that you have to go through a dozen cage traps before you can even see my dwarves unless you're a flyer.  I lost two dwarves to ambushes in my first game in the second and third years... never again!  (I also lost a few to stupid cave-in mistakes, and a couple to sparring accidents, but that's a different story.)

Of course, as benevolent as I am to my dwarves, I'm an absolute monster to my opponents, with all the typical magma floods, 50 straight traps, atom smashers, drawbridges that catapult enemies into a moat filled with crocodiles, crossbowman pillboxes, and of course, the dreaded locked door.

[jerank]

I try not to fall into the old 'insanely long passage of traps' routine to much. For me, ballistae are the answer. In my normal fortresses, I build an external bastion with a main entrance arranged like this. (Every dot is a walkable space)

. ... ...
. . . . .
. . . . .
. . . . .
. . . . .
. . . . .
... ... ..

And so on.

The purpose of this is to channel any walking attackers along the walking area, which is often lined with traps. Ballista emplacements overlook this narrow twisting walkway and can fire at will while the opposition must make approximately twenty steps to bring itself one step closer to my emplacements. When they finally do, they must then walk up a narrow corridor overlooked by another pair of ballista batteries. Only after breaching this layer will they be able to descend my multi-zlevel stairway down to the actual fortress. I put this together after reading the Lets Play of Boatmurdered and Syrupleaf. These external bastions are also multi-level, with the lowest being the entrance, the second being an arrow stockpile, and the third leading up to a set of turrets which allow marksdwarves to shoot down at invaders both as they approach and as they brave the ballista emplacements themselves. Recently I also began designing bridges along the same lines which criss-cross back and forth along the missile trajectory of ballista emplacements, once again meaning an enemy must waste a great deal of time moving up and down without actually moving forward at all. This all takes a great deal of time and effort to build, but feels much more satisfying than simply using the old ‘insanely long passage with traps’ scheme. Orc sieges in the 100+ range have been the only things to so far come remotely close to even threatening this deathtrap defence scheme. I even keep things so they can be easily reversed to fend off an underground HFS invasion.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, one of my favorite defenses is to make a series of drawbridges that go around a pillbox for my marksdwarves.  The drawbridges can be raised to fling seigers into the watery moats filled with crocs or whatever nasty aquatic things I can get my hands on.  I prefer to use "clapping" drawbridges - where there are two drawbridges facing in opposite directions from one another right next to one another at the ends, so that building destroyers can't reach the raised bridges.  (And "clapping" bridges that are raised at the same time will actually atom smash things on the upswing, as well.)

Still, I have to rely on at least an outer ring of cage traps, just to get the megabeasts who will do stupid things like deconstruct the only bridge they can take to get into the fort, and to my waiting garrison, then realize what a stupid move that was, walk over and tip over a couple of windmills, then get bored and leave.

I use a LOT of drawbridges as I get more elaborate in my outer defensive rings (and I don't remove them, I just add more and more rings as I get bored).  I use bridges to make it so that once goblins enter into my courtyard, the exit closes behind them, and they have to take another route out, where there are cage traps galore, so that the goblins that retreat are all captured, as well, and NOBODY escapes my fortress alive.   (I also use bridges as a means of underground access to the trap resetting area... basically, my soil layer becomes a friggin' ant colony of tunnels to my defenses, which are a labyrinth aboveground.)

It gets pretty silly when megabeast attacks consist of 2 minutes of waiting for the dragon to meander through the limited accessways I cut into the mountain, only to finally walk into the first cage trap it finds, and end the "rampage".

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

I'm usually a callous monster in DF, playing almost the stereotypical demanding Old Testament God. I build opulent structures for a few chosen or for no reason at all, and most dwarves live squalid lives in the tunnels of my fortress.

I love doing this. I dig random lines right under the surface with my mouse, ensuring crazyness, and have squalid sewer-ish homes for most of the dwarves, and aboveground build temples and palaces and whatnot. I like to think of it as a testament to how humanity hides its filth in a show of splendor and glory.

The Humans and Elves share the same position as an ambassador in the palace of a 3rd world dictator.
On the one hand, the food is great and this Glorious Leader dude is pretty friendly, but I'm sure there shouldn't be so much screaming outside.

[deoxy]

I try not to fall into the old 'insanely long passage of traps' routine to much. For me, ballistae are the answer.

[a whole bunch of defenses are discussed]

While I can't really fault you for using ballistae (who doesn't like seeing their enemies literally blown to bits?), I do think you description is about 27 kinds of overkill.  If you really want to make sure every enemy that comes to your door dies without losing any of your dwarves, there's a very simple solution...

You path?  The winding one?  Yeah, make that 2 levels high, and floor the second level with hatches.  Link it all to one lever.

Spike trap every tile in the room below, all to the same lever.

When hostiles enter, drop them into the lower room (hatches will work on creatures larger than size 10).  If they fly, they will still go under there, since that's faster than going back and forth.  Close the hatches.  If you missed some (and there aren't any flyers), repeat this as necessary.

When you have them ALL in there, pull the lever until they are all dead.

With just a little creativity on entry and exit methods to these areas, nothing gets in unseen (animals on chains, of course) and nothing ever gets out.

You can even apply ballistae to the both levels, just for added fun.


On a slightly more serious note, it sounds like what you need is a no-migrants game.  Limited labor for a couple of decades really makes the game more demanding.

[jerank]

You miss my point. I do this because I enjoy doing it. Spending an hour building up an extremely pretty-looking yet deadly set of defences is what I like. Killing things quick & dirty holds no interest for me, as there are so many easy, yet very boring ways to do so. A multi-tiered fortress which took thousands of jobs to build is just more satisfying and gives a feeling of personal accomplishment.