Bay 12 Games Forum

Anyhoo, you can minimise -- but obviously not prevent outright -- injuries if you at least deck out your sparring partners in leather armour.  It's good to keep a few sets on hand for sparring.  If you're going to be doing any weapons-training, it's best to go for the heaviest armour you can, of course.

But otherwise the worst thing that can happen is crashing. ;-)

I try to.  Most of my wood needs are fulfilled by the exterior world, and I tend to prefer challenging myself by opting for no traps, no floodrooms, etc. instead of going for inhospitable climates.  Since I'm very much a casual gamer than a power gamer, I often get bored of a successful fortress after about the third year and abandon the fortress, or just wipe the whole world and regenerate a new one... I've only once ever grown a tower cap from a tree farm before abandoning the fortress, but it's the thought that counts.

* Where do you like to build your fortress relative to the cliff face, river, chasm and magma? Why?

In all of my modern forts, I dig a defence passageway straight between the exterior world and the river.  I then bridge the river, set up a main hall, and go from there.

My barracks are always in front of the river.  This way, I can mobilise an armed defence in a more cohesive fashion against a goblin siege.

* How do you relate with the other civilizations? Do you depend on trade? Is it irrelevant to you? Do you think of caravans as opportunities, nuisances, or irrelevant?

I tend to play nice.  Plus, craftsdwarfs are an excellent way to dispose of stone that piles up, so if I can't do anything with those crafts I tend to ask myself, "What's the point?"  I try to find a roughly even mix of stone piles (an important source of income for peasant haulers) and just letting the crafters haul stones on their own.

* What's most important to you hwne you design your fortress? Aesthetics? Efficiency? Defense? Mining out every last ounce of valuable ore? Overcoming obstacles as the game presents them?

Aesthetics is a big factor for me, but in general I just build as the need strikes me.

* What's your pace? Do you rush out your entire design in the first five minutes and then impatiently wait for the dwarves to get to it? Or do you slowly progress through the mountain, designing as you go for years?

Slow.  My longest running fort was six years and I didn't even cross the chasm.

You'll note that dwarf bone artifacts use fresh bones, for instance. ;-)

For a modern corollary: if a terrorist blows up a plane in Kazakhstan, do the families of the Americans and Canadians on board become angry?  You bet they do.  Kazakhstan should be keeping its terrorist population down.

[ March 06, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]

Of course, to put that to shame, magma is much more abundant than coal... but then, in most of my fortresses I self-impose a ban on building anything magma-related, just for the sake of keeping the fortress lasting dozens of years.