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DWARF FORTRESS
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Lackey
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 12:08 pm    Post subject: DWARF FORTRESS Reply with quote

DWARF FORTRESS is magical. If you have a high tolerance for interface (and ASCII graphics) you will find the game profoundly deep. I don't have such a tolerance, so the g ame is impossible for me to play, but I love to hear the stories that come out of it. I'm impressed Tarn Adams magician-like finesse and attention to detail. Something like this can only exist alone, and only once.

Adventure mode, at least, is easy to appreciate. You learn this the first time you beat a minotaur to death with a unicorn corpse, or engage in an elaborate wrestling contest with a wild panther and then get surrounded by zombies and punched to death outside some ancient ruins. So far all my fortress stories have been like early new world colonization; brief, harsh, and characterized by madness, starvation, and mutiny. It's something I'd like to get into, but doing so requires serious delving.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 12:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've actually been getting pretty into this over the last couple weeks. I'm wondering how far you've gotten?

Generally I'm fine with getting through the first couple of winters, my issue is when the groups of 25 dwarves show up, including 3 dwarven nobles, meaning that I'm constantly trying to play catch-up in terms of contructing living spaces, beds, etc.

Bill Harris has some good DF posts, you can skip through his regular posts to find some good stories and beginning tips (including a hastily written farming tutorial by yours truly).

The wiki is very helpful indeed, although it takes a little bit of time to get acclimated to what exactly is going on. For one thing, I'm still entirely too vague about what you need to do in order to smelt metal or how to make lye and thus potash for crop fertilization.

If you have any/want any tips, post away and hopefully we can get some other people involved, so long as you can get past the ASCII and the incredible complexity of the thing, it's extremely amusing.

I haven't played Adventure Mode at all.
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 1:12 pm    Post subject: Re: DWARF FORTRESS Reply with quote

Lackey wrote:
DWARF FORTRESS is magical. If you have a high tolerance for interface (and ASCII graphics) you will find the game profoundly deep. I don't have such a tolerance, so the g ame is impossible for me to play, but I love to hear the stories that come out of it. I'm impressed Tarn Adams magician-like finesse and attention to detail. Something like this can only exist alone, and only once.


yeah, this game intrigues me, though i generally can't do strategy games of this variety, especially ones with unintuitive interfaces (as much as i love ascii graphics). thus far i've been too intimidated to attempt the game myself, though the stories remain fantastic.
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Lackey
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 2:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You might like Adventure mode Dessgeega, it's a Rogue-like with more wilderness.

I honestly haven't got anywhere in fortress mode, not even through one winter. I endeavour to learn the interface though, at least such that I can know what's happening. A friend of mine impressed me with a labyrinth he constructed in the middle of a fort in case he ever catches a minotaur.
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 2:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Farming is key for making through the first winter, which means loads and loads of pausing the game, making sure that each dwarf only has certain kinds of labor selected and having a definite plan for the first year. Once you get through that, it's gravy.

I, uh, could post some stuff about the interface and getting started if people are interested.

Right now I'm apathetic about my fortresses (one at work, one at home) because the mistakes that I made earlier in the game are starting to trip me up now and rather than figuring out how to get around them, I'm more interested in how I would do it differently next time; although not to the point where I'm actually going to start a new game.
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 2:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Scratchmonkey wrote:
I, uh, could post some stuff about the interface and getting started if people are interested.


i would like this.
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 3:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Me too. I need to start off just knowing what keys to press.
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 3:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Alright, I'm working on something in Word Pad right now, concentrating on basic interface-y style stuff.

Also, if you have a question about how to do something or whatnot, post it here. I only learned the basics of the game by repeatedly emailing the guy who turned me onto it, including super-basic stuff like "how do I go back up through/out of the menus?"
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 6:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

As those of you who have tried the game have already figured out, it's incredibly opaque in terms of having absolutely no idea what you're supposed to do and having loads and loads of options. The best thing to remember is that this game goes as slow as you need it to. Contemplate shit.

Also, I'm putting stuff in here that for non-interface tips as well, so feel free to skip over those if you're just interested in how the hell the controls work in this game. Also ask questions because I'm sure that I forgot something.

SETTIN' SHIT UP:

The only real tricky part of the setup is that you should elect to determine all the details yourself. When you do so, use {Tab} to move between area selection, skill selection and supplies selection.

For areas, it's a good idea to go for Temperate and Heavily Wooded. For Skills, it's generally a good idea to have a Miner, a Mechanic, a Mason, a Carpenter and a Farmer.

On the supply screen, press {n}. This will show you all the possible things you can add to your expedition. There's uh, a lot of things. A lot of things. There's a rudimentary search where you can type and it'll run some sort of string-match thing to find anything that matches what you're looking for.

The best thing to do is search for "meat" then take 1 unit of each meat that costs 2 points. Then search for "dwarven" and take as much of the different alcohol types as possible. This means that you'll get more barrels, more wagons to carry those barrels and more horses and mules to pull those wagons, which means more resources.

THE ACTUAL GAME:

Once you get to your actual fortress, the game can be paused with {Space} and the view can be changed with {Tab}. The best view is the one with the map/world view on the left and the main menu on the right.

