Bay 12 Games Forum

I sank a dam into this frozen creek in the winter and the water just flows right through the blocks and floodgates.

BoredomTedium the eternal Fortress: We Have Socks. 
A 100+ year fortress. I know its probably been done. I'm just wondering what its like and what effect such a fortress would have on the legends and the local landscape. I mean there's a finite amount of metals and stone at every site.  How many goblin sieges can your fortress eat before you run out of goblins? Is it possible to kill the world from your fortress? 

So my Fortress went from getting owned by elves, badgers, and macaques, to cowering behind a atom smasher, to cowering behind two atom smashers, to dropping the elves into the river.
Well the river has gotten quite full (elves, goblins, trolls, and a cat in a cage I accidentally dumped in there) so we no longer cower.  Now we shoot them from our dread black obsidian tower with red fortifications who's top is eternally shrouded by a cloud of bees (18 hives worth).  Then we run them down with our steel plated infantry.  Sometimes we even fight goblins.
Now I have a moat that surrounds our fortress on three sides which, due to an slight engineering oversight, is actually wider than the river and full of magma (the magma part isn't the oversight).  I now take perverse pleasure in watching bodies get dumped into it. I've also set up a "twin dragons" system which is a pair of pumps flanking a steel drawbridge which rapidly drain the moat onto whatever is in front of them. The moat can also be rapidly filled with water so I could use the dragons to put out fires theoretically.
I have a trap above the first cave level that kills forgotten beasts with magma, (necessary, there's one down there that killed a quarter of my fort in 10 seconds with a single fart.)
Also my Baron is a super chill ambidextrous legendary miner who likes, green glass, flasks, thrones, and shoes. Mostly he orders shoes. Also he's a nudist.
The mayor on the other hand, churns out babies and ordered a Sterling silver bed.

So I've been trying to find a site that's relatively flat with iron, flux stone, and a river. Resulting in a whole pile of rejected sites and half started settlements.  I finally get to a site that looks good and start digging straight down. Usually with only seven dwarfs the game runs pretty smoothly right?  Well I was getting the lag and frame rates I normally associate with a 200 dwarf fortress with attached dwarf shower haus. It was bad, particularly when the river thawed. So I was digging down hoping to reach a lake cavern so I wouldn't have to dig a cistern and actually see what ores were available. It was looking pretty bad anyway (just copper ores) then I realized I hadn't hit a cave yet. I found the magma sea without hitting a single cave.  In the magma sea was a massive magma fall, like huge (I think it was 30+ blocks across), pouring into some sort of hole that probably went to hell. This explained the lag. Needless to say I won't be building there.