The industrial zone finished, attention now turns to raising the walls up from the ground, building up towards the top of the dome so that the geometry of the roof is as aesthetically pleasing as possible. Also, to secure all those trees that will be used in forming the clear glass underwater tunnels.
Since I'm going to expose the walls and ramp the ground, properly paving the entrance, I dug out this new entry way, so that the trade depot was conveniently located nearer the stockpiles, as planned. This has been a bit of a problem, though, as kobold and goblin ambushes against caravans have been uncommonly successful. - Shrike
There are 5 comments for this map series, last post 2009-11-19
Rockhome the Great Fortress
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SHIFT + Key doubles keyboard scroll rate.
Don't have Flash?
You can download the compressed map file:
2009-12/shrike-Rockhome the Great F-region3-222-3251.fdf-map
but you will need the .NET version of
SL's DF Map Compressor
to convert to the .PNG image format.
Submitted by: Noble Digger - 2009-11-19 to 219 Mid Winter
Ahhh, try never to smooth farmable tiles if you can help it. I know in some situations, you can un-smooth a smoothed tile by building a wall on top of it and then removing the wall. It's also possible to wet floor tiles via bucket brigade if the room is accessible from above. Simply make a lot of buckets and designate a channeled tile above the farm plots as a Pit Pond and dwarves will conveyor belt buckets of water into the hole until you tell them to stop.
Submitted by: Noble Digger - 2009-11-19 to 219 Mid Winter
Oh, and on a side note, this fortress kicks ass. I don't love the geometry decisions in all cases but, you've accomplished some engineering and mining feats here. Nice work.
Submitted by: Shrike - 2009-11-19 to 219 Mid Winter
Thanks.
I'm not too happy, either; I tried planning things out, but the magma pipe got in the way, so I had to compensate. It's easy to mass-copy circles/ovoids, but the more complex geometries are brutal. Also, I ran into problems with the edge of the map limiting walls, and didn't want to completely redesign everything.
I only found out about the farming problems because I'd just started transferring my food production lines out of the topsoil as part of the transition to the permanent fortress. There's a lot of temporary scaffolding, and the tree-level wall was built in one season after a siege, before I'd dug out the larger section. I'll also be removing the current entrance and barracks once I get those areas set up.
And would you believe that I've only "lost" 2 dwarves? One of them was the countess consort, who demanded dragonscale items. The other was a tax collector hung up on crystal glass. There may have been a kidnapped child, but I don't think they count.
[Message edited on 2009/11/19 at 04:56 by Shrike]
Submitted by: Noble Digger - 2009-11-19 to 219 Mid Winter
Goddamn. I had a fort that I worked on to test out Stonesense (40d16 can't export images so it's just sitting on my HD) and the key idea was that I removed a huge cube of the map and left behind a tower with a pyramid on top of it. I'm curious what manner of strategies you use for deep excavation. Mine was all ramps from the top down and careful long-term planning.
Submitted by: Shrike - 2009-11-19 to 219 Mid Winter
I'm using d13. Seems to work fine, aside from the mouse being worthless (not really, but annoying rather than helpful).
The method for deep excavation depends on the desired outcome. Ramps are good for access and shaping, but since I wanted the dirt and a high aspect (not constantly sloping wall), I let my laptop crunch through the cave in calculations after mining out layers and then doing a +1 radius channel around the edge. Of course, I used a support hooked up to a lever.
I believe I was able to do the big drop in five years from embark. Cleanup is ongoing, though.
The design was pretty much:
1. Find the center. You can see the marks at the bottom of the map, around the royal tomb, where I was counting out the distance.
2. Create the lake template. It was at this point that I realized I could just designate the start of a dig block (I mean, the flashing plus sign), go to the other corner, and then go up/down a z-level to copy the design from layer to layer. If I'd tried that with ramps, it would have been a real mess.
3. Let the dwarves go from the embark shaft and dig it out. Since I'd designated the whole area at once, this meant just finding other things to do for a year or two.
4. Build and link the support, then dig the channel around the outside edge.
5. PULL THE LEVER (from a safe walled-off and forbidden doored distance).
6. Go get something to eat/drink/grab a book to read/play another game while the calculations grind through.
Pretty simple to do, but definitely time-consuming.