{Space} is also what you use to go back up through menus, which you will do a lot. Other keys that you use a lot are the arrow keys (or the keypad), the {+} and {-} keys on the numpad and {Enter}. The arrow keys and {+} and {-} are used to change your active selection and {Enter} is used to select/highlight what you've selected.

NOTE: I don't know if you can play the game on a laptop or on keyboard with no numpad, because a lot of the menus are traversed with {+} and {-}.

Everything that you do in the game, you do from the main menu, which includes a gigantic amount of sub-menus. The game automatically pauses while you're rooting around in these menus.

Some menus will be confusing because they'll appear to be like other menus, only a little different. One good example would be when you're asked to select materials for building a bridge or road compared to selecting materials to build a basic object or workshop. The latter advances you out of the menu once you've selected a single item whereas the other allows you to select multiple items before advancing to placement. There's a legend at the bottom of each menu that should indicate all the actions that you can do in that menu, so if you're getting confused, check there first.

Menus that you'll use a lot:

{b} - the Build menu. As an example, hit {b} to get into the build menu and then hit {w} to build a workshop. There'll be a nice long list of workshops, you can either select one by traversing the menu or hitting the key listed to the right of the workshop to instantly select it. Hit {Enter} to activate your selection and you'll be presented with a list of rock types that you can use to make it. Select one of those and you'll have a 3x3 grid of Xes that you can move around on the map using the numpad/arrow keys:

XXX
XXX
XXX

Some of the Xes will be light green and some will be dark green. The dark green represents a block that your dwarves will not be able to move through. This is important because you don't want to place the workshop where a dwarf can't get into it to work or where dwarves can't come and pick up the items that it produces.

You'll also use the Build menu to place items that have already been made in workshops. For instance, if you made a door in your mason's workshop and you wanted to place it, you would enter {b} -> {d}, then select the door, then place it.

Note that this will not actually place a door there, it will merely set a task for a dwarf to pick up a door from the mason's and then install it where you want it, that is, if you you have a dwarf with Item Hauling highlighted in his labor list (all of them should have this by default, I just included this as an example of how the game functions).

{d} - the Designate menu. You use this to assign certain tasks, the ones that you'll use most frequently are the ones for mining and cutting down trees. When you're in this menu, there should be a yellow X cursor on the map. If you press {Enter}, it should flash with a green cross. This indicates that you are designating the area for the activity that you wish to take place.

You select an area by moving the cursor and then hitting {Enter} again. The game will draw a rectangle between where you first hit {Enter} and where you hit for the second time and then there will be instructions to carry out what you had selected in the menu to take place in that menu.

So, if I wanted to dig a one-block wide tunnel into the mountain (which is one of the first things you'll want to do), I would hit {d}, make sure that "mine" is selected, position the cursor on the edge of the mountain, press {Enter}, move the cursor to the right for as deep as I want the shaft to go (heh heh) and then hit {Enter} again. There should now be a line of mustard-yellow blocks going into the mountain, indicating that there are instructions to dig there.

If I wanted to dig a two-block wide shaft, I would have moved the cursor down or up one square before moving it to the right.

In the case of cutting down trees, you're selecting an area such that there will be instructions for your dwarves to cut down every tree inside that area.

If you select {d} -> {x}, this is the "remove designation" designation. This works the same way as the other designations, only it removes anything that you had previously set for the area. This is most useful when mining because any area that you make bigger than 7x7 will eventually cave in. If you designate a large area like that, you can use this to make one-block negative spaces in your room which will then act as supports.

More on cave-ins:

http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Cave-ins

{j} - the Job menu. This will show you all the jobs that you have set in your fortress. It will show who is doing a job, if anybody is, or if a job is Inactive. It will also show you anybody who isn't working on anything at the current time and why (whether they're Sleeping, Drinking, Eating, Soldiering or just plain slacking off). The main use of this screen is that if you hit {c} while selecting a dwarf on this screen, you will be taken to the square that that dwarf is standing on and be inside the {v} sub-menu that deals with labor. This is a very helpful way to find a dwarf if you don't want to hunt through your fortress on the main screen.

{k} - This menu gives you a cursor and displays on the menu to the right whatever is in the block currently selected by your cursor. Handy for figuring out what ASCII symbols stand for.

{p} - This allows you to set a plot by designating an area for storage/farming. When setting a plot, you start with a single green X that you can expand into a larger grid by using the {u} and {m} and {h} and {k} keys. Basically, use {u} to make it larger on the y axis and {k} to make it bigger on the x axis and the other two keys to shrink it. You can use the numpad/arrows to move your grid around, if the Xes turn red, this indicates that you have selected an area where you cannot place the plot.

(To be extra-confusing, if you choose to {b}uild a r{o}ad or bridge, you use this same system.)

To start with, you can use this to designate spaces for storing certain objects - refuse, food, wood, stone, ore, etc. You'll want to set up a bunch of these right at the beginning just so that you can get all that stone you're digging through out of your way, as well as a place to put the wood when you cut down trees, someplace to put the fish guts when you catch fish, as well as someplace to store the de-gutted fish as well.

One of these plots is the farming plot, which you select like the others; however, this one needs to be dug out rather than just instantaneously popping into existence (it also needs to be dug out on muddy land). Once a dwarf has dug you a nice plot, it will appear as a grid of double-stacked brown tildes that dos absolutely nothing until you use:

the {q} menu! - I don't even know what this menu is called. It has a wide range of uses. Basically, you use it to assign attributes, queue items to be produced and use special properties of objects, where the objects can range from a chair or door to a workshop or a special building like a trade depot.

