User:CptFastbreak

I tend to forget my thoughts on design strategy in between fortress builds, so I put them here.

Minecart hauling

It is currently impossible to have a completely safe, micro free way to drop items down a shaft with minecarts due to a bug that causes items to do excessive damage when falling (spiderwebs falling 1 z-level have been reported to cave in skulls).

That notwithstanding, my experiments have shown that it is possible to have items drop only 1 z-level with the following setup. The dumping track is be 3 tiles long. The end leading to the shaft must have a track stop set to dump into the shaft. The other end has a stop set to not dump anything. The middle tile has a pressure plate set to trigger on any track condition linked to a retracting bridge directly above the square to be dumped into. When the cart is moved to the dump, the first pass over the plate will trigger the bridge, but it will be ignored because a second trigger follows immediately afterwards when the cart is moved back to the fillup point. At this point, the falling items have 100 steps (?) to reach the bridge to get stopped before the dumping. I'm not entirely sure how fast vertical movement is, but in my experience, about up to 20 z-levels is about enough to have the items rest comfortably on the bridge before it is opened shortly afterwards. Between 20 and at least 40, the items have not reached the bridge yet when it opens and will therefore directly fall to the ground.

Defense

My next fortress will use a "three lane" approach to fortress defense: three mutually exclusive routes that lead into my fort.

• Defcon 1, Ambush lane: this is normally open to the public. It is a three tile wide, heavily trapped corridor leading directly to the trade depot. The trade depot has to be open to wagons all the time, otherwise trader wagons will not even enter the map. The purpose of this path is to take care of any unpleasant surprise such as snatchers, thieves, and ambushes.
• Defcon 0, Trader lane: this path is opened when traders enter the map. It is a three tile wide corridor with no traps leading directly to the trade depot for the traders to bring us wood and useless crap. The traders' guards are capable of taking care of ambushes on their own.
• Defcon 2, Siege lane: this path is opened when a siege should be fought back. It will possibly only be 1-2 tiles wide, and should ideally be somehow exposed to the sunlight to order dwarves out of it. The outer approach should be covered by catapults, the inner lane by ballistas, toss a guard tower with marksdwarves somewhere in there, maybe traps but that might be overkill. The path leads to the barracks, where the military will be glad for an interesting break from sparring sessions.

Other ideas:

• Chain recon dogs in windowed towers all around the map. Drawback: needs a lot of towers on a large site; Advantage: Reduces the system to only two defcons, allows outside work
• Let siege lane lead to a chained bait animal instead of to the barracks. Drawback: unemployment for military, might be unnecessary depending on the defense status
• Make siege lane magma floodable to get rid of any gobbo crap dropped there. Drawback: needs replenishable magma source, more work, less fps due to fluid movement. Advantage: magma.

Bedroom/workshop design

For my last two fortresses I used the decentralized living plan along with decentralized workshops. I had four work/living complexes more or less symmetrically around a central grand dining hall. The big advantage is that it accomodates for various workshop area constraints, e.g. having the butchery close to the surface for a refuse area vent, the kitchen near the farm near the soil area, but the forges close to the magma. Two major drawbacks are the necessity of complex micro management for the bedrooms, and the increased complexity of the noise problem. Placing a tower cap farm can be tricky when there are bedrooms everywhere.

Extensions of the decentralized layout:

• There should be a central finished goods stockpile close to the depot to have all those x(narrow giant cave spider silk socks)x and x(small alligator leather loincloths)x in time there for the foreign perverts that call themselves traders.
• Since apparently only one stockpile can take from a stockpile at a given time, the local piles must be chained to take from each other. There should be two big central booze and prepared food stockpiles where the first local pile takes its stocks from, to avoid clutter in the kitchens. Preferably somewhere near the grand dining hall. Dedicated food haulers will take care of the distribution.
• There should be a central living area near the dining hall for dwarves that work in various places all around the fortress: miners and engravers.
• The military needs a living area near the depot, the siege operators can't be too far from their machines. Consider a military vomitorium to fight cave adaption.
• A separate lever area should hold a pump operator in a lockable area.
• Centralized catacombs for burial deep down. Since burying a dismembered dwarf might take a long time in such a setting, I use a wake room closer to the surface where the dwarves will be buried in a coffin which will be deconstructed later on to have their bones transferred to the catacombs. Since z-level is not taken into account in pathfinding, coffins in the catacombs should only be allowed for burial on demand when theres bones to transfer.

Mistakes I made last time:

• Living areas should be below the workshops even on woodless maps, otherwise they will be susceptible to fighting and siege engine noise from the surface.