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Build a massive, walled fort, filled with decorative eye candy.

18 (16.5%)

Deep, complex caverns, hiding in a cliff face, a minimalistic approach.

19 (17.4%)

A hybrid of the two, focusing not only on rare ores, but adequete defense.

21 (19.3%)

What plans?! I live on impulse and raw, dwarven, emotion!

51 (46.8%)

Total Members Voted: 109

[Naz]

I figure out where I want my water source to come from and dig a tiny hole there with a small room below it. Then I designate that as an everything stockpile, destroy the wagon and move everything inside. After that I build a secure "surrounded by walls" staircase up to a platform with my trade depot on it, remembering to have a bridge or something that can be closed to deny access to my fort. All this is going on while I'm mining out the area I want to build my farms in and the necessary irrigation and any woodcutters I have are outside clear cutting the woods and hauling the logs back inside. After the farms are dug out, the irrigation is functional and the farms are built I plan out where I want the rest of my fort to go and start digging. I usually plan my fort based around what the pop cap is. So it takes FOREVER to dig out and design plumbing for but once it's done I don't have to worry about placing something important in some random ass place because I don' have space where it should be placed. All that is during my first year.

Also at some point I usually seal myself off from the outside completely by walling off that original entry point. I do this to protect myself from sieges and titans until I'm ready to dig up to where I want my entrance to be and get traps n such built to handle anything that might come at me. A major thing to remember when doing this is that you have to build a tree farm underground and, most likely, tap magma or you'll run out of fuel and supplies before you can return to the surface.

[Darkweave]

Usually I take a bit of iron ore, flux and wood with me, embark in fairly mountainous regions and being making 2-3 steel picks and 2-3 steel axes (EVERYTHING has to be made of steel!!!)

While this is going on I scout out an entrance and get my miners to start fishing for a nice early food boost. As soon as the picks and axes are done, I mine out some more ores and flux to make 3-4 sets of steel armour so I can get the first migrant wave training for the military. After this, I make a temp-fort and wall myself in, usually just letting migrants in and and begin carving out a huge fort complete with 10-Z-high fully smoothed dining room and individual workshops and bedrooms for each Dwarf, with farming taking place in the caverns.

This is my usual approach but I've been far too slow at getting a decently equipped military up & running so usually I end up staying walled off, get bored or make a mistake with the fort design and start again.

Plan for next time: Embark with 3 copper picks, mine out coal, iron ore and flux, get 10 sets of steel armour and weapons made and 10 Dwarves training by the end of the first year. Hopefully by the end of the second year I'll have 20-30 steel-clad Dwarves ready to defend my entrance in shifts so that I can focus on my grand main fort without getting bored of being inaccessible to invaders. I'll probably wall of a section of the caverns for farming and water then focus on my entrance, typically a huge spherical cavern inside a mountain. I try and fill the bottom half with magma and have a huge winding glass staircase down to the main fort but usually get bored before then. Only just now thought of channeling the outside of the sphere, building a support then collapsing the whole lot to speed this up a bit, totally need to try that! After that I'll move to the 10-Z smoothed dining room, themed workshop areas with individual bedrooms and workshops for each Dwarf. I might even try a glass labyrinth hanging from the dining room ceiling that I can throw goblins in to and a few magma waterfalls.

Yes, half my Dwarves are usually miners and engraves, hence my failtastic military!

[Diakron]

1. Design elaborate fortress
2. Create small crappy 'prefort' to house dwarves while they build the grand elaborate fortress
3. Years pass
4. 10 years later I'm still in the prefort, which has been organically expanded to house everyone
5. Get bored, gen new world
6. Promise self not to get distracted and build the true fort this time!

^^^

This, but my prefort always grows like option 1

[Psieye]

Option 2 is closest to my technique: dig down to the magma sea ASAP, start making eye candy items to sell.

[omniclasm]

I usually do the 3x30 entrance thing...

Though in my newest fort, I made a 12x36 entrance, 2 zlevels high. Then on the ground floor I made a moat 3 squares wide on each side and filled it with water. On the second story of the walls, I hollowed them out and made fortifications to act as a pill box on each side of the entrace

then for my house structure, I dug out a 12x24 square with a 2 square path along the outside, with rooms leading out of the path. 6 zlevels high, with a giant pit in the middle, a 2 wide path on every level, and rooms lead out from the path that are 3x4.

Quite happy with it

[Musashi]

0. Imagine a nice, elaborate, coherent design of my fortress
1. Actually embark and forget half the actual design, therefore designing only parts of the stuff to dig
2. Get frustrated because the miners won't dig the bedrooms and stock rooms fast enough, therefore un-designating most of that shit and build rooms
3. Struggle to flood a farm
4. Struggle some more
5. No, really, it takes me that long to set up a single farm
6. Watch the dwarves starting to starve and get dehydrated
7. When the caravan arrives, rage because I didn't make any craft for trading and can only give a couple things in exchange for booze if I'm lucky
8. Prolong everyone's suffering until the whole fort goes berserk or gobbos ambush us, whichever comes first
9. Reclaim and see things go much smoother because there are already workshops, beds, and a farm that only require 30 more seconds to be set up, and I can't remember why it was so difficult to make in the first place



I'm forced to do things the complicated way, or so it seems.

[Corona688]

Now that the military isn't quite so badly bugged I've been trying to use it more, resulting in injuries which ARE still pretty badly bugged but can be worked around the dwarven way, dropping rocks on it.  Surviving a GCS invasion without recourse to cage traps is pretty Fun.

[Sutremaine]

1. Design elaborate fortress
2. Create small crappy 'prefort' to house dwarves while they build the grand elaborate fortress
3. Years pass
4. 10 years later I'm still in the prefort, which has been organically expanded to house everyone
5. Get bored, gen new world
6. Promise self not to get distracted and build the true fort this time!

Indeed. For the first three years of the fort the only things built below ground were a table and a chair (not least because I accidentally removed the anvil from the embark screen), and still there's not a single square dug out for rooms. And now I've lost another year because I forgot to turn the temperature back on, leaving me no access to the plumbing.

But it'll be worth it in the end. Everything I've carved out so far will be sealed off under a wall, and then I can work with an entirely safe cavern area and a pristine top surface.