Using our earlier example of the farm plot, you would hit [q], then move the cursor around on the map -- it'll select whatever's closest to it. When something's selected, it'll blink green. In the case of the farm plot, it will give you a menu of crops that you can plant. Use {+} and {-} to select a crop and your dwarves will plant it. Well, for that season. You can view the three different growing seasons by pressing {a} - Spring, {b} - Summer, {c} - Fall and select different crops for each season.

If you used {q} on a door, you have a menu that allows you to select whether the door is forbidden (nobody can use it), pet-passable (your dogs/cats/horses/etc. can go through it) or another option that's entirely skipping my mind at the present.

If you placed a bed, you would use {q} to select it, then {r} to declare the room that it's in as a bedroom, use {+} and {-} to determine the size of the room, then {a} to assign that room to a specific dwarf. Same thing with a stone throne or wooden chair to make an Office, or a Dining Table to make a Dining Room, etc.

{v} - the View menu. This menu is used to look at your dwarves and their various attributes. There's a general view, a view of whatever wounds they may possess, their inventories, etc. The one that I use the most is what jobs they'll do. To do this, press {v}, select the dwarf you want to modify, hit {p} to go to what I think is their Preferences menu and then {l} to go to their labor menu. Here, you can scroll through all the available labor tasks and use {Enter} to select and de-select the jobs that you want that dwarf to do.

For example, I typically take off all jobs but Mining on the dwarf that I've given the Mining skill to. This ensures that he will do nothing but dig, never stopping to carry stones to the stone plot or to haul a bed or to build a workshop or anything except dig dig dig.

IN CONCLUSION:

This is way too long, probably far too confusing and properly shows just how insane this game is and doubly how insane I am for playing it.
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 8:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Scratchmonkey, you have made me never ever want to play this. Sorry, but if I wanted to play a game with this many rules and requirements I would just get back into D&D or CoC or something.
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 5:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Man, that's too bad because this game is really something once you get beyond the interface.

That said, the interface is probably the gnarliest that I've ever seen.

To a certain extent it's necessary because the game is pretty brutally complex, to a level that makes something like Civ look like Pong; there are definitely parts of it that could use some cleaning up and re-configuring (and if it had mouse support that would be pretty helpful as well).
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 7:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I messed around with it again today; cut a few rooms, built some workshops. Still can't get a handle on actually building a community though.
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 28, 2006 5:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The community takes a couple of years in game-time to really get going, until then the dwarves are concentrating on plain survival, which generally means having enough food to make it through the winters.

Once you have everybody fed, the issue starts to become managing your population and making sure that everybody's happy.

After that, I gather that the game starts to become about dealing with outside (and inside) threats, which will probably be the end of my fortresses as they're not particularly well-designed in terms of resisting attack.
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 29, 2006 12:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

For those interested, I have made a crudely annotated map of my fabulous dwarven fortress of Ducimshoveth (or "Workmysteries" in human) here.

All of the small unlabled rooms are workshops, where certain skilled dwarfs produce items of varying complexity. The dorms are where all the dwarves sleep, except for the nobles, who have their own little complexes north of the second set of dorms, arranged around the prison, where I have a number of rope restraints waiting for any dwarves reckless enough to become lawbreakers.

My three farms provide more than enough food for my entire population of dwarves, although a fair amount of their output is immediately turned into alcohol in order to keep my colony of invenerate drunks operating at maximum drunken efficiency.

There are a number of problems with this design. For one thing, I have a lot of bedrooms, the main meeting hall, the main dining hall and a handful of workshops between the mountainside and the underground river. If I am eventually besieged and the fortress breached, that is the area where I will have to repel the intruders. It would have been far better if all my rooms were on the other side of the river, allowing me to place a retracting bridge over the river and place traps/defensive fortifications between the fortress entrance and the river. (This, along with an outside moat/possible doomsday device using channeled water and lava from inside the mountain, is my plan for the next fortress if/when this one fails.)

I also need to build a bridge and continue over the chasm to the east, as most of the good ore lies deeper within the mountain and when we find the lava river, it will provide an excellent (and free) source for smelting metal.
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 29, 2006 8:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think maps in this game look lovely. If you get the lava thing working I'd love to see it in action. Also, is that whole room labelled food straight stockpiles?
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 29, 2006 12:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I've heard horror stories about getting lava acqueducts to work, with many dozens of dwarves perishing in the construction (mainly because there's some bugginess in terms of walking into lava). I've never actually reached the lava river yet in any of my fort, so I'm a little excited about it myself.

And yeah, that room labelled "Food" is just stockpiles. This is what happens when you get your farms up and running -- you get tons of produce which you can then turn into booze or prepared meals. Plus I have a lot of meat because I let my beginning horses provide a breeding population and there's what I trade for from the various caravans. I think I have 100+ meat, 200+ plants and 100+ drink for 59 dwarves (I used to have 61, two of them were killed in a flood that somehow got past the doors on my bridge).

