Posted 24 June 2007 - 05:26 PM
I tend to dig straight into the mountain at the start, and build workshops outside for the basic crafts, and start to produce some of the essentials while the fort is being dug out. That includes two floodgates, five mechanisms and a door for farming, and seven beds for the dwarves. They're deconstructed and rebuilt inside the mountain once I've dug out a place for them to go.
Traps are a great way of defending your fortress that saves on training and equiping soldiers. I'd say the best sort are weapon traps, fileld with captured weapons from enemies (there's nothing else to do with them, really), obsidian swords (easy to make near the start, and they do loads of damage) and trap weapons (like large spinning serrated blades, they do lots of damage to enemies, though you need to be able to do metalworking quite well to get a decent amount of them). That said, stone fall traps are very easy to produce, needing only a mechanism and a stone each, so it's possible to fill a whole corridor with them, and they're also a good way of using up excess stone.
More creative traps, made from playing around with pressure paltes and things, can be extremely effective. Some players fill almost all the space between the cliff face and the river with an incredibly elaborate mechanism that kills attackers en masse. While they look quite cool, they're not that practical, taking up loads of space, etc. Also, if you're flooding areas of your fortress, there's a huge risk you'll flood the entire fortress, killing all your dwarves. A slightly safer optino would be linking a pressure plate to a support, so the roof caves in on your enemy, but I'd still advise you to stick to normal traps, soldiers, and war dogs for your defence.
At the chasm, which is where I tend to get attacked from most, I put weapon traps around the edge, and I chained up war dogs as well, it's a very good defence, my soldiers haven't had to do any fighting there since it's building, and I can tell it's working because the area is always covered in blood.