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[Dorfus]

Every single fort I make is starting to follow the same pattern and I'm struggling to willfully break it. I put my farms/food/dining hall in the same structure I usually do, big centralized areas and large multi-use stockpiles. I even follow the same order for building things - drawbridge, food, traps, trade, military, housing, military equipment.

I just don't think I anticipate scale well enough - each migrant wave I get I simply pile into a custom profession and leave them to do hauling tasks.

How do you guys manage to break out of typical design routines/fort constructions and make something more interesting and unique?

[Sir Iryn]

Usually, I build a human fort afterwards. I'm working on one right now, actually. All constructed buildings on the surface, most made out of stone pulled from the mines with a mix of wood buildings in there. Requires a bit of modding to get right. You need to add in all the dwarf jobs, add in all the dwarf reactions, change humans to playable, add in dwarf traps, and I believe a change needs to be made to make dwarven caravans arrive.

After a little while of playing that human fort, I typically come back to dwarves with a few new ideas.

[Vactor]

Some easy changes:

-Remove the drawbridge and traps part of your build, face the world with an open door.
-Build above-ground only.
-Build a decentralized fortress, where each dwarf has its own micro-fort, set up a trade system using stockpiles and a dedicated teamster's union.

[Ephemeriis]

I find that I usually go looking for roughly the same kind of embark...  And then I build things in roughly the same way...  And it turns out roughly the same way every time...  And then I start getting bored...

So, what I'll do, is look for something dramatically different from the start.

Maybe embark to a glacier, or the oceanfront, or onto a volcano, or some place with a lot of rivers, or an aquifer, or an evil biome, or whatever.  Something different enough that your normal strategies don't work quite the way they usually do.  Does a good job of messing me up just enough to get me out of my rut.

[Dorfus]

I found something to do! I took your suggestion, Vactor, and made a decentralised fortress. I spent two whole seasons walling up a big perimiter and then sketching some sample burrow layouts. Then I began building the burrows, each one focusing on a single industry. All of my food comes from the food burrow, all of my trade goods from the trade, etc. I have a dedicated team of haulers and masons/miners running between the burrows keeping everyone stocked on food and supplies and it looks awesome - like clockwork.

My favourite bit is the specialisation - each burrow-dorf has his own assigned bed and the more lively burrows have dedicated haulers who live solely to facilitate things within the burrow. As an example, my food burrow is currently feeding 30 dwarves and has one farmer, one butcher/tanner/brewer/chef and one food hauler who takes all the products up to the food stockpile for the cross-burrow haulers to distribute. Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

[Dr_Pylons]

I found something to do! I took your suggestion, Vactor, and made a decentralised fortress. I spent two whole seasons walling up a big perimiter and then sketching some sample burrow layouts. Then I began building the burrows, each one focusing on a single industry. All of my food comes from the food burrow, all of my trade goods from the trade, etc. I have a dedicated team of haulers and masons/miners running between the burrows keeping everyone stocked on food and supplies and it looks awesome - like clockwork.

My favourite bit is the specialisation - each burrow-dorf has his own assigned bed and the more lively burrows have dedicated haulers who live solely to facilitate things within the burrow. As an example, my food burrow is currently feeding 30 dwarves and has one farmer, one butcher/tanner/brewer/chef and one food hauler who takes all the products up to the food stockpile for the cross-burrow haulers to distribute. Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

Does this cut down on idlers? I might have to try this...

[Dorfus]

Not exactly. You have to spare about 10-15% of your dwarves to keep everyone fed and watered and supplied. The best bit is how easy it is to give dwarves new work to do. If I want to suddenly double my farming capacity, I simply assign dwarves to that burrow, turn on the labour and build the farms. The haulers and stockpile settings take care of getting seeds in, harvesting, getting barrels, taking food out to give to other burrows etc.

It doesn't exactly reduced the amount of idlers but it does make it easier to give dwarves something to do that doesn't consist of mass-dumping stone.

[Shrugging Khan]

First off, I look around the world. If I find a particularly interesting embark location, I check it out in the various embark tabs (elevation, trading access, biome etc.), make some mental notes about it and close the game. Then I go off to plan for a few days, and only once I've thought of an interesting plan do I proceed and actually play...and fail, usually.

When there's no interesting embark, the plan comes first - and the embark choice second. Or a re-gen.

[ISGC]

rather than looking for a specific area that includes everything you need, try an area where something is lacking.  Challenge yourself through terrain, instead of looking for the same volcano/flux/river map, because that will lead to the same fort over and over.

[Rowanas]

Whenever I get bored, I mod. Modding helps keep things fresh for me, try out new things, test ideas. Probe the boundaries of my knowledge and skill.

[ThaMuzz]

Megaprojects.  I have a standard fortress design (complete with quickfort blueprints).  Once the basics are dealt with, however, its time to build.

[morikal]

I found something to do! I took your suggestion, Vactor, and made a decentralised fortress. I spent two whole seasons walling up a big perimiter and then sketching some sample burrow layouts. Then I began building the burrows, each one focusing on a single industry. All of my food comes from the food burrow, all of my trade goods from the trade, etc. I have a dedicated team of haulers and masons/miners running between the burrows keeping everyone stocked on food and supplies and it looks awesome - like clockwork.

My favourite bit is the specialisation - each burrow-dorf has his own assigned bed and the more lively burrows have dedicated haulers who live solely to facilitate things within the burrow. As an example, my food burrow is currently feeding 30 dwarves and has one farmer, one butcher/tanner/brewer/chef and one food hauler who takes all the products up to the food stockpile for the cross-burrow haulers to distribute. Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

Huh... I tried this a few months ago, and got stuck on various bugs around burrows & hauling...

for example, my brewer did not have food hauling enabled, but he would get stuck repeatedly picking up his completed barrel of booze, and then dropping it, cancelling due to there being no available dropoff.

Has this been fixed?

[Dorfus]

Don't think so. I gave everyone stockpiles or a hauler to move stuff away from them. There've been few complaints so far - the occasional drop-off inaccessible issue but then a hauler sweeps in and takes care of it for me. Currently running it into the ground though, having dug down a few hundred z-levels to find magma for a metal industry. Since I've run out of wood I'm relying on making enough metal to provide enough bins to make more metal. The problem is I've got so many people working on it they're using all the metal they're making to make enough bins to hold the metal they're making :/ Still, it'll work out soon enough. Got a batch of 20 or so stone haulers to dedicate their lives to the forge soon.

[Vactor]

Glad I could help 

[MacMahoon]

I find that DF becomes !!FUN!! when you dont make farms. All of your food comes from caravans and slaughtering animals. The game turns from a slow decent into madness and FPS death to an exciting famine fort. It is especially FUN when a siege prevents the caravan from coming for a while. Or a race dies out in worldgen.