User:Navian

My current project is a frozen fortress with no neighbouring civilizations. The biomes are taiga and glacier, with the fortress built in the glacier and the taiga used for farmland, plant gathering, sand, woodcutting and a water supply in the form of an aquifer. With no enemies and few animals, only one member of the fortress died of external causes, an unfortunate bear hunter. Another of my hunters has made sure to stock up on over a hundred food items and can barely move. This keeps him very safe, as he is unable to catch anything.

The lack of sieges gives the place an ominous tone, I find. All the ice makes room for acres of engraving and huge towers, but with most of the workforce devoted to food, cloth, dye, and glass production, not much work has been done. The count recently arrived, and went insane due to his bedroom not being engraved when he went to sleep in it, and being woken up by the engravers who came to improve it. Hard to satisfy, that one. The countess is easily pleased, on the other hand, all she needed to do was break a miner's spine in a fist fight and she was right as rain.

I've noticed a few interesting things during the course of this game. One, 'The Incoming King' really likes roads paved with clear glass. Two, not only did the dead count's wife stay a member of the nobility after his passing, but she's now become the 'Duchess Consort' after the arrival of a new Countess and her Consort, and subsequent promotion.

Yes, that's a Duchess, a Duke Consort, and a Duchess Consort, all demanding rooms and imposing mandates. Three, as it turns out it actually is possible to get engravings on constructed walls, it just requires building the wall on top of a floor engraving. This helps a lot for subdividing nobles' rooms, and it makes my covered roadways much prettier.

Carvans and migrants trek through hundreds of miles of snowfields, so I thought it'd be nice to get them a nice big hall. I was going to make it more epic/ridiculous in proportions, but I ran out of mined ice and left it at two stories with fortifications on the third level roof.

The king finally came, and the fortress population is 303. Still no signs of any hostiles whatsoever. Heck, the polar bears won't even come back. I'm starting to wonder whether there's any endgame for me at all, or if this is going to keep going on... I'm more than 20 years into the game, the year 599 is almost over, and there have only been fifteen deaths: Four babies who fell down the well shaft before I moved the barracks, the crazy count, a few failed moods, a couple sparring deaths, and one construction accident.

Justice hasn't given anyone permanent injuries yet, just broken bones, but brain damage was very common before the population got so high that the meeting areas and barracks carved into the glacier aren't so cold anymore. I wonder, if the ice started to melt and that 18 story tower collapsed on a few dozen idlers, could that be a game-ender? Definitely would be a cute one. I definitely have plenty of unemployed citizens, with more goods than they can export and so much food there are no barrels left for brewing. The only way to generate jobs would be to mine and construct great works of insanity in this featureless wasteland, and my fingers just aren't up to all the button-pressing involved.