I actually played the game a little longer last night after posting that map, I've managed to complete the road to the edge of the map as well as repel an antman attack from the chasm, which led me to construct a barracks and an archery range to the east of the noble's quarters.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 7:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

does the punctuation all over the ground serve to differentiate what's there, or is it just textural? ie, should you sweep your floors or what
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 7:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's textural in most cases, there's an option to render all ground as '.'.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 12:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ducimshoveth, in the Summer of 1054.

It's a bit more zoomed-out than the old one, mainly because I wanted to get the mining corridors and the magma river in the screenshot. You may notice that one of the mining corridors intersects with the magma river. See, I was trying the old grid-search method for looking for coal and I figured that I wasn't that close to the magma yet.

I was wrong and in the proces of being wrong, my legendary (and only) miner met a short and burny end. Thank goodness the next wave of immigrants had 2 miners in it, so I wasn't left without the ability to dig for too long.

If you compare this to the older picture, you can see that my ore stockpile has gotten much larger, as have the dorms in between the river and the chasm. I've also added some more rooms for nobles as well as an archery range and a barracks to the east of the nobles.

The main purpose of the mining corridors is to find coal, which I haven't found yet. Once I've found it, I'll try and get a magma forge and magma smelter set up on the magma river, which will greatly reduce the amount of fuel that I'll need to generate metal. Once these get set up, I'll start generating steel weapons and armor, as well as coins so that I can attract a Bookeeper.

You can't see it in the new shot; there's a group of human merchants coming down my newly-completed road toward my trade depot. Unfortunately, I don't have much to trade to them aside from stone mechanisms, which are typically used to set up levers and traps. I may wind up trading them anyway just because I'm not exactly short on stone and it shouldn't take me that long to make new ones.

I'm still worried about defense -- not internal, I think that's pretty well sorted for now, with a small internal fort being built on the side of the chasm and traps covering the entry points for the river. Rather, I still don't really have anything to protect me from beseigers. The long-term plan is to move everything from the front of the fort to either inbetween the river and the chasm or in between the chasm and the lava and then convert what's already there into some sort of defensive set-up, the question is whether anybody shows up on my doorstep before I can pull that off.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 9:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

This sounds like an awesome game that I would be tragically unable to interface with in any way.

I mean i'd try if there was a mac version but man
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 8:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

gosh, I really want to watch someone play this. i don't know how much pleasure I'd get out of playing it.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 10:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dark steve wrote:
This sounds like an awesome game that I would be tragically unable to interface with in any way.



thats pretty much the deal with this game.

because its such an awesome game (a type of complex building game i've been craving for a long time), i decided to give it a try as soon as i read this thread. after about 12 or so fortresses and many crashes and save corruption bugs (dont play the game windowed!). i've finally started to get the hang of this game.

its really great. really.

if they streamlined the interface and had better documentation, maybe even add a mouse driven interface, it would be something incredibly good and accessible to everyone. i still havent gotten used to the interface though.

here is my current fort. I have written nice little lables. it has 35 living dwarves. this is my second winter so far and food has become somewhat scarce. i think a bunch of them might die off if i dont find an alternate food source. anywho..

what i like about this game is how one comes to love each and every dispicable swarthy little dwarf that comes to find a home in your forsaken fortress even though you cant remember any of their names. i've heard there is an option that will let you change that so, but i cannot find it. that pretty much sums up the experiece of this wonderful little game.

any of you guys know how to work with the military aspect of this game? from the dev forums i hear that enemy combatants can attack your fortress. outside of a healthy spattering of traps and locked doors, with my limited knowledge of the interface, i dont think i'll survive such a thing. especially considering that currently my dwarves are being killed off by wild unicorns.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 11:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

a_plus wrote:
gosh, I really want to watch someone play this. i don't know how much pleasure I'd get out of playing it.

I think I could only play it after watching someone play. I'd be fascinated learning how it works with a visual approach. There's a reason they put pictures in game manuals. I just don't have the patience to read a shitton of explanatory forum posts beforehand.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 1:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It definitely takes a lot of patience because you feel absolutely helpless for such a long time. Sushi and myself are both in the situation of producing a fairly stable fortress (or at least one that doesn't die off immediately); yet we know that we'll be found wanting by later stages of the game that we haven't really found out about and that's after a lot of trial and error.

I think the main thing with military is three things:

1. Regulate your internal access points.
2. Prepare for an outside siege.
3. Don't go past the magma unless you're really really sure you can handle anything.

The first is the easiest bit and one that I feel like I have a pretty handle on. It's all just about making sure that you have traps around the access points of the river, the chasm and your wells, since monsters can come out of all of these.

Aside from traps, another good strategy is to make ropes or chains, then [b]uild a restraint out of them next to these access points, then assign a war dog (if you have them) to the restraint. The dog will have a short radius of movement around the restraint, meaning you'll have something aside from traps to deal with nasties from the deeps and since war dogs are capable of taking on pretty much all of the intermal enemies as long as there's at least 2 of them, it makes things much nicer.

You can also assign war dogs to dwarves, which can be a good idea with miners and other dwarves who are often away from the main portion of your fortress. You can do this by hitting [v] then [p] then [e].

The second is the one I'm still trying to figure out. I haven't been besieged yet, although from what I've heard, it is something that will happen eventually, it's just a question of who and when. One good basic strategy is to have your entryway prepared to repel invaders, which means creating a large enclosed area, ideally surrounded by walls with fortifications (arrow slits) carved into them and dwarves with missile weapons behind them, with rows and rows of traps, ideally weapon traps loaded with multiple weapons (obsidian short swords and metallic serrated discs seem to be favorites).

