Bay 12 Games Forum

It's actually surprisingly simple. Yes, you can use floors as roofs and ceilings. Keeps out all the nasty fliers. Remember, if you're using fortifications for marksdwarves, use walls and then carve fortifications with d>a.

Pump some magma up under the water you need unfrozen.

Bridges are your friend. Particularly raising ones. Instead of grates, building a bridge out  to the middle of the water fall would have worked and kept the Dwarves from drowning. Me, I route THROUGH waterfalls, instead of just buy them.

Alternately, re-routing the river and building a bridge out to carry the water beyond your walkway makes it possible to retract the bridge and have it flood the walk, defending you from sieges.

Wood re-grows. And if you have caverns, there's wood down there.

A 24z pump stack, which runs water down a 24z water reactor should provide enough power to run both it's own pump stack and the magma stack, without needing 138 dwarfs working. Just route it so the bottom level is running back to the bottom pump.

I simply channel holes into the edge of the volcano if all I need is to power workshops. Works well enough.

Z-levels are prioritized over direct distance. If pretty stone A is ten steps away, and on the same z, the dwarf will walk 60 steps to reach pretty stone B which is nine steps away but one z-level up.

As such, workshops are arranged as so:

++++
++++
++++
XWX

W=Wall
The up/down stairs lead to stockpiles of materials for the workshops. If I have a forge area, they'll all have a common stockpile of metals and fuel below, and a common stockpile of finished goods above. The former simplifies the hauling, and the latter simplifies storage.

Usually though, I'll start out with stockpiles of equal size, and then link them with central corridors that keep haulers out of the way of the workers.

I haven't had any... survivors. But they should return first to civilian life, and then rejoin when the re-enlistment happens for the Military cycle.

I use 4z drops. The bottom is filled with Spike Traps, and they are connected to repeaters in alternating rings. Center 4, the 12 surrounding them, and so on. They alternate on/off during a siege.