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[ducker]

my first attemp was rather rough...

Here is my second one.  I'm midway through my first winter, I have 18 dwarves and things are looking as if I'll comfortably make it through the winter.

Nothing earth shattering in terms of design, I just personaly like viewing other people's forts, so I figured I'd throw mine up as well.

[ravensword227]

Well its rather dareing to start in a desert like that.  At least you have a outside river, though, you have not taken advantage of it.  Build yourself a channel going from the river to the side of the mountain and build a flootgate there and a room for farming beyond that.  I find that getting a farm up and running is more important than building personal rooms for your dwarves because you have a reserve for the winter - enough to accomodate more than just your starting party - which you'll be wishing you had when the migrants come.

EDIT:

       

This is like my fourth serious attempt in fortress mode.  My biggest accomplishments here was getting together a serious system of farms and an entrance constructed with a defensive strategy in mind. I have not been seiged yet, unfortunately; however, it was exciteing to put together a patrol to gaurd my tree cutters and haulers beyond the river.  

That involved the following:
1.  Crafting weapons (bone bows, wooden bows, wooden bolts, bone bolts, darkstone short swords).  Crafting leather armor, backpacks and quivers.
2.  Assembleing two squads.
3.  Building an archery range for the squad standing down to practice.
4.  Setting the soliders to patrol around the trees with food rations and a water.
5.  Giving a rather large queue to cut down the trees once the area was secure.

[ September 12, 2006: Message edited by: ravensword227 ]

[AlStar]

Just my thoughts...

Going from left to right:
1. it looks like your refuse pile is filled to capacity, you should make it larger, so things don't start rotting.

2. As far as I can tell, this room has a bunch of wells in it. This is good. It also has doors only on one side of it, and that side is opposite the side that has your housing. This is bad. I'd recommend cutting out this gem (possibly getting the gem in the process) and putting in a door.

3. Dwarves don't like sharing tables. If you get a chance, you should probably make the single row of tables into a double row.

My other couple comments are that
1) it looks like you've got your craftsdwarf station pretty far inside your fort. This might be fine, but I like placing them close to the entrance, so that they can easily get bones and shells from the refuse pile (disregard this if you're making crafts from other things)
and
2) Your main hallway starts out 3 wide (this is good) but then rapidly shrinks to 1 wide (this is bad.) 1-wide hallways cause dwarves to have to squeeze past one another (and pets too, if you've got the normal army of pets milling around) going very slowly. I'd reccommend making all main corridors at least 2 wide.

[ducker]

1 - Yes, I'll need to inrease that.  A bunch of frogmen posed a minor threat that my carpenter took care of.

2 - I was going to do exactly that.  Originaly it was a small room, with a baracks to the right of it.  Once I set up all the individual rooms to the north, I blew down the divider between the well(s) and the baracks.  I'll dig out that one location.

3 - I didn't know this... I'll make adjustments ASAP!

misc comments.  
This wasn't a desert map.  Perhaps it looks this way because it's the middle of winter and I cut down many of the trees just outside of my main gate.

I did start widening my main hall, but then I was getting concerned with possible attacks and wanting some sort of choke point.  I do have room to make it 3 wide all the way in.  I'll look to do that as well.

I agree, I'm not thrilled with where my craftedwarf is located.  I'll most likely reposisition him to the north, (west of my wells/meeting hall) which will allow him easier access to the bone outside.

Thanks for your feedback.  Makes me enjoy this game even more!

[ravensword227]

quote:Originally posted by ducker:
<STRONG>1 - Yes, I'll need to inrease that.  A bunch of frogmen posed a minor threat that my carpenter took care of.</STRONG>

About those frogmen.  IMO, I've found it best  to put the wells down the hall of the bedrooms with falling-stone traps around them and down the hall instead building wells in a large, open room.  With my setup, any frogmen that pop out of the well are smitten as soon as they appear AND if a few of them are thrown at me they have to travel through a hallway of slaughter.  Otherwise you'll need a designated gaurd or two to be at the right well at the right time to keep frogmen from getting into the tender, undefended parts of your base and killing your craftsmen.

[RPB]

If you're not going to build doors on your workshop rooms (to make them lockable), you might want to go ahead and cut out some of those walls (but not all of them or you'll cause a cave-in!) You can use the extra space to put in more stockpile space next to the workshops, which cuts down the time your dwarves have to spend running around hauling.

[Temps]

If I remember right, workshops count as supports. So its all fine and dandy until someone claims the workshop, flips out, and kicks the workshop over.

