My Fortress
imgur.com/a/pQWTp
imgur.comPosted Feb 24, 2013, 9:26 AM UTC
36772
imgur.comAre those dig orders queued up but impossible, just for aesthetics? Very clever
Nice touch on the slums, making it all crooked.
Amazing work
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The dig orders are just waiting until I need more noble housing or storage. This is all mapped out with Quickfort blueprints I've made so everything you see has been slowly mined in little chunks.
Nice touch on the slums, making it crooked.
And they tessellate too!
Edit: Also, they are in easy counting blocks of 40 per quadrant. Each quadrant is also easily divided into four lots of 10.
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I tend to do the same thing, but as a caveat:
Can't confirm it, but I've heard that having lots of queued up dig orders can decrease FPS.
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I will typically only have one Z level of designations at one time and just release parts until miners are needed elsewhere.
Re queued orders, do you mean even if they are not reachable? Like the dwarfs keep getting 'cancelled orders; area inaccessible' or something?
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I'd have to look it up, but it was more conjecture that just having the tiles designated for digging, regardless of whether they were accessible or not, supposedly had a negative impact on FPS in large quantities.
Dunno if they did any conclusive testing on it though :P
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I do that all the time as long term planning once I have the basic layout and pattern I want for a fort.
They're basically blueprints. "Hmm, I could use that forge wing and a new set of bedrooms now." Designate doors.
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Do you ever have problems with creatures coming out of the nearby volcano? I have always wanted to embark like that, but always thought with my poor military control I'd have more fun than I bargained for.
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I often embark near volcanoes, and I am very bad at setting up militias. Generally the magma creatures are happy enough to sit at the bottom of the magma sea.
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That's possibly the chillest image of magma creatures. "Hey man there some dorfs up that volcano." "Na man I'm happy here. You want some candy?"
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Generally, be the operative word there. I always get berserk magma crabs that want nothing more than to burn my fort to the ground.
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I tend to build a wall around the Volcano opening and then build a platform a couple of Z-Levels up for enemy sacrifices and trash dumping.
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Not yet. Haven't experienced a raid yet, only thieves so you never know. I think it is two years since embark.
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Are we showing off our fortresses in this thread? My current fort looks kind of similar, I think I built a little more vertically.
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your fortress makes all the ones ive ever done look like hobodwarfs live in them.
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trust me.. ive built some janky ass hovels before. I just picked a fairly peaceful embark so I had a lot of time to kill before mega beasts started showing up. Normally I'm more than happy to have my slave dwarves sleep in a pile.
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Love it. Even after at least 18 months I still am pretty useless and haven't gotten to the level of building in gold. Sure I can design a pretty hall but I've yet to make full use of most of it. I think my pleb housing has only once had more than one quarter full before I've succumbed to something stupid.
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tell me about it. I even had some close calls with this fort. Digging out some more minerals I accidentally opened the caverns via a diagonal. Luckly I noticed the forgotten beasts climbing my stairs in time to send the military. Only losing a dog in the ensuing battle. However, I can't count the times I've lost a thriving fortresses to something small, I feel you.
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Well, I feel incompetent.
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This makes me wish there was a copy paste tool for dig selections. Its so time consuming tracing out each dig shape, especially for bedrooms and such.
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These are all Quickfort blueprints that I've made. I am horrible at sticking with games once things go downhill so instead of re-designating every time, I just had to automate it.
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Genius. Absolute genius.
for quickfort, it just makes all the designations does it? i.e if you don't have any beds, it won't place them until you get some?
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It's not quite that good, its pretty much just a better implementation of the in game macro system. Designations are fine, ie dig, channel, remove ramps, etc, but building is a bit screwy. It just chooses the closest suitable material or object and if it can't find it, I think it just doesn't place them or it wigs out. It seems to handle bad terrain just fine, it skips the square and moves on.
For example, my rock stockpiles at ground level are for keep wall and tower building. I try to make them the closest suitable material and then once I think I have enough, I designate the walls and floors. This game some newly felled timber was closer for small segments of the wall and had to be rebuilt. Slightly annoying.
And the bad news is that I haven't yet made a bedroom furniture blueprint. I generally just create them using default macro commands.
As a bonus, here is picture of my old bedroom design.
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Goddamn, I just make 2x2 rooms take up as much as the map as possible.
though I splurged this map and made them 3x3
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Also macros are handy for small things, or anything that's a repeating pattern (e.g. a spiral staircase, bedrooms).
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Ohman, I didn't even think of this. Did I spy a built in macro recorder in DF or will I need a third party one?
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Quickfort (It used to be included in the lazy newb pack, not sure if it still is.) Can essentially do that.
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And that is how it was done. If anyone wants them, PM me
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That's what quickfort and chromafort are for.
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2x2 slums? Luxury.
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True true. But compared to the noble rooms...
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Your design aesthetic is visually pleasing to my eye. I shall borrow it.
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Thanks and be my guest. Quickfort blueprints are available.
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If this could be rendered in 3D, it would look like a generational spaceship.
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hey Urist McJustFinishedBSG look at how inappropriate your fortress is !
God I don't know if I hate or love these threads
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Beautiful. I would love to recreate but my frames per second :/
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In what way does it impact FPS? I've got a powerful pc so have never seen it drop.
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I have an old rig so larger embarks and also the 3*3 updown staircases (pathing calculations) would kill it - it is a beautiful fort though, I like the curves.
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That is one swanky fort. Nice disign, and good job on that moat. Every time I try to mess with water like that I end up flooding more than I bargained for, or I end up with a dinky little stream instead of the deep pools that I wanted.
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When I first started filling my moat, my dwarfs were pathing across them to cut corners. Once I released the floodgates, three dwarfs got caught in the rapids and subsequently drowned. Luckily I had saved it beforehand and I could force quit without loss. I learnt from that the importance of burrows and closing drawbridges.
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Haven't explored making roads or designating thoroughfares yet. Thanks for the tip
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Just uploaded to DF Map Archive.
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Bravo. Much more forward thinking and design work gone into this than any of my forts!
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You wouldn't believe. I tried to make everything fit to that 11x11 sweet spot so there are easy stockpiles and easy manoeuvring. Plus there is room for secret corridors and staircases in the thick walls.
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Looks amazing.
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I hate you and your perfect magma pipe.
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What was your reasoning behind the 3x3 stairs without a center column? Does that relieve congestion?
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I can't speak for Mcspakattak, but 3x3 with an empty center is the ultimate staircase; it dramatically reduces pathfinding calculations (as a dorf only ever "sees" 3 staircases on the next level) while still allowing for 2 alternate staircases if the staircase directly up/down is currently occupied, removing space-sharing in all but the heaviest congestion.
Try it in your fort today!
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Ha! Didn't know that. The central column just pleases me better than the full 3x3 staircase. Cool, did something right!
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empty as in a 3x3 room on each floor, or empty as in a deep shaft down the center?
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The latter, as in the screenshots above. An unmined shaft in the middle of the 3X3 block of staircases.
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so, by "empty" you mean "full"?
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Awesome work! I really like your design. I tend to map things out a bit smaller in QF, but I might try larger designs now.
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I read some tutorials that recommended not stacking staircases to avoid long falls. Ever since then I've designed my stairwells in a helix fashion.
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I've wanted to but just don't know how. It confuses me.
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I've made this in the past (two levels shown separated by >):
uju
j.j
uju
>
juj
u.u
juj
It could be done in 2x2, as well, or even 1x2 like a real-world stairwell.
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It's that simple? Huh. Thanks.
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I learned from Bravemule
You have abandoned the art, OP. Your shapes are unscrupulous.