My brother-in-law designs forts pretty much just like this, all big rooms and no real design to it. He just turned eight and used to lose pretty much every fort to dehydration until I added some helpful tokens to his dwarves.
Still haven't taught him efficiency or aesthetics yet, though...
Just because one designs forts based on open rooms doesn't mean it's a choice without any design thoughts behind - my favorite setup is to layer a stack of square rooms (20 to 30 tiles wide), with a 3x3 stairwell in each corner. These stairwells reach up till the surface where they are fortified with constructed walls, doors, moats and drawbridges, making the cornerstones of a small square aboveground fort.
I like it because every floor is suitable for pretty much anything while allowing for neat symmetric designs, and the longest walking distance between any two tiles in the fort is 20 to 30 tiles (this also means that if anything hostile gets into the fort I'm basically screwed as they can be anywhere very quickly). And when you're playing with POPCAP at 70 like me, pathfinding isn't much of an issue.
Housing floors are the only floors with walls in my design.
But yeah, I also used to stick with ugly messy single-floor fortresses until I realized how powerful stairs are.
Anyway, back on topic:
That's how my regular food stockpile looks like, except I make two separate non-barrel/pots stockpiles, one for seeds and one for non-edible food in need of processing (wheat, flour, quarry bushes and their leaves, fat and the like).
I also always forbid all dyes and lye from my food stockpiles, and make separate custom stockpiles for them alone near the appropriate workshops.
I usually run six 4x4 plots, one per seed, harvest set to only planters, with two dedicated planters, each one with his personal bedroom just a few tiles away from the plots. The planters are also burrow-restricted to the plots, their bedrooms, the food stockpile(s) and the legendary dining room. Maximum efficency and I'm always overflowing with food.
And clothes. Seriously, follow the suggestions about starting a clothing industry, and focus on producing shirts, trousers and shoes. Dye everything.
Once the farming picks up, you'll need dedicated craftdwarves just to keep up with the ludicrous amounts of threshing, weaving, dyeing and clothesmaking.
Just as now you're drowning in food, you'll be drowning in apparel (and wealth, thus sieges, thus Fun), with the added benefit of preventing bad thoughts from clothes rotting since there's always a ton available.
Prepared food has a similar effect on your wealth, and I find it satisfying to see huge stacks of prepared food outside of barrels.
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Topic: Too much food? (Read 5457 times)