Bay 12 Games Forum

Shotrake

A fortress with 210+ dwarves, ~3k each of different sorts of prepared meals and drink, fully functioning industries of all stripes (clothes making from pig tail farms to dyers, smelters/forges/woodburners, carpentry, jewelers, butchers).  Edit:  I forgot. There's no sand on the map, so there isn't any sort of glassmaking industry. 

Got the queen legitimately.  The nobles all request stuff like warhammers, brass items or crowns.  I think the Queen Consort has expensive tastes, but that hasn't reared it's ugly head yet.  I have like 20 or 30+ champions, so sieges are a push-over.  With just a bit of input, the place pretty much runs itself (at about 20 fps with everything turned off). 

To be honest, I got bored with it.  The place doesn't have anything like magma, HFS, chasms or other underground features, so outside of wanting to create an neat fort around some interesting land formations, I accomplished the goal I set for myself.

I have the save and will upload it if anybody's interested.  It's vanilla and 40d, before the 40d 1-11 versions of the game (but I think it's still compatible). 

Edited again:  Ok, I uploaded it.  http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=1118

Unicorns for me.  I remember having them rampage through one of my forts:

"Oh look, they're curious about my forts.  Sure, no problem having them wandering about inside.  They're not getting in the way or anything."

"Oh, silly dwarf, you got in the unicorns way and hurt yourself."

"Hmm...why am I getting death notices?"

"OH MY GOD!  THE BLOOD!  THE MIASMA!!  THEY'RE HUNTING MY DWARVES!"

For me, 80-90% of new immigrants get masonry and stone detailing turned on, and I set them to building large outdoor constructions and smoothing the underground areas of my fortress.  This mass of people also doubles as my hauler workforce.  Depending on what I'm working on, I can regularly keep an entire fortress of 170+ non-idle (usually with a small number of idlers because of healing injuries or being jailed). The other 10-20% usually get tasked with miscellaneous cooking related jobs (butcher, tanner, brewing, farming), or other specific industry jobs that I want (typically weavers and metalworkers). 

I usually can keep my fortresses well stocked with a variety of food and drink.  I try to keep my stocks between 1500 - 3000 units of food and drink.  Ordering oodles of drink and meat from the caravans helps immensely with guaranteeing that I don't run out of edibles.

The biggest problem I've always had with running large fortresses isn't the numbers, it's the framerate.  170+ dwarves usually drops my FPS down into the 17-30 range.

Maybe a Suggestions area in the Wiki would help to alleviate the problem a bit?  It would help to categorize the different suggestions, point out some of the more popular threads and potentially could be used to distill interesting suggestion topics down to their most useful pieces.

I love that when megabeasts get wounded during world gen, they stay wounded when they show up to attack your fortress.  Especially when said wound it their right rear leg and it causes them to fall over unconscious the second they arrive on your map.  Even better is when they slowly crawl toward your fortress, leaving a trail of blood in their wake, and the rest of your dwarves go about hauling wood back inside.

"Eh, wot's tha'?"

"Oh, that's Ade Suckerwastes.  Ee's a hydra wot's been threatening Timberwake since I was a wee 'un.  'spect he'll get to the gate some day.  Leaves a bloody mess though!"

Mmm...demon steak with a nice Chianti.  And a side of fava beans.

When two rivers meet up, there's usually a multi-z level waterfall that drops directly from the level of the higher river to the lower level one.  My suggestion is, rather than having all rivers that meet up do this sort of thing, instead have a gradual drop in z-levels from the higher level to the lower level one (like one or two levels at a time).  You wouldn't want to get rid of all the large waterfalls obviously, but mixing up the tall falls with rapids would create some more interesting locations to explore and build on.

In any case, Toady probably isn't going to stop work on the current arc (Army Arc) to switch gears to another arc (Presentation Arc) midstream.  At the very least, he'd wait until the current stuff he's working on is finished up, and by his estimates that puts any potential change in development focus out to sometime in February.  That'd be another four months, and realistically you're looking at probably another year or more before he'd be sufficiently satisfied with the current arc and wanted to shift gears.

Like I mentioned, until the donations start to lag, there's not much impetus for him to work on stuff he doesn't find all that interesting.