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[Voyager]

So the stream of Goblin invasions and the comatose armoursmith have taken their toll.  All that remains of my army is the awesome Soapmaker (who is about the only guy to have survived more than a single Goblin wave), and I have a party of Goblin Spearmen roaming the countryside.  Where they are, I do not know.  As such, I have sealed my fort until I have some sort of functional army again.  That's going to be a while.

I've got coal, but it will be a while before I can get the tree farm going, so I'm thinking it'll pretty soon be time to make a go at bringing up Magma from the magma sea to power some Magma forges.  How does one approach this is a militarily weak fort?

Harry Voyager

[Haedrian]

What I do is this: I leave a bunch of masons free.

I start digging downwards looking for the sea. The moment I hit some cavern, or an area with empty spaces around it, I quickly wall everything in around my stairs (!! don't forget diagonal !!).

Rinse and repeat. You won't have to fight the denizens this way.

Then I just build the forges there and then. I never bother pumping the magma upwards

[Lagslayer]

Don't forget ceilings either, if there is empty space above the cavern entrance.

[blue emu]

Check this out: Field-Testing the Orbital Defense System Mark-2

The whole project was built with a work-force of under 40 Dwarves, and my Military never exceeded six AxeDwarves.

Saved-game included in the thread, in case you want to download it to examine the construction methods.

[Camden1990]

Lol, blue emu, you do get around with that link, skimming over the forums today I think you've cropped up about 7 times!
Not that the orbital magma cannon is undeserving of praise.

I always build my magma forges down at magma sea level, to stop FPS reducing pumping.

[Voyager]

Don't fun things pop out of the magma sea?

[NecroRebel]

Don't fun things pop out of the magma sea?

Not really. Mostly just magma crabs, and those are fairly pansy. Also, building destroyers apparently cannot destroy buildings on a different z-level as them, so if you put a floor grate over your pump stack's input or a fortification between your magma tunnels and the magma sea proper, you're totally safe. Probably forever.

So very safe...

[Girlinhat]

Piercing caverns isn't tough, once you realize that stairs are an amazing upside-down construction.  You can breach a cavern from the roof, and then build a stairway down into open air, with your worker standing on the level above as he builds the next stair down.  Stairs can support floors and walls as well, so you can build the stairs, and then walls around it, without even touching the floor.  It's just important to note the direction of building facing, and diagonals.  In general, you'll want to build your walls like this...

First:

Code: [Select]

.F.F.
.FFF.
.FXF.
.FFF.
.F.F.Where F = floor, X = Stairs, . = Open Space, and W = Wall.

Second:

Code: [Select]

WF.FW
WFFFW
WFXFW
WFFFW
WF.FWYou must do this, so that you can build the corner walls, otherwise it'll be out of reach of your buildings and any flying creature (and they DO fly!) can sweep in undisturbed.

Third, skipping the diagrams now, you simply un-build those for extra floor bits, and replace them with wall bits, so that you end up with a floor surrounded by walls.  Then, repeat for the next level.

Just be careful how you build the walls.  Constructions are produced in "First in - last out" order, so the first one you assign to be built will be the last one finished, as long as you don't unpause while designating construction.  And because dwarves build things from predictable directions, you should always build the South or East wall LAST, since they build from the west or north on these.  If you build the west wall last, they'll stand on the outside of your perimeter and wall themselves off.

[Voyager]

Don't fun things pop out of the magma sea?

Not really. Mostly just magma crabs, and those are fairly pansy. Also, building destroyers apparently cannot destroy buildings on a different z-level as them, so if you put a floor grate over your pump stack's input or a fortification between your magma tunnels and the magma sea proper, you're totally safe. Probably forever.

So very safe...

I suddenly got this mental image of a three foot tall Bronze Colossus, struggling to reach the dwarven roof.

[blue emu]

In general, you'll want to build your walls like this...

That works, yes. If you don't have the time or patience to construct and then deconstruct those extra floor bits, you can do it like this instead:

Code: [Select]

WWW
Ww.wW
W.X.W
Ww.wW
 WWW
... with the capital-W-walls constructed first and the small-w-walls constructed last. That doesn't require deconstructing anything.

[Girlinhat]

How do your dwarves reach the capital W squares, if there's no floor there?  Walls cannot be built from a diagonal location.

[blue emu]

That design actually works better building UP, because the tops of the previous layer's 'w' count as floors.

[Girlinhat]

Building up is easy.  Building down is the complicated bit.

[Dorf3000]

I generally build walls around a staircase by alternating the N/S and E/W walls while I go down.  When the walls on the level below are built, they provide floors to access the corner squares, and once the corner squares are built it's a simple matter to fill in the remaining wall.

I'll try to illustrate:

Code: [Select]

z1:
OXO

z2:
 O
 X
 O

Once z2 is built, z1 looks like this:

Code: [Select]

+
OXO
 +

Then the corners can be built and then finally the opposite walls. It also scales well to 3x3 or bigger staircases.

[shlorf]

That's a very useful trick. Thanks for sharing.