Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Korva]

I'd like to try a fort with a bit of "theme" next and thought I'd fish for inspiration. Who here has done a military fort and can share their experiences? Are there any megaprojects you incorporated into the fort? What rules, if any, did you set for yourselves? Is there a map you'd like to show off?

My embark will be a perfectly flat, cold, Untamed Wilds taiga with a brook that I hope will be unfrozen at least during summer. It has sand for a glass industry and an upright spoiler at z-26. A goblin fort is relatively close, so hopefully they will sends "sparring partners" soon enough. If not, I will piss off the humans.

Thoughts so far:

• I'm capping my population at 80, no children allowed (though obviously migrants will probably bring a few). This should help with FPS, and hopefully make things a little less anonymous than with my last 220+ fort.
• I've very much been playing it safe, so deaths have been rare. This time I want to be more reckless, risk more injuries and deaths.
• Danger room use will be allowed, but restricted. I'm thinking to stop once the first skill reaches level 5. After that it's normal training, live combat and prisoner-bashing only. I hope this will give me some basic survivability but allow room for Fun.
• Everyone has to undergo at least some basic military training. Everyone will have to earn their place in the fort by serving in at least one ambush/siege, and ideally by slaying at least one enemy (in live combat or 1-on-1 against a prisoner). I may make an exception from the second rule for my doctor unless/until a migrant with decent medical skills shows up.
• Once that condition is met, the dwarf will be entitled to individual quarters. Until then, they have to crash in the newbie barracks.
• For now I'm undecided whether I will allow for this fort to become a barony. Maybe allow the first dwarf with x kills or the first legendary weapon-user to become the baron (unless s/he has hots for slade or mostly stuff I don't have)?

I don't think there's a good way to reserve a swanky dining room and the best food and booze only for proven residents while the newbies have to make do with basic stuff, is there? I'm not going to build two essentially separate forts.

And finally: if I stick the green recruits in iron or copper for their trial-by-fire period (or even just leather) and reserve the good steel for the pros, am I crippling their odds too much? I want the odd death and injury, yes, but I don't want entire barely-trained newbie squads annihilated by a single ambush group.

... or do I?    (I have been rather too easy on my dwarves so far.)

[Girlinhat]

Well, a few running themes.  First of all, cage traps in the front defense, but only a few.  Catch the first 3-4 ambushers and let the rest hit your army.  Those few skimmed off the top will be for live training and other mischief.

As for the mischief, there's the usual assortment.  Pitting towers are rather dwarfy, and very Spartan.  Gladiator pits are a MUST, and not just stripped prisoners and groups of 2-3 gobbos.  Things like, wild bears, and whole captured ambush squads.  To be a serious gladiator pit, it needs flooding capacity and a cage of untame lions nearby.  The ability to breeds and handle untame creatures will be an important challenge.  What better way to show off than have your commander wrestle a lion into the dirt?  Unarmed matches would be nice too.  Gobbo with a weak weapon like a copper sword, or any elf, against an unarmed dwarf, or with only a shield.  Underwater combat as well, have a flooded arena WITH lions and goblins and a few trolls!  Screw pump grind chambers would be nice, to train your stats as well.  Potentially don't use windmills, use only raw dwarf power.

As for setup, towers and pits, in my opinion.  Spiraling towers of multi-tiered barracks, archer vantage points from within the barracks to rain down on sieges.  Civilians are important, and should be properly restrained.  They live on the surface, farming various crops and dumping them through holes to the soldier's barracks, completely broken from contact with the rest of the fort and only used as a sort of slave labor (which means your food source will never tantrum).  A grand mess hall is a must, a large, long table to eat at, preferably two tables with chairs on opposite sides, to give the appearance of a single long table.  Kitchen within the mess hall, butcher as well.  Survive on meat whenever possible, only turning to plants for booze and when enemies aren't plentiful.  You'll probably want to mod the raws here, to allow ethics to let you eat goblins and other sentients, so that you can sustain yourselves on enemy attacks alone.  You can also mod goblins to siege or ambush sooner, so population cap isn't that important if you tweak it.  Killing fields too, a large roughly paved area to engage in flat out open combat, or more creative with a few fortifications and pillars.  Perhaps simulate a ruins environment?

