User:KhazâdAimênu

Fortresses

Splatteredwalls
Such a nice, auspicious name...and it's lived up to it so far, it's been my bloodiest fortress yet. It's also the first fortress I've managed to site with a brook, an underground river, magma, a bottomless pit, and HFS.
Points of Interest:

• Suspension Bridge: To span the river, I built the following:

    --------- ---------
    I       I I       I
-----bbbbbbbB-Bbbbbbbb-------

- Floor
I Support
B Bridge base
b Bridge body

It's sort of a suspension bridge; this is the simplest design, but it can be made far more complex and maintain the basic structure. A Fun feature is that if you want to collapse the entire bridge, all you have to do is link the outside supports to a lever.

• Archer Screen: Part of the "story" I had for this fortress was that there should be a big, straight road that's integral to the fortress, and as such I couldn't have a very complex entryway. I also wanted to avoid sealing the road wherever possible. I put traps on the entryways, and stationed my melee troops on the road, which rises a z-level after the traps. This worked well for lashers and wrestlers, but not so well against a group of crossbowgoblins. After losing three dwarves, including a champion, I realized I needed to find some way to protect against archers while still allowing easy pathing, that could leave a nice open road when not under attack. Hence, the archer screen: two alternating rows of floodgates pop up out of the road when the lever is pulled. Units can still pass through the diagonals, but archers can't get a line of sight.

0+++++0
0++D++0
0+++++0
0x+x+x0
0+x+x+0
0+++++0
0VVVVV0

0 Wall
+ Floor
x Floodgate
V Down Ramp

• Dog Pit: I had a lot of war dogs, and they had the habit of running off after invading goblins before they got through the trap section, invariably getting themselves pointlessly slaughtered. So, I wanted to make a kennel for them, but this would limit their usefulness if any goblins or elves did make it through the traps. Some people have put them in lever-attached cages near the entrance, but I wanted to do something different. I decided that, since the road actually runs over the first floor of the fortress, I would drop the dogs into a room underneath the road, with a ramp leading up to a hatch in the middle of the road. The hatch is attached to a lever, so the dogs are normally trapped in their room, but if the defense is going badly, I can pull a lever and have a dozen war dogs stream up out of the road. When the hatch is closed, caravans can pass over normally.

Lionwind
My first aboveground fortress - I embarked on an aquifer to enforce that only basements are allowed. Also because I wanted to build my fortress around building and defending a bridge over a river. A fun lesson in why checking the civs before embarking is a good idea; turns out my civ is almost gone, on the brink of being overrun by elves, and the liason died some time ago. The regular elf sieges have been challenging, but satisfying.