Many people have built complicated moat systems, of both water and magma. Some have even combined the two to create scorching clouds of steam to broil their enemies!

In short, the idea seems to be that the less actual contact between your dwarves and the enemy, the better.

As for the final one, well, I haven't seen it myself. I've heard stories though.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 9:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

i want to say i find all these maps tantalizing and i encourage people to keep posting them.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 2:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

How fast is the game running for you guys? My biggest problem with it is the waiting around while tasks are completed, or even while the dwarves are sleeping. That seemed to take like half an hour of realtime, and that's not fun. Until that gets worked out, it's a good game for multitasking.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 3:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, it takes a while and at the beginning of the game, there's a lot of time where it's running in the background because you don't have many dwarves and they take a while to do things, especially when they all go to sleep at the same time.

Later in the game, when you get larger amounts of dwarves and their sleep cycles get de-synched, there's a lot more going on at any given time.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 9:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I did it. I just created my world, and am looking at my bitmap of it while it saves. After reading many more stories about the game, I decided I may as well try it out. I've been playing so much Nethack recently, and that's got a pretty steep learning curve, that this shouldn't be too bad... right?
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 1:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The interface isn't actually as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Convoluted menus aren't quite as much of a problem when the game pauses for you to figure them out, and while it's certainly inconsistent, it's inconsistent in consistent ways. Be prepared for some research, though, definitely.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 12:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Another map, this time of the fortress that I'm playing during my breaks at work. This is Ralum, or "Silverynails".

This fort was started before Ducimshoveth, which you can see by the fact that the corridors are far too narrow, causing incredible congestion, that one of the farms second from the bottom) is perma-flooded due to my stupidity (although there's a supposed fix coming that will enable me to reclaim it) and that I've built right up against the edge of the cliff face, rather than leaving room between the outside and my fort to build up a defense. It's not irreperable, as I can still move some rooms deeper inside the fort and still have room to build a "two-entrance" defense system, which works as follows:

The enemy AI seems to go for the "open" path into a fort if offered multiple choices. You can take advantage of this by having a normal entrance and a second entrance which basically consists of a 1xmany corridor that constantly loops back on itself and is chock-full of traps and only connects to your fort through your barracks, with plenty of dogs chained there, etc.

With some enemies, like goblins, it's enough to just lock the doors on your regular entrance and they'll happily jaunt off down the murder corridor. WIth trolls and other monsters that can destroy doors, it's helpful to install a moat with a retractable bridge just inside the main entrance (which has to be inside the mountain, as outside bridges cannot retract).

As for other attributes of the fort, there's the large inside mining stockpile inbetween the chasm and the lava. Tired of having my stockpile be outside, especially since this meant that stone mined deep in my fort had to be carried all the way across it. So I built a giant storeroom to hold basically anything my dwarves pull out of the earth, and it's working well so far, especially since I've started building workshops along the side of it, which should increase my production of stone-related items.

The empty space at the top of the mining corridors is from finding a coal vein, which my miners are currently stripping clean. Coal is very nice because then you don't have to burn trees to smelt metal, which is handy because of the scarcity of wood. Now I need to find a hematite vein so that I can start iron and eventually steel production, which I will use to make lava forges and smelters, further reducing my fuel needs.

You can't see it from the screenshot; those redundant bridges over the river and chasm haven't actually been built yet, just scheduled. I put them in after one of my farmers had a tantrum (from too many slaughtered animals causing miasma) and destroyed one of my stills. Since bridges can be destroyed and this causes tons of pathing problems, it's important that we have backups.

Things to do in the near future:

- build cage traps for the main entrance
- build moat and bridge for main entrance
- start murder corridor
- find hematite
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 1:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Also, please enjoy this hilarious DF-related images (stolen from the Something Awful DF thread(s), which are massive and are worth reading, along with the DF thread in the Penny Arcade forums):



Last edited by Scratchmonkey on Sun Oct 08, 2006 4:58 pm; edited 1 time in total
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 7:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I had a pathetic little encounter today.

A giant rat sprang up on my chasm bridge. This isn't normally so bad because I've got traps surrounding the chasm and there's usually a ton of dogs running around. Only this time, no dogs were around at all. And for some reason a peasant and a fisherdwarf decided to stick around and duke it out with the Giant Rat, rather than, say, running the hell away.

So, two dwarfs versus one Giant Rat, should be fairly easy, right? Especially since the first part of the battle featured them careening off the bridge and into the start of a corridor, causing a stone-fall trap to smash into the rat, dealing massive injuries, enough so that it would lapse in and out of conciousness for the rest of its (hopefully quite short) life.

The fisherdwarf and the peasant moved in on the crippled rat, raining feeble blows upon it and doing absolutely nothing at all. That is, until the rat briefly regained conciousness and bit the peasant's hand off. Going straight into "over-exerted", the peasant stood there shrieking and waving his arm around, the blood splattering the door behind him.