Danger rooms should be dangerous as well.  High-quality wooden spears, or copper/iron spears maybe, add some real risk to it.  Doctors stay out of combat, much like planters, with the ideology of "I got stabbed, do your job and fix this". 

[darkflagrance]

My last three forts have been military-based, using heavily modded games that sent tons of enemies at me along the lines of the 40d Relentless Assault or the 31.1x Fortress Defense mods.

I set up three industries: farming/food production, bonecarving, and smithing. Smithing armored my warriors, while food and bonecarving are natural industries to encourage when you end up with tons of corpses after every season. High food exports also encourage immigration, meaning floods of expendable recruits.
However, my forts were set-up to be self-sufficient, with lifespans of ten years and childhoods of one year, so most of my peasants were used for the purposes of breeding more soldiers. After spawning three or four future recruits, I would then draft the parent into the military. Out of a 140 citizen fort, I tended to have 25 or so elite melee soldiers, along with 14 or so marksmen and similar amounts of fortress guard. I also normally had 25 children running around at all times.

Early on in the fort's life, I build a massive wall around the fortress, and then build towers or firing positions where appropriate to cover the quadrants of the map. Usually, there is a smaller inner courtyard where enemies can be lured in and trapped for the military to surround and slaughter.

Iron spears in danger rooms will decimate your fort unless you can somehow get constant replacements and really good doctors. I'd advise only danger-rooming your elites to a certain level, and perhaps restricting danger-room privileges to those who have already survived one battle (and thus deserve the training).

You can use burrows to restrict dining rooms.

As for recruit survival, you should probably at least make sure they are fully armored. If you don't engage in a lot of trade or mod your dwarves to have high birthrates and short childhoods, you might run out of soldiers (not that that isn't Fun of course...)

[Urist Da Vinci]

If you want reckless fun, plan on confronting every enemy in your territory until all of your dwarves die in glorious battle. Most people's forts end when they get bored, or the FPS gets too low. You should plan a fort that will eventually end in epic bloodshed.

[Aussiemon]

What works rather well is building a small squad of hand-picked Dwarves, a drawbridge over a 4-5 z-level drop, and then having the small squad wait at the bottom to mop up the survivors. It may be a bit cheap, but it works incredibly well.

This is inspired by the time I realized my drawbridge wasn't killing goblins with the drop. I had to scramble a bunch of laborers and send them to punch the weakened enemies to death.

[ext0l]

Make your farms as early as possible, then work on your metal industry. Hopefully, you'll have 1 squad of dwarves armed and possibly partially armoured by the end of the second summer. If you're using danger rooms, have them spend ~1 year in there then keep them as permanent soldiers. Start squad 2 and 3 simultaneously in the danger room. If you're not using danger rooms, have them fight crundles/trogs/bugbats from the caverns. It's much faster than traditional training. If you don't have armoured dwarfs by the first ambush, it's very likely you will have a tantrum spiral unless you trap spam or block your entrance, which isn't fun.
After building your army, focus on bedrooms, dining rooms, hospital, etc.

Enable furnace operating on every migrant. In later sieges, enemies will bring so much armor that you can rely on that for iron/copper/silver.
Run dfcleanmap often to minimize lag.

[Girlinhat]

I can reasonably equip a full squad of soldiers in copper gear by end of first year if I'm pushing it.  Probably iron too, but I've not tried that embark scenario yet.  It all revolves around priorities.  Have a few people do a farm, while the rest spam out some furnaces.

[Sutremaine]

The more skilled a dwarf is, the less armour they need due to plain not getting hit, but any hits that do get through (eg. ones from behind) will hurt badly. I'm not too up on taiga wildlife, but a breeding pair of small herbivores should be safe opponents for newbies in leather or sub-iron metal. Catch them, throw them in a 3x3 pit with a 1x3 bridge in the bottom leading to a training room, and you have a nice supply of live targets after a few years*, which is about the point you might start running out of things to kill underground. Undead will spawn infinitely, but you're not in an evil biome.

*Obligatory 'this won't work on any animal not normally a pet if you don't purge _EXOTIC from your raws'.

[Girlinhat]

If we're going to discuss breeding wild animals, this is definitely the right forum to do so.

