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[Subdane]

I had a lot of fun making a human fortress in 40d. Made a town with a wooden palisade surrounding it. I limited myself to only using wood for construction and building as realistically as possible. Each workshop was housed in a separate 'shop' building with a small cellar for storage an a living area upstairs. Everyone/family had a their own house. No apartments apart from a large barracks and communal room above the inn were allowed. I farmed aboveground crops only and bred cattle for meat. The only bit of underground construction I did apart from the cellars was a well so I had an unfrozen watersource in the winter. After a few years the pop had grown so large I had to make a second palisade to allow more housing. I also built a large stone castle as a megaproject by surface quarrying.

Im doing this right now, its great fun but building everything out of wood is very timeconsuming. Think next time its gonna be stone or perhaps channel the castle out.

[MarcAFK]

I find the biggest problem i have with aboveground wooden forts is making sure my buildings match, i always end up with random OAK blocks somehow jammed into my cedar longhouse, or pine blocks messing up my larch flooring....
It's minor but when i switch on the visualiser i like my wooden buildings uniform, for that reason i always end up gathering 10-100 times as much wood as i need and also build test walls just to reference the wood colour when i need to construct something.

[wrajjt]

Personally, by the time I am ready to expand my outer wall and thereby gain a larger area to build houses in, my workforce party always run into a huge goblin ambush. Hate it so much.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

My current fort is going to EVENTUALLY be largely above ground, but I'm going to do it with ice walls poured by bucket brigade, so its' gonna take awhile, unfortunately.

[Subdane]

Hmm something interesting happening in my fort today

I was so busy testing out some things I havent tried before I forgot to focus on defense 
Shortly after my best soldier (armed with the only steel weapon) Fell in the water doing training with a rookie and drowned....

There was a goblin ambush, they quickly killed my small militia force and turned on the civilians. I drafted a lot of civilians and turned them loose on the four goblins armed only with their teeth and ..... well nothing else. They starting biting and ripping limps of the goblins, one of the goblins jumped into the water and drowned.... pussy!

Now I am left with a lot of traumatised dwarfs, that are killing, fighting and destroying my fortress.

Cant wait to get home from work and see if I can turn it around

Gotta find an Arnold Schwarznegger dwarf and appoint him to sherif and deal out some justice

[Starver]

A wall is good, but you can always dig out a ditch with a drawbridge.  Just remove all the ramps on the inside and with the bridge raised nothing can reach you.  Unless you're playing a mod it usually takes time for archers to show up.

My current standard defence is for a two-wide ditch, inside de-ramped (or outside dug as channels, inside dug as Z-1 standard mining (already proof against crossing!), then channel over the mined bit for a gen-oo-ine ditch).  If you don't like the trees growing on the flat bit of ditch, re-channel it so that it's even more ramps down and a 2Z natural wall.

In a current fort I've claimed maybe 90% of the land (high 90%s, really, but I've got a buffer-zone walkway inside the outer ditch and outside the main complex), but not all of it has ditch-edge walls (yet) at ground-level, just the ditches.  I really ought to get screenshots of it, or dumps to the usual place...

[squeakyReaper]

My current fort is heavily featured around clay.  With two layers of clay and no sand, woo, I dug my houses out of the ground.  That is, I channeled down one layer to make my roads, and dug small hovels into them.  Removed the ramps around, and built small wooden towers on top of the houses for storage or housing.  Luckily my gobbos prefer beakdogs to giant eagles or some such...

[lurtze1]

How do you all embark, I use an "reversed miner/woodman order" that is, instead of my standard 4 miners 1 woodcutter I have 4 woodcutters 1 miner.
that 1 miner is for the cellars where my villagers secretly grow mushrooms

[Alluvian_Est-Endrati]

Aboveground forts can be a lot of fun. Personally I like embarking on or near a lake or river, with my fort built out above the water. A number of my forts have ended up jutting out over a lake in a fashion similar to Reveredtour. Loads of fun.

If you do not want to to underground farming, you either need to gather plants for aboveground seeds (or trade for them) or do a tiny bit of creative modding to what Dwarves can utilize. I like both methods of farming actually.

Getting your fort defensible quickly is the first real challenge of an aboveground fort. Start of small, build a little building or a walled off area out of wood if there are ample trees in your embark. Either upgrade to a stone wall and other fortifications later on or leave the original building behind as a museum piece. Sometimes I like to use the original building as an artifact museum or something else that does not need too much room on the surface level.

As much as I would love to build forts out of bricks and such, the process currently is a bit too time consuming to get adequate initial protection in-place. Really only a worthwhile option for a larger building project when you have ample time on your hand above and beyond survival.

[slothen]

I like dropping things from heights and having a squad of elite marksdwarves to stop a siege in its tracks.  I always end up building at least an outer courtyard.  I should try a full outside fortress.