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[Lemunde]

I was considering making a guide to making a fortress survive just about any kind of tragedy or incursion.  But then I realized I don't know everything and everyone has their own way of doing things and aren't willing to sacrifice some of the things I am to keep a fortress going.  So I'm opening this up to everyone to post some tips on how they keep their fortresses from succumbing to the every day perils of dwarven life.  I'll start with some of the tricks I've picked up over the past months.

1: Seal yourself in.  This is the most reliable method of protecting your dwarves' collective assets from the outside world but comes at a cost.  You will need to make sure anything you need from the surface or the caves is already in good supply.  Most notably wood.  With some engineering you can create a tree farm underground or wall off an area above ground for green trees.

The most notable sacrifice is your lack of access to trade.  You will need to rely on your own resources for all of your needs.  Raising your own animals for meat and leather can help.

The real trick is handling migrants.  If you wall in too early you may be stuck with just a handful of dwarves.  Fortunately bad things don't usually start happening until several months into the game so you can risk holding off until you feel your population is sufficient.  This can work in your favor if you are trying to keep your population low.

This doesn't have to be a permanent solution.  Walling in while you get your military and other industries under way can save you a lot of headache early on but once you get up and running you should consider opening up again.  I highly recommend this strategy for newer players.

2: Use a bridge or a gate.  A good and commonly used alternative to keeping yourself walled in all the time is to use a gate or a bridge to allow passage only during certain events such as migrant waves or caravans.  These gates are best combined with other defenses such as military or traps. 

Care must be taken when designing these gateways as ranged hostiles can fire bolts and arrows directly into your fortress without fearing reprisal.  You should arrange passage through the gateway so that the bulk of your fortress interior does not have a direct line of sight to the outside.  Combined with a properly positioned squad near the entrance, ranged attacks can be rendered almost completely useless.

Make sure the gateway is only open when you need it.  This can be difficult to keep up with for new players.  Keeping an eye on announcements will tell you when you should open or close the gate.

3: Military > Traps.  Don't get me wrong.  I love traps.  I've used them in almost every fortress I've made.  But they come with a price.

There's no doubt that properly designed traps can slice up most of your ambushers and kidnappers without any trouble.  The problems occur when they are being maintained.  Inevitably your traps will become jammed.  If you leave them alone they will unjam on their own.  Unfortunately there is no option to force your dwarves to leave them alone short of using burrows and I'm not even going to go into all the trouble burrows have given me.  And unless you have an excessively large array of traps you will need to have them cleaned regularly.

So what eventually happens is you get a dwarf that decides to clean a trap and it just happens to be at the worst possible time.  A goblin ambush pops up right at your door step and the dwarf cleaning the trap faces almost certain doom.  This is compounded by the fact that more often than not your dwarves will tend to run out of your fortress instead of back in.  However his chances increase significantly if you have a squad nearby.

I don't have any magic numbers for your military.  I've successfully defended a fortress in the past with only 4 axedwarves but I've needed more in others.  For the inexperienced, stick with axes and/or swords and use bronze or higher for materials. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If at all possible, dig all the way down to the magma to find adamantine and dig out the top layer(perfectly safe) to get some adamantine weapons started.

 

In any case you'll want to make your weapons out of the best materials you have available.  Trading for steel is a viable option as you won't require much for weapons or you can trade for the weapons directly.  For armor you can get away with using lesser materials.  But try to use plate instead of chain to avoid stray bolts and arrows.

4: Make sure you have a little bit of everything.  Probably the most irritating way for a dwarf to die is to go into a mood, claim a workshop, and sit there, slowly going insane because there's no silk thread or raw glass lying around.  This is where trade becomes more important.  The materials are usually cheap and it only takes a little of each to insure your moody dwarves have what they need.  If there's any industry you don't plan on having, go ahead and trade for some of the materials for them.  Also consider embarking with it if you can.

5: Keep your dwarves happy.  This should go without saying and since there are so many methods to this I won't go into too much detail.  But I do think I should emphasize the importance of keeping your dwarves happy.  Megaprojects are all well and good but you shouldn't neglect the feelings of your dwarves in the process, especially since it doesn't take too much work.  Otherwise the first dwarf that bites the dust is going to set your other dwarves down the path of mood death and nobody wants that......Okay, a lot of people want that but it's not a good way to keep a fortress going.