[Aristharus]

quote:Originally posted by Temps:
<STRONG>If I remember right, workshops count as supports. So its all fine and dandy until someone claims the workshop, flips out, and kicks the workshop over.</STRONG>

Nope, they don't. Or at least they didn't in some older version. I had four workshops in a room like this and got a cave-in:

code:

#########
#XXX.XXX#
#XXX.XXX#
#XXX.XXX#
+.......+
#XXX.XXX#
#XXX.XXX#
#XXX.XXX#
#########

X = workshop

[Aquillion]

I'm surprised nobody has pointed this out, but...  those bedrooms are waaay too large.  You just don't need bedrooms that big for ordinary dwarves.  2x3, even 2x2 is fine.  The effort spent on larger rooms would be better spent double-engraving your dining room and scattering some other furniture in it...  all your dwarves use your dining rooms quite frequently, so a high-quality one is an easy way to get you a big happiness boost with relatively little work.  Bedrooms, by comparison, just make one dwarf happy, and once the economy starts they'll have to pay for even that.

I would consider making a more direct path to your lumber storage by digging straight up from it into the main hall.

Add more traps when you have a free dwarf!  They're cheap and easy defense against the early baddies, and require almost no maintenance once you've set them up.  You've got lots of spare mechanisms, so you might as well trap your main entrance and the area around your wells.

Doors can help a little bit with defense, too, and will keep a number of other dangers in check, like floods and miasmas.  At least put a pair at either end of the corridor near your farm, to give you a chance to do something if it floods past that initial door.  Oh, and place one by the entrance to the river unless you want your halls shallow-flooded for some reason (it doesn't really do much damage, but it can move things around and occasionally wash a dwarf out into the river.)

In a little while you should build a loom.  Collecting silk and turning it into cloth is easy once you've hit the river...  it's completely automated, you just need to have a loom as close as you dare to the river, and a dwarf with weaving turned on.  They'll automatically collect new webs as they appear and turn them into silk...  silk can make cloth for bags, ropes, and clothes, while also satisfying possible fey mood demands for thread or raw cloth.  Although it's easy to collect, silk is hard to rush, so you should start gathering it as soon as possible so you'll have a big stockpile for trading or clothes or ropes or whatever when you need it.  Well, it's not that hugely important, but it's so easy to get that there's no real excuse not to once you're sure your food is alright.  And you do need bags for some things...  getting them from silk is much easier than making them from pig tails.

[ September 13, 2006: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[ducker]

lots of good feedback thanks  

So my rooms can be as small as 2x2!!! wow. I never thought of having a room that small!

Loving this.  I'm up to around 22 dwarves I believe.

I haven't seen any frogmen from the well yet, my only frogmen attack was from the river, and about 5 showed up.  My Carpenter delt with them swiftly.

Update to my keep.  Not too much done,  I added a few more stockpiles near particular shops (ie. wood pile at captenters shop.

The current project I'm mining out will be a stock pile for crafts/finished goods.

Why would I want to lock the doors in my workshops?  I don't really understand that.

I'm also thinking of putting double doors on all my workshops, so people could feasably cut through, making distance much shorter.

 

[ September 13, 2006: Message edited by: ducker ]

[RPB]

Well, now that you have 20+ dwarves, you will occasionally (maybe 1-2 per year in the game) have one of your dwarves go into a strange mood, where they claim a workshop and start looking for strange materials to build an artifact with. If they don't get the materials they want, they eventually (after a season or so of the mood) go insane, which might mean they go berserk and start attacking. Some people use doors on all their workshop rooms so that they can lock in insane dwarves.

Personally, I find stationing a squad of soldiers outside the workshop works just fine, and means I don't have to waste room with the walls of each workshop. My forts tend to turn into gigantic carved-out areas with occasional walls between big open rooms.

[Aquillion]

You could make rooms as small as 1x1 if you wanted to...  but 2x2 lets you fit in a cabinet and a coffer, which you'll want to be able to do later on.

[PNB]

normal dwarves get a 1 by 1 with a crappy bed. and are happy with the super paved outside areas.

[Aquillion]

Yes, but then they can't store any possessions or money.  This amounts to losing a ton of potental happiness gains in the long term, doesn't it?  In particularly, they should eventually get unhappy thoughts as a result of being unable to keep enough cash on hand to represent their account.

[Gakidou]

Is there any benefit to using 2x2 rooms instead of 1x3, though? Consider:

(b = bed, c = container, d = door)

code:

2x2
####
#cb#
#c #
##d#
....

Versus

code:

1x3
#####
#cbc#
##d##
.....

Are dwarves unhappy if they have no free floor space? Because if not, then the only possible reason to use 2x2 for lowly dwarves would be that more can be squeezed along the same distance of passageway. I don't think that dwarves get upset at other dwarves passing through their rooms, though, so you could try:

code:

Array of 1x3 rooms
#####
#cbc#
##d##
#cbc#
##d##
#cbc#
##d##
.....

Thoughts?