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[AzuredreamsXT]

So i'm currently well into my first truly successful game, and i now see the power of a really good embark with plenty of resources. Once you know the game, such an embark provides a relatively easy way of defeating whatever comes your way. I have not yet breached HFS, and i'm sure that will be the end of me when i do, but yea.

So whenever i play another game, i'm either going to embark in interesting regions, or i'm going to go for a different "type" of dwarven outpost. The wiki says some people never dig other than for mineshafts to get ore, some don't even do that. They just build above ground castles, farms etc. That sounds fun as hell, and difficult as hell. Has anyone done this, successfully or not? Share your experience if so!

Or, if you have used a different well defined and unique template, share that too. The other unique types of dwarven outpost i envisioned were dwarves of the frozen wastes (embarking in tundra or glacier biomes, sticking with an ice theme with your goods and items), or maybe a dwarven outpost all about fancy glass, using nothing but that for everything except the essentials as a rule.

[AzuredreamsXT]

I'm looking for paradigm shift forts, not one's that just shake things up only slightly!

I'm also considering a *gasp* elf friend fort, where we rely heavily on wood and creatures as they do. If they try and tell me to cut forestry though they can shove it.

[King DZA]

If you're looking to up the difficulty a tad, there's things like going without any traps, not using farms, building a fort in the caverns, limiting yourself to only one type of weapon, and many other interesting methods.

In DF, when it comes to screwing yourself over, you're only limited by your own creativity.

[AzuredreamsXT]

That is so not what I'm looking to do, but Ty for the suggestions!

[UristMcFan]

I've always like the idea of a tower fort, just for the sheer impracticality of it.

[King DZA]

Oh, you could also try limiting yourself to only foreign armor/weaponry. scavenging around for arrows that your bowdwarves can use is always fun.

[Telgin]

I can speak a bit on an above ground fort, since that's what I'm doing right now.

The biggest change is that it is much, much slower to get stuff set up.  My bedrooms took almost a year to get completed, and then more migrants show up. 

The advantage is that my fort produced so little wealth to that point, that out of the three migrant waves I could have gotten, I only got 2 and they were 3-4 dwarves apiece.  Even then though, I'm behind on gettin them shelter.  As I get the hang of it I expect this to be an advantage though.

I'm in the untamed wilds, but I imagine this would be very, very difficult in a region with lots of hostiles upon embark.  There's no where to run underground if the skeletal elk come running, and it takes a long time to get walls set up.  A channelled moat (even empty) would probably go a long way to fixing this.

[NecroRebel]

I've done entirely-constructed forts before; they take forever, unfortunately, especially if you insist on making them entirely out of blocks, and take a great deal of personal attention, especially if you want chambers more than 20 tiles on a side on a z-level as it means you can't just designate the whole thing at once.

Currently, however, I'm doing a fort where I have minimal below-ground structure, and am making a trio of cast-obsidian towers connected by bridges every few levels. Obsidian casting is still slow, particularly to get it started since you have to dig down to the magma sea to find half of your components, but I think it's faster, and certainly gets you higher-quality stuff in the longer term. My towers are 13 z-levels tall right now, and have been growing by about 2 levels per year since year 3 or so (I'd have to check my backups to know when the first level was cast).



I find the most entertaining forts for me to play are the ones where I have an interesting shape in mind from the beginning. My favorite fort that I've ever made consisted of a series of pillars hanging in wide open space and connected by catwalks. I still like looking at that fort; the open spaces make it look nicer and less cluttered than many of my other projects. Even once the fort proper was done, though, I wasn't finished, because there was still ground below the pillars, so I dug a great chasm that went straight down to the magma sea, walling off the caverns as I passed them, so now there's an I think ~30 z-level pit below the lowest level of the actual fort. I've also toyed with forts with a lake in their center, of water or magma, but I've not found a design I liked yet.

[Casp]

In DF, when it comes to screwing yourself over, you're only limited by your own creativity.

Sigged.

[dreadmullet]

Have you tried embarking on a volcano? I built a fort on the side of a huge volcano once. It lead to much "x has died after colliding with an obstacle!", which is always fun.

[Newbunkle]

The wiki says some people never dig other than for mineshafts to get ore, some don't even do that. They just build above ground castles, farms etc. That sounds fun as hell, and difficult as hell. Has anyone done this, successfully or not? Share your experience if so!

I like to do this sometimes. I often go out with no skills and no items, so they have to scavenge everything (you can turn the wagon into training axes to cut more trees). You have to gather plants for brewing, and fishing can help feed you. You'll have to build out of wood for a while until you can trade for a pick.

Migration can be slow because your fort is dirt poor. If you want to wait for stone before building, you can make do with a wall, a ramp, and several floors hanging over nothing. That'll let you put beds down, or tables and chairs. Watch out for giant badgers of course.

Alternatively, take skilled dwarves and a few picks to speed up construction of your stone castle. Just be aware than the richer fort will attract hostiles more quickly, so get plenty of masons working on the walls. You might want to deliberately limit your digging to keep the value to a minimum.

I haven't done this yet, but I want to try using metal to construct my fort. Perhaps building a UFO or something like that.

I had a glacier fort before, and it was kinda fun. There's a bug on glacier maps where staircases can't be dug in ice if there's stone right below. Channels/ramps will work instead, but it's a bit awkward.

I like the glass fortress idea. I should have tried it when one of my old worlds had a volcano in the middle of "The Desert of Owning". Magma and sand will give you infinite glass, but it'll be green unless you have wood for making pearlash. (Green is cool tho').

One other fortress I enjoyed very much was an oceanside fort. I roleplayed it as something out of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I relied on fishing for the bulk of my food and encrusted all my furniture with shells. Two beached whales gave me hundreds of units of meat and lasted me for a good while. It may have been sheer luck that they came to me, or perhaps it was the migrants I threw into the sea as a sacrifice to Dagon.

[Urist Da Vinci]

I once tried a fort where I disabled all of the underground layers, and embarked on a 6x6 area with a forest and river. You end up living aboveground, with access only to shallow metals/rock, clay, sand, and trees. Very humany.

[tommy521]

I've been thinking of going for a Dwemer (for all you Skyrim fans) type of fort. So on a mountain, some outdoor buildings, some indoor buildings, half inside the mountain and such, cool roof and window styles, lots of mechanics and such.

[JackoftheBox]

I've been thinking of going for a Dwemer (for all you Skyrim fans) type of fort. So on a mountain, some outdoor buildings, some indoor buildings, half inside the mountain and such, cool roof and window styles, lots of mechanics and such.

Now thats an awesome idea, never occured to me, and now I must try it!

[dwarfhoplite]

I sometimes get ideas from real life cities or fantasy fortresses. I'm planning to build Minas Tirith sometime and my latest project was sort of Byzantion/ Consantinople)

pichttp://postimage.org/image/50kfb3dn1/ unfortunately my game crashed and I lost interest in it