Quick tip to keep dwarves happy: Big dining room and a variety of booze.  Remember, the more happy thoughts, the better.

[Vastin]

One thing that makes a fortress virtually unassailable is having the primary access be a drawbridge over a dry moat. At that point only a flying building destroyer can get in (assuming you didn't leave gaps elsewhere.), so pretty much only a titan is a real threat.

As for dealing with caravans, traps and so on, the following scheme works very well:

3xN Underground road leading to close to the edge of the map, channels in the ground where it ramps up to the surface ensure that the caravans have only this one path in, and must enter directly from the edge where your road terminates. Add moat+drawbridge arrangements at both ends (DRAWBRIDGE, not retracting bridge! The drawbridge keeps out missiles & flyers when it is up).

Line the corridor with traps. Most of the time you can leave this open, the traps will give you plenty of warning that something is in the tunnel, though I tie a guard dog inside the entrance for good measure.

When gobbos start setting off your traps, seal the tunnel so they can't get out. Let them run through all the traps towards your fort. Then as they get close, seal the near side and open the exit, now they'll all run back OUT trying to escape. Wash rinse and repeat until they are all dead or your traps are all jammed. Then either let them flee the map, or send in the heavily armored clowns to mop up.

Once the gobbos are dead or gone, seal the exit ramp and get to work collecting goblinite and resetting traps in perfect safety.

Honestly, it's pretty easy to make a fortress nigh impregnable - but titans and FB's can still pose a threat unless you keep yourself completely walled in. If you don't care about migrants and caravans, you can do that pretty easily as long as you make arrangements for a safe water supply you can refill without exposing yourself to the outside world.

But then, where's the fun in that? I suggest digging down to the nearest cavern immediately and attempt to settle it wholesale.

[Hyndis]

Easy way is to just seal yourself in. You can do this with a simple drawbridge linked to a lever.

Tap into a brook, aquifer, ocean, or underground lake for water. Set up a farm inside the walls of your fortress.

Its okay if you don't have all materials for strange moods. Just ensure that your dwarves have plenty of idle time together in a small meeting zone. Your fortress will soon be crawling with tiny bearded Urists, and they will replace the losses from insane dwarves. To prevent berserk dwarves when a mood is failed put cage traps between the workshop and the rest of the fortress, so any berserk dwarf is captured within seconds of going berserk.


You now have food, water, booze, wood, an endless stream of babies, and no enemies. You can then set up an airlock for traders. Two bridges, with a trade depot between bridges. Open outer bridge to allow traders into depot. Seal outer bridge, open inner bridge. Trade.

[Gnauga]

Regarding goblin defences, if you really really want to make a fort last from invasion, make a moat as close to the edge of the map as possible. Make a single 1-tile entry way as far from your main entrance as possible, extrapolate a path between your fort's entrance and the moat's entryway, and fill it up with cage traps. Build a massive execution tower with steel spikes at the bottom to dispose of captured scallywags. Honestly, I have about 200 cage traps set up like this, although poor planning means they aren't all hit reliably. The downside is that this is quite cheap, to the point that some regard it as an exploit.

If you do use it, however, it means that you will never see an ambush popping up at your front door, and will almost never see a thief or snatcher being caught in the middle of your fortress. In my experience, captured prisoners of ambushes or sieges can be dragged around with ease, and you don't need to worry about them breaking free from a dwarf's grip on their way to the top of the execution tower. Thieves and snatchers are slippery like soap, and cannot safely be dragged around. Also trap-avoid or flying things will have to be taken on by your military or a more complex defense system.

[Hyndis]

To ensure traps are walked on use retractable bridges to narrow the path. For example, make a 1 tile wide, 40 tile long walkway of death. Fill it with traps of all kinds. To speed up travel when cleaning up after a siege put this walkway up in the air, with a retractable bridge on one or both sides. Extending the bridges turns it into a 5 tile wide freeway for your dwarves. They will zoom about very quickly. In times of siege retract the bridge and its a twisty, winding path of death where goblins very slowly try to squeeze by, crowding each other out.