[Korva]

Thanks for the input! Good idea with the breeding pits for wild animals. With some luck I'll have black or grizzly bears and sasquatches eventually. I've also modded the raws to add leopards and tigers and their giant variants, as well as tigermen (and changed PET_EXOTIC while Dungeon Masters are still bugged). There are no Terrifying taigas in this world, sadly, just glaciers, tundras and oceans. I have a Terrifying glacier earmarked as my next project, probably. And since I've never really peeked into the caverns much, I will definitely remember to explore and catch critters from there this time.

Facepalm moment about burrows, I'll try that to keep the dining halls and food/booze supplies for newbies and proven residents separate.

There must definitely be towers and a proper arena! Maybe I'll make a big outdoor arena my semi-megaproject.

Trying to have the dwarves eat mostly meat is a good idea, too -- especially the meat of their hapless animal "sparring partners".

I have to re-gen this world anyway so I think I'll reduce the siege and titan attack requirements from 80 to 60 while I'm at it. Thanks for the reminder.

Boredom is what has caused all my past forts to be shelved, yeah, so I want to add a little more adrenaline and play it less safe this time. I also need a semi-megaproject or two to keep focused. Extensive outer walls and the outdoor arena plus maybe the usual fancy multi-level central hall underground should do the trick, as well as the desire to breach the place with the upright spoiler.

Cheers all, I'm looking forward to this.

[Namfuak]

When you get bored of the fort, you could end it in a glorious grand melee between every dwarf in the fort by putting the trade depot in the middle of the arena, having every fighting dwarf in the area, and killing the animals from the dwarven caravan.

As for the fort itself, there are a lot of good suggestions here, so my only thought would be that it might be interesting dwarves with many kills had individual rooms that expanded based on the number of kills they had (maybe notable kills only).  So, after 10 notable they might get a 1x1 room with just a bed, another 5 and it expands to 1x2 and gets a chest, another 5 and it goes to 1x3 with a coffer, etc.  Eventually, you could have a whole housing system spanning multiple z-levels, where each dwarf had different sized and numbers of rooms (they might get studies, dining rooms, gardens, etc after certain numbers of kills).

[Korva]

When you get bored of the fort, you could end it in a glorious grand melee between every dwarf in the fort by putting the trade depot in the middle of the arena, having every fighting dwarf in the area, and killing the animals from the dwarven caravan.

Deliberate loyalty cascade? Now that is an evil thought. Gotta keep it in mind!

As for the fort itself, there are a lot of good suggestions here, so my only thought would be that it might be interesting dwarves with many kills had individual rooms that expanded based on the number of kills they had (maybe notable kills only).

Hmm, that is an idea. I'm an obsessive planner who likes to give all dwarves nice quarters so my options are limited, but I could see about adding offices for outstanding service, as well as more/better furniture, and maybe start with 3x3 default rooms and leave enough room to expand to my usual 5x5 later ...

Had to re-gen the world to get some raw modifications activated, and now my chosen spot is Joyous Wilds. Unicorns ahoy, too bad they can't be tamed (maybe I should mod THAT too), but they should make for fun sparring partners at least.

[TheyTarget]

I can reasonably equip a full squad of soldiers in copper gear by end of first year if I'm pushing it.  Probably iron too, but I've not tried that embark scenario yet.  It all revolves around priorities.  Have a few people do a farm, while the rest spam out some furnaces.

My last fort was pretty heavy on the military. If you go straight for steel, working none stop(leave the food and farming for the first migrant wave, you'll get by on the embark food) you can get two dwarfs in full steel armor by winter first year. First thing I did was bring some charcoal. Had my dwarfs use the one piece of charcoal to make coke, and then once I had 20-30 I got a second smelter going through the process to make steel. Then directly to the armorer. Had two dwarfs pretty much unbeatable by first year cause they were danger room training as well. They kept the fort defended well enough quickly reaching legendary in weapon, shield, fighter, and armor user skill. Gave me more then enough time to train and prepare a very nice force of dwarfs.

[Dreggon]

If you want a semi-megaproject appropriate to a military fortress, may I suggest making an arena for the clowns? Remember that they can fly. Any dwarf that can't fight (i.e. nobles) should be delegated towards maintenance of the circus.

[TurkeyXIII]

Do without the danger rooms.  You won't need 'em.  If you have more soldiers than they do, you'll win fights even with very little training.  You might even survive without armour, but that would be pushing it.

Remember bring some lye with you when you embark, and ask the liaison to import some too.  You'll be needing quite a bit of soap.