Editing User:Cheepicus

I am a player of moderate experience. I've been trying to branch out more lately.

== Starting Build ==

For a long time my starting build has been pretty stable.

=== Dwarfs ===

* Miner 5 / Appraiser 1 / Persuader 1 / Negotiator 1 / Intimidator 1 / Judge of Intent 1 
* Miner 5 / Brewer 5
* Miner 5 / Cook 5
:The early mining crew. They give up mining with the first migrants. 
* Mechanic 5 / Siege Engineer 5
* Carpenter 5 /  Stonecrafter 5
* Mason 5 / Architect 5
* Grower 5 / Armorsmith 5

=== Equipment ===

* 1 anvil, 0 axes, 0 cats, 4 picks.
* 2 dogs. Lately, 4.
* 0 plump helmets.
* 12ish plump helmet spawn, 1 of each other seed. I've never done dying or outdoor farming.
* 1 of each food costing 2 or 4. Not 6 ... rather have 2 wood.
* Scads of wood.
* I don't start with bauxite and don't really see the use of it for standard dealing with magma.

== Fortress Ideas ==

My typical fortress has one central shaft with everything sprouting off of that. Sometimes this is too boring and I want to try something else.

One thing I have been sort of playing with is "1 room per purpose", rather than "dig out a big space and cram stuff in it."

=== City fortress ===
The buildings are all on one z-level far underground, laid out with a grid of streets. No surface defenses; invaders must be allowed to march right down to the z-level of the city. (Don't piss off the humans!) Ideally buildings and areas are 'guild related' with 100% assigned beds and dining rooms, with mechanics next to other mechanics, and so on.

I've done a couple fortresses along these lines. Fun, and I don't think I'm done with it yet. Would like to have the city have rain, have not quite worked out how to have water falling gently over a large xy area. Probably I can do this with a "pachinko machine" apparatus above the city, where water streams into a central hole and then is sieved out. Another method would be a single big room, filled by a reservoir to a shallow depth; the floor of the room has a shitload of hatches, which are linked to repeaters on different syncs, so that sometimes they are open and sometimes not. Super bonus cool would be for the rain amount to vary over time (extra credit; to match game seasons) without any manual input from dorfs).

=== Roguelike fortress ===
By this I mean a fortress whose useful areas are dug in rooms, which are joined up by corridors. The corridors are dug ad hoc to join up rooms, vs. the concept of adding rooms onto a skeleton of corridors. This would be a deliberately inefficient design.

=== Narrow Tower ===
Making a challenge out of my normal method, the whole fortress is vertically aligned 11x11 chambers. Exploratory mining and plumbing are allowed, but all buildings must be in the 11x11 footprint.  Obviously having a cliffside would help.

== Previous Fortresses ==

=== Systembooks and Plaitbust, Underground Cities ===

Had some fun with underground cities with buildings laid out on a grid, avoiding the use of z-levels as much as possible.

[http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7087-systembooks Systembooks at DFMA]

[http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7158-plaitbust Plaitbust at DFMA]

Plaitbust got up to 289 dorfs, my largest fortress so far.

=== Reignlens, Guild Outpost ===
Here I wanted to make a fortress centered on ONE universal stockpile. (With no dump reclaim, bin max 0, but separate stinky-item stockpiles allowed.) Around the stockpile would be a ring of guild structures where each dwarf has quarters and dining facilities personally assigned (except peasants).

This is in some sense the opposite of my usual fortress design, where there's a big undifferentiated apartment block, then a big open room for workshops and stockpiles with a lot of time spent worrying about stockpile size and placement.

[http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7063-reignlensoutpost Reignlens at Map Archive]

I didn't know the maximum stockpile size is 31x31, which meant that after THE stockpile filled up, it was like having no stockpile. Organizing by guild was annoying by first but quickly became fun.

Not really an inspiring fortress but a fun little mini-challenge for me.

=== Targetarch, Sand Fortress ===
[[Image:TargetArch.png|thumb|left|200px|On embark.]][[Image:TargetArchOops.png|thumb|left|200px|Oops.]]
A sand/magma/aquifer fortress, was amusingly saved from flooding (embarrassingly noobish mistake) but then became boring. Really if I want to play a no stone-layer fortress, I'll probably have to forgo magma, or do it as a conduct.

Centering the fortress around the top room of a magma pipe is still interesting to me. Or maybe it's that flooding them is such fun.