User:Gotthard

Castles

I'm currently experimenting with making castles; one of my current fortresses is on a biome with all dolomite and hematite. I've got about 700 blocks in the small keep area so far, and I started with 2 masons (currently 3) making blocks non-stop. I suppose I could have just made it directly out of stone, but then it wouldn't be *smooth* castle walls, now would they?

There is a central keep over the main entrance to my underground areas~

wwdwdww
w+++++w
d+<+<+d
w+++++w
d+<+<+w
w+++++w
wwwwwww

(d=door, w=wall, +=floor, <=stairs down)

The keep is currently 5 levels high, and the second and third floors are a small barracks and armory respectively. The third level has fortifications for shooting (not that z-level shooting is hopefully fixed) and the fourth level is a small shooting gallery to practice. The fifth level has more fortifications, and the planned sixth level is another barracks/armory, with the 7th level possibly having siege equipment.

Surrounding the central keep is a series of walls and 4 towers:

wwwwww.................................wwwwww
w++++w..................................w++++w
w++++wwwwwwDDwDDwwwwww++++w
w++>+wwwwwwPPwPPwwwwww++>+w
w++++d..........o...........o..........d++++w
wwwwdw..................................wwwwww

(D=steel door, P=vertical steel bars for portcullis, w=wall, +=floor, >=up stairs, o=lever)

The walls go up to one more level, and the third level is only one wide fortifications, with the other a floor to enable shooting off the walls. The towers are currently 5 high, with small barracks and ammunition storage for the archers. The left lever opens the portcullis, the right lever the steel doors.

I'm wondering if building the walls and towers larger, and building bedrooms and other shops into the walls is feasible. Certainly I'm looking at moats and drawbridges as well, but I want to get a prototype castle up first to check in game dimensions and time to build.

Utilities

I'm working at making a small script to autoplace towers/walls/floors in certain dimensions. You'll be able to save the 'floor plan' in a config file, and load it out as you wish. I'm a perfectionist however, and since the building materials list isn't alphabetical, but by distance, the place a particular building material is in changes as you place items. Trying to work out a good way around this. If anyone knows a way to make it alphabetical (or can point me to a DF utility that gets the text currently highlighted) feel free to let me know. It looks like it should be trivial to write a script that takes well-formatted text files and then inputs the walls/stairs/floors for at least one level, I'm working on a way to make it move up/down levels as well. But the damn materials will be whichever are closest, nice for all the efficiency people out there, but plays havoc with the artists.

Why autohotkey by the way? www.autoit3.com is the only thing I use.