tl;dr: I suck at DF, and now I'm gonna try a megaproject. What got you started on megaprojects?
The long version:
For the longest time now, a huge part of DF has remained a mystery to me. I started playing last summer, and got okay at sustaining a fort, but I lost interest. I checked out .31.01 when it was released, but I didn't feel like I could understand the military so I quit again. Then, around the time .31.10 came out, I started again, and figured out the military and all that stuff. So at that point I could start a .31 fort, keep it going on plump helmets and defend it adequately. A lot of stuff seemed too confusing to tackle: glassmaking, hunting, clothesmaking, power; I assumed it was impossible. Then, on .12, I started Fortresscobra.
Fortresscobra was my first real fort. It lasted seven years, with an accomplished military, massive food production system, hunting squads, clothing industry, etc. I even started a windmill farm, though the tantrum spiral came too soon for me to hook it up to my planned 130 z-level magma pump stack. The progression was simple: already curious about how these things worked, I decided to try them for myself. To my amazement, they weren't too hard.
So now I'm on my next fort. I got it up and running way faster than any other fort I've ever had (granted, it was a very supple embark site; I'm not ready to embark on my first haunted glacier just yet), and early on I decided I wanted to have a huge mausoleum. Fortresscobra had a mausoleum, too, though it consisted of several large rooms with equally spaced caskets inside them, and several specially decorated 3x3 tombs for my most special dwarves. This seemed too easy this time around. I decided to make it more interesting: a 27x27x5 room with a central access shaft. On the floor level will be 3x3x2 tombs for every important dwarf. I haven't decided where the commondwarves go yet, but that can come later.
Now I know that, by DF standards, my 27x27x5 mausoleum is nothing impressive. But for me, it's huge; I haven't built one room before this that spanned multiple z-levels, and it will have several multiple z-level buildings inside it. I haven't finished it yet, but I know I'll be able to, and that gives me a huge amount of confidence. I actually feel like I could attempt what has for so long seemed impossible: a megaproject.
However, I know that not everybody's progression to megaprojects was so slow and tentative. I see plenty of people who say they had two normal forts before delving into their first megaproject. My question to the forum is how did you get into doing megaprojects?
Author
Topic: How did you get into megaprojects? (Read 973 times)