This gives ample time for the traps to do their thing. You can use spike traps on a repeater, cage traps, or weapon traps. Each trap will be walked over repeatedly, resulting in 100% efficiency.

[Lost Requiem]

If you live in a mountain range, shave away the mountain gradually until you can create choke points for the enemy. Flatten the walls and channel away the overhangs and remove ramps. There is really nothing you could do about the parts on the borders, but at least the path of the enemy will be predictable.

Trap bridges that drop down several Z-levels into the first cavern are a fun idea. in the case of non-flying/giant enemies, they will break a few bones from the fall, and will be easy pickings for your army. Bonus points if you drop them into magma.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

MEGA ULTRA-DWARVEN points if you drop them straight into Hell!

[Hokan]

Flood it. With magma. No, not the fortress, the entire world.

[Gnauga]

Flood it. With magma. No, not the fortress, the entire world.

Magma tends to leak out the edges of the map. You'll need to build a wall to turn your embark into a magma-cistern if you want to do that. Or if you can get a sufficient stream from a sufficiently speedily replenishing source, you could just let it leak out.

[Hokan]

Flood it. With magma. No, not the fortress, the entire world.

Magma tends to leak out the edges of the map. You'll need to build a wall to turn your embark into a magma-cistern if you want to do that. Or if you can get a sufficient stream from a sufficiently speedily replenishing source, you could just let it leak out.

Who needs magma encasement when you can just drain the entire sea with pumpstacks? Sustainability can suck it!

[FleshForge]

A way to test if your fort is "airtight":
1. Get everyone inside
2. Close the gate(s)
3. Try to build anything (e.g. a 1x1 wall section) outside your perimeter; if it says "no access" then you are airtight.  If it allows you to build, then you are vulnerable!

[Organum]

^ That method relies upon there being no materials which could be used to build such a thing lying outside of your fort proper. I tend to have loads of stone and wood just lying around outside of my fortresses, so if I were to try your method I would always get a negative (vulnerable) result.

In that situation, the only way to be absolutely certain is to do a manual check.

A pro to this is that it forces you to double and triple check your defenses, and in a game like this that's never a mistake.

[Vercingetorix]

That's especially true in the caverns, where you can inadvertently punch an opening in to the caverns without noticing and live a nice path for a Forgotten Beast to sneak through.  This is especially bad deeper down, when you're already working to secure your fort against annoying things like crundles.

[Flaede]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

MEGA ULTRA-DWARVEN points if you drop them straight into Hell!

Has anyone managed this? That is awesome! That is right up there with the first repeater spike trap, building-destroyer bait trap, or automatic-season-change entrance-switch with flooding trap.

[cog disso]

I'm nuts about traps, bridges and dogs. An exposed overworld tile within 10 steps of the fortress must have a trap (resulting in my INSANE trap building industry, regularly 10 mechanics shops are on hand). Every three tiles must contain a dog, encircling the overworld fortress, and one of the BEST defenses is actually the combination moat and multi-story wall. Build the bridge on TOP of the wall, with a connecting staircase on the other side.

Remember that dismantling and rebuilding your Trade Depot is always acceptable. I make my traders enter a SECONDARY guarded facility away from the main fortress, which has a drawbridge and an underground series of floodgates that all have to be activated. Once the trader is in the door, the bridge raises, the floodgates underneath open, and trading can begin in earnest. The trader's office needs to be available from the underground floodgate tunnel, so that traders never see the traps inside the main fortress. I call this the "Airlock" system.

All staircases have a five tile safety circle of stone fall traps.

I always build an underground well and an walled off farming facility for safety purposes.

I'm kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind of a paranoid son of a bitch. That said, I've never met a siege I didn't like.

[Eugenitor]

Well, if you want to be relatively safe from goblins (and not cheat), you can always embark where they don't exist, like islands. I'm doing this for my current FB-slaying fort as I can't be bothered to deal with gobbos right now.

Apparently dwarves are the only ones with boats as the only caravan I get is from Doran Shoveth.