The fisherdwarf, now basically on his own, who had proven himself utterly incapable of producing anything other than light wounds on the rat, was lucky that the rat was mainly unconcious, as he was only ocassionally bitten, and that for small amounts of damage. However, the longer the stalemate continued, the more likely it would be that he would wind up like his handless friend. The slapfight raged on and on, completely shutting down that section of the fortress as dwarfs shrieked in terror and ran, dropping whatever they might have been carrying. Soon the area around the "melee" was empty except for scattered items and the fort was filled with sounds of whimpering dwarves, hiding under tables and fervently hoping that somebody would deal with that fearsome unconcious rat.

Luckily at this point a wandering cat came by and evsicerated the twitching rat with a single blow, leaving the peasant to be dragged off to recover in his bedroom and the fisherdwarf to stagger back to rock-hauling duty.

And where was the Captain of the Guard and the Fortress Guards, who are nominally supposed to defend my fortress? Well, during the entire epic battle of ineptitude, they were hanging out in the nearby dining room, having a party.

"What's that screaming in the hallway?"

"Who cares, dude, it's time to par-TAY! Besides, the cats will take care of it."
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 9:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The AI appears quite Radiant.

Chain a dog or two there.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 9:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well this isn't going so well. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get these dwarves to DO anything! I've got my supposed miner who's just sitting around with the rest of them, probably mubmling something about how cold it is and feeding carrots to my horses. why won't they dig Sad((
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 9:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Have you [d]esignated the stone that they should dig? if you have, it should up as a mustard-yellow highlight, with a flashing block on the end they're going to start on. You need to make sure that they can get to the stone as well, which means it has to go all the way to the edge of the cliff. If there's a block or two of stone in the way, they won't do it.

You can also hit [j] to see what all your dwarves are doing. He may be On Break or Drinking, in which case you'll just have to wait for him to be ready.

And yeah, the first thing I did after that was chain some dogs up next to the bridge.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 10:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It just says 'No Job' for him, but I swear i've given him the "mine" job...and I can't figure out how to designate stone to dig, either. hmph
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 10:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Scratchmonkey wrote:
Have you [d]esignated the stone that they should dig? if you have, it should up as a mustard-yellow highlight, with a flashing block on the end they're going to start on. You need to make sure that they can get to the stone as well, which means it has to go all the way to the edge of the cliff. If there's a block or two of stone in the way, they won't do it.

You can also hit [j] to see what all your dwarves are doing. He may be On Break or Drinking, in which case you'll just have to wait for him to be ready.

And yeah, the first thing I did after that was chain some dogs up next to the bridge.


you also have to make sure the dwarves are set to do certain tasks. you have to highlight them using the view unit [v] mode, switch to the preferences sub menu [p], then go into the labor sub-sub menu [l]. there, you'll see a list of jobs they can do and which ones they're assigned to (the highlighted ones. select them using +- and enter).

i like to assign multiple jobs to my dwarves, even moreso duiring the first few seasons. after that i tend to assign a 'main' set of jobs along with a sub-task like farming or item hauling (mostly farming).

good luck learning the interface.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 10:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

He should have Mining highlighted by default in his labor menu as long as you gave him some skill in Mining. If not, it'll have to be turned on.

To designate rock for digging, press [d], then hit [m] to highlight "Dig". Then you determine the space that you'll want mined by pressing Enter to start the selection, then moving the cursor, then hitting Enter again to end selection. The area you selected should be highlighted and he'll start digging it out.

So if you just move the cursor to the right, your digging area will be a line of blocks to dig out:

XXXXXXXXX

If you move it up and down as well as to the right, it will something like this, depending on how far up or down you went:

XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX

(in this case, 3 squares up or down).
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 10:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oh, ENTER. That was the crucial keypress i was missing.

Well, it's still an alpha, right? things can only get better.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 11:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

geh this game keeps crashing while its saving for me.

i just lost another nice fortress.

what a downer..
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 11:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The forts on this thread are pretty gorgeous!
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 07, 2006 1:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

And one more quick question, as i get more and more fascinated by this game: I've seen on some guides that it's not a bad idea to build workshops outside, then move them indoors once space permits, but I have no clue how to move a workshop/building (assuming that's possible)! Help?
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 07, 2006 2:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

By "move", they mean build a new workshop inside and dismantle the one outside, in whatever order you prefer.

I'm currently "moving" a ton of workshops from the left side of my fort to the right side of my fort so that I can have more room to build defenses.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 07, 2006 7:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Okay, that's what I did, and I kinda figured that's what was supposed to go on. There's so much stone to go around that it doesn't really hurt me at all to do that.

Also, the interface and learning curve isn't THAT bad. I mean, if a person can play the original DOS Civilization or Nethack, then this really shouldn't be a problem a few minutes into it, with the proper documentation, of course. Too bad there isn't a good manual/walkthrough included with the game!
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 1:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote



Shiiiiiiit. Those g's you see in the lower left-hand corner are goblins, putting Ralum under seige. Riding beak dogs, they've got me with my pants down, halfway through my defensive preperations.

They've already offed some poor dwarf who wandered out by the frozen river (you can see half of his body just poking into the picture) and now they're bearing down on the dwarves milling around my trade depot in the upper right. I have two ballistas built, only one of them is loaded and it's questionable as to whether anybody will actually run up and fire it. The eight dwarves hanging around outside are probably goners and right now my "strategy", as it were, is going to be to lock all the doors into the fortress and wait for them to go away after they've killed everybody they can get to.

