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[Fat Friar]

Ditto to everything in martinuzz' post, designating is very quick and tidy with shift+arrow keys, unless I'm constrained by cliffs, aquifers or magma pipes my forts are usually on an 11x11 template.

[celem]

Cave-ins were working that way? Wow, that's definitely a feature I'd love to see come back! Though I understand that in this form it would create complications with current underground cavern implementation...

Im pretty sure Toady wants it back in some fashion or another.  It went with the switch to 3d if I remember rightly, and caverns is likely one of the reasons it was shelved.

My embarks vary between what people are describing here, and the old 2d-style where almost everything is on the same z-level.  If I've got a mountain range at my back, which I often do, then I lay out horizontaly and just run deep shafts for mines, cavern access and bringing up liquids, industry goes horizontaly and you get great oversight.
Otherwise a central stair with whatever 2x shift+arrow in each direction from it's centre is XD
I dont ever have the same stair run all the way from the surface though.  I tend not to have any given stair longer than 5-6 z-levels, breaking it to continue 1 tile across.  This is to minimise people falling down the stairs from the courtyard and splashing on the forge-deck right by the sea, which used to happen to me a bit.

[KingKaol]

I do 9x9 rooms connected by up/down stairs in the corners (on an 11x11 grid)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Verjigorm]

I guess it works, but good god if that ain't ugly as heck. 

[EvilBob22]

I'm a 5x5 kind of guy.  If I need a bigger area, I knock down the walls between 4 5x5 rooms and I get an 11x11 area.

Code: [Select]

###O#####O###         ###O#####O###
#.....#.....#         #...........#
#.....#.....#         #...........#
O.....O.....O         O...........O
#.....#.....#         #...........#
#.....#.....#         #...........#
###O#####O###   ==>   #...........#
#.....#.....#         #...........#
#.....#.....#         #...........#
O.....O.....O         O...........O
#.....#.....#         #...........#
#.....#.....#         #...........#
###O#####O###         ###O#####O###

I make a 5x5 grid of 5x5 rooms, and that makes the corridors around the whole thing exactly 31 tiles long.  Both that and the 11x11 rooms are easy to designate.  (I also have a macro that designates the entire grid.)

Although lately I've been working on a .34.11 fort made of circular, above ground, clear glass domes...

[Dorf and Dumb]

To me it seems like it's not the size of the room per se, but the phasing of the main stairwells.  On a 2x2 or other even embark, when you put the main stairwell right at the center, it tends to go through all solid rock all the way down, and sometimes hallways go through only solid rock linking to any adjacent stairway.  The other stairways are put 32 squares away up/down/left/right from the first.  If you have 3-wide ceremonial hallways (which is truly a waste of time, but does allow interim mason workshops and such) you then have a 29x29 block area to deal with.  This splits to 7 3-wide rooms along a side and 8 walls; or you can combine a few to make them 7-wide, 11-wide etc.  On two edges of the map they can be 10 deep leaving a single hallway and wall at the very edge of the map for, I dunno, maybe a hot water system?  (Hmmm, been a while since the map where I gave every dorf his own well and shower)  Dorfs with 3x10 smoothed obsidian rooms tend to be happy, even with the accursed lack of native gold floors lately, and it gives them just about enough room to put all their crap when you replace clothing with armor.

[Mimodo]

I'm definitely a 5*5 for workshops, which then links into a larger stockpile room. Large stockpile feeds a stockpile around the workshop in the room for quick creation of goods. Once made they're taken to another stockpile. It's great for getting stuff done quickly when you've got plenty of haulers.

Space wise I'm not too concerned about it, and really I'm not that efficient. I find the best way to keep unnecessary social interactions (and hence marriages and children) at bay is an inefficient fortress where everyone is hauling something if they're not useful

[Romegypt]

maybe make it so that the density of the rocks can allow for bigger/smaller rooms before cave ins.