Normally, I'd be able to pull the lever to the right of the moat and pull back my drawbridges; however, due to a miscalculation on my part, the only active bridge at this point is treated as an external bridge, meaning that I can't retract it. I was trying to install a bridge that could retract and I got about a third of the way into the process before the goblins got here.

I should be able to survive the attack, so long as the remaining dwarves don't freak out about their comrades who were slaughtered and start tearing the place apart from the inside. If and when the goblins do leave, I'll have to throw all my energy into getting those bridges operational, expanding my moat and possibly creating some sort of steam-based defense system, if I have the time.

Some of the more observant of you might be wondering why exactly a calf is standing in the middle of my moat. Well, uh, I don't know what you're talking about.
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 4:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's now year two at Okangdoren, and things have progressed really quite well. Near the end of last winter, food started running out, but the worst effect of that was mild hunger. Spring came along, meaning farming could start again, and the weather was much more inviting. A small group of migrants came in to help out, and now things are really bustling. It's almost a little utopia -- everyone's been getting along, a couple big parties were held, and spirits are high. We haven't seen any baddies from the deep: no goblins, no demons, no river or chasm citters.
We did, however, just have a small invasion. A deer waltzed just inside the fortress and proceeded to raise hell, injuring a few dwarves, causing panic, and smearing blood all over the walls and floor. The deer finally ran off, but any visitor is going to have an unpleasant first impression of the place now.
If we get attacked by anything more dangerous than Bambi, I don't think things will go too well.
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2006 11:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, the above invasion did not go terribly well. I believe the final toll was around 10 dwarves, including one Marksdwarf and one Axedwarf. The goblins made it inside the fortress and were torn apart by war dogs before they got very far past the antechamber.

The real problem was cleaning up all the bodies/chunks and trying to placate the dwarves who had lost pets during the attack, both in the form of the wardogs and in some wandering cats that were cut down by the invaders.

The reason they were able to get inside was that I hadn't completed my drawbridge yet. Now I've got 4 parallel bridges build/in construction (actually, it's really 8 bridges, with the final square of each being a separate bridge that can be retracted) and I'm in the process of linking them up to a single lever, which I'm also linking up to a floodgate that will hopefully connect to a magma channel, currently being built. It's my first experience with an acqueduct, and I expect that everything will go horribly wrong, even if I try the crazy floodgate "fix" that some people have come up with to avoid flooding their entire map.

I'll also need to dig channels from the outside river to my moat and then flood those, so that when the magma hits, I'll generate a tremendous amount of steam.

In other news, magma men and fire men delight in jumping out of the magma river and smashing my magma smelter and magma forge. Assigning war dogs to restraints nearby doesn't seem to work as they tend to either get fried right off the bat or die far too quickly in melee. Traps seem to be the way to go and I'm left wishing that I had more mechanics, as all this bridge linking/floodgate linking/lever building has left me quite a backlog of traps to position.

With my "home" fortress, I created a pretty cool entrance/moat feature that I think will really help in terms of defence. I haven't had time to work on it recently because I've been at work for 13 straight days (they do let me go home to sleep); when I get back to it, I'll post some pictures.
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 16, 2006 10:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oh god.

Well, I was almost done with my magma channel and had my drawbridges set up and I was basically on the verge of having acceptable defenses, when the goblins began siege no. 2.

They decided to show up at the exact same time as the human caravan, which is both hilarious and probably the end for my fort. Hilarious, because that meant that the goblins were pretty much completely wiped out by the caravan guards, leaving me to clean up.

And it means my doom because the humans will blame me for the caravan's destruction, which means I will probably be sieged by humans as well as goblins.

So, I decided to drop the bridges and let the dwarves go out and collect the bodies/goodies. This is when I noticed the large group of Trolls and the second group of goblins streaming across the bridge over the outside river.

Facing a moral crisis, I raised the drawbridges again, abandoning the dwarves who had scurried outside. I had made enough ballista ammo that there was some covering siege engine fire and in desperation, I drafted all the outside dwarves into the military on the hope that it would make some kind of difference.

Thankfully, my small horde of press-ganged dwarves managed, along with some suprisingly effective ballista shots, to take out the trolls and remaining goblins, causing a rout before the trolls could destroy my trade depo or the bridges.

Now the outside is littered with corpses, body parts and the remains of the human caravan. Everything is being hauled to its respective storerooms and I'm left hoping that I can actually get my steam generator defense system working before the humans decide to descend upon me. That is, if my insane little charges don't all decide to go buck-wild and tear the fortress apart from the inside-out.

Final death toll: all the humans except for their "Trade Baroness", who was inside negotiating terms for trade during the battle and is currently picking her way down a road scattered with the burning wagons and mangled corpses of her caravan; about 15 dwarves, it's hard to tell because I had a wave of immigrants shortly before the invasion, which is actually kind of handy because now I have some spare bedrooms.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 21, 2006 1:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

So I've had my first time off in a while (by this I mean that I've got time at home to do something besides eat and sleep) and I'm doing a little work tonight on Ducimshoveth, which is my fortress that hasn't yet been beseiged by goblins.

Only now, I'm kind of looking forward to it. You see, I've finally managed to channel magma all the way to the front of the mountain, where the only thing standing between molten rock and my moat that connects to the outside river is a single floodgate. I'm one lever pull away from a cataclysmic eruption of steam that will scorch goblin flesh from goblin bone.

Of course, it does the same thing to dwarven flesh and dwarven bone, so I need to make sure that I don't steam-cook my loyal dwarves, which is probably easier said than done. That said, I'm feeling much more calm now, having set up a defense, which, if it works correctly, will be able to see off just about any future seige.

On a more sour note, I almost screwed my farming royally through too much cooking and not enough brewing. It's a long story; the end result being that I have 5 plump helmet spawn and no plump helmets (although I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 prepared meals). I'm very thankful that I have those 5 and I'm looking forward to next spring when I can actually plant them, brew the plump helmets and start the cycle over again. This will probably mean making lots of barrels, which would be easier if I found some coal, so that I can make metal barrels rather than using loads of wood.

This is the current look: Ducimshoveth, Winter 1055

And the previous year, for comparison: Ducimshoveth, Summer 1054

The major differences is that the dorms between the river and the chasm have been lengthed; there's a furniture storeroom added out there as well; the nobles quarters have been expanded and further detailed; although it's hard to tell, the meeting rooms to the west have been dismantled and the long hall along the river-chasm dorms has taken their place; the channel and aqueducts carrying the magma to the front of the mountain have been built to the south and the front of the mountain has been hacked away to create this kind of theatrical "mouth" of an entrance, complete with a moat and some supports to hold it up (it did collapse once during construction because I'm a dumbass).

The ballistae (the yellow things) are behind fortifications and should be effective once I figure out how to get the dwarves to take the ammo that I've made and actually, you know, put them in the ballistae. I'm unsure about this stragegy because steam travels through fortifications, rendering the siege engines useless should I decide to go with my primary defense plan. Next time around I am definitely going to try the murder hall route or something more devious involving channels running parallel to a main hall with fortifications placed to spew steam onto anybody silly enough to come inside.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 12:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

A brief break from my forts, to talk about pictures of what other people have done:

http://img207.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mudworld6ml6.png

A fortress using an alternate tile set, that's gone all the way back to the heart of the mountain. Of note here is the well-developed defense systems, which consist of channeled and aqueducted water and magma, situated so as to generate clouds of steam either at the outside enterance or the magma river. Note the magma-filled chasm, which is achieved by having an open magma channel empty into the chasm for a period of time, reportedly up to a year in length. Afterwards, the native population of the chasm is uh, no longer a problem, although I have heard reports that batmen will sometimes still come out of a pacified chasm.

http://personal.structureddev.net/jesse.luna/misc/df_mon_oxdu_region_map_full.png

There are several unique architectural aspects to this one, the most notable being the absolutely massive multiple entrances to the outside, guarded by siege engines, which are also used for some internal defense, which is something that I'd heard about but never seen put into practice. This fort is also notable for being extremely organized, as well as for having everything squished between the outside and the river, as opposed to most designs, which favor placing most of the fortress proper between the river and the chasm.



A detail of exterior fort defenses, still in the stage of being developed. The main idea being to funnel invaders into a small "killing zone" defined by the fortifications at the end of the "arms" at either side of the enterance and the central fortified area, which is intended to house multiple siege engines. There's a siege engine workshop to the right of this area so as to minimize ammunition shortages (and by which you can derive that the builder of this fortress favors ballistae over catapults, which seem to be used as often to dispense of unwanted stone as they are as actual war machines). I believe that you can see a moat under construction along the bottom of the picture, which will probably be crossed with a retractable bridge, so as to isolate the defenses if they are breached by the enemy.



A "pocket fortress". Used by many as their initial staging area in terms of living quarters and necessary workshops while the guts of the eventual fortress are hollowed out by the miners. In this specific case, the builder even went to the trouble of channeling the outside river so as to have a farm plot in the pocket fort. Much of the infrastructure is still outside of the mountain.

http://img169.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mudworldly3.png

I believe that this is done by the same guy who did the first fortress in this post. I linked to this one mainly for the non-rectangular room designs, which look really nice. I've seen some forts that use the circular designs for all of their rooms, along with some other people who have used their floor plans to create giant images carved into the mountain, of dwarves and of other things.

http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l23/ironstorm01/GBLSHSoD.png

An impressive defense system, to be sure. The bridges in the side channels don't really serve any purpose aside from looking good and possibly giving fisherdwarves more real estate to work with. The basic function of this is that once the magma is released, it will travel down the channels down either side of the main road, generating steam until it reaches the outside river, at which point it will create a wall of steam until switched off. At this point, you can have your dwarves come out and collect the nicely cleaned detritus of the attacking army. A tip for those of you having trouble with your civilians wandering outside during a siege: put them all in one squad, then activate and station it deep inside your fort when the siege begins.

http://img68.imageshack.us/my.php?image=koligamee2.png

This is possibly the most ambitious fort that I've ever seen. Taking place entirely on the outside of the mountain, this guy has created a settlement that has lasted for 13 years without using stone or metal. Not only that, he's created an intricate defense system, created lakes that spell out a name in dwarven runes and engraved the entire available surface of the mountain.

Alright, I think that's enough for now. Like Dess, I really enjoy the way that the game winds up looking as the fortress grows and develops. Even though it seems like it's just me yelling at an empty room in this thread, I'm gonna keep posting unless people ask me to stop.
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