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[Arphahat]

I am pretty good at starting a new fortress and getting it up and running.  I have a lot of fun managing the dwarfs at the early stages.  However, it seems that whenever I get to about 50 or so, the sheer amount of micromanaging involved has me abandoning the fortress. 

I am wondering, is there a good strategy for maintaining interest when the fortress population gets large?  Should I try cutting down on the number of industries I am involved in, or is there some trick that I don't know about?

[Sizik]

Build large buildings and structures, providing a unique fortress look and an interesting place to adventure.

[Captain Xenon]

give yourself a series of projects, each more complicated than the last. building a indoor waterfall is a good start.

also, at 80+ dwarves you can get sieges of goblins. these can be a lot of fun, if you set up properly first. personaly, i keep making the entrace deadlier at a greater distance, creating barriers that force attackers to pick a direction of approach.. which is then covered in traps. the AI pathfinding is predictable, the trick is getting the traps into their line of retreat as well- dont want my (narrow) trade goods to escape!

[Mulch Diggums]

Building things is realy fun. I usualy start out with a castle half inbeded into the side of a mountain and work my way up to super tall piles out in the wilderness that I can collapse from the safety of my fort. Its fun to knock it down with seigers next to it, usualy they pass out with no damage, and if you set up a tunnle system with a few well placed hidden exits you can realy get the jump on a seige.

[Viprince]

I am pretty good at starting a new fortress and getting it up and running.  I have a lot of fun managing the dwarfs at the early stages.  However, it seems that whenever I get to about 50 or so, the sheer amount of micromanaging involved has me abandoning the fortress. 

I am wondering, is there a good strategy for maintaining interest when the fortress population gets large?  Should I try cutting down on the number of industries I am involved in, or is there some trick that I don't know about?

What I usually do to keep the game interesting is start by choosing a starting location with interesting features like a magma pipe, rivers, cave rivers, chasms. You can play with those once your food and economic supplies run smoothly.

You can also Orientate on the military side of your fortress, just after 50 dwarves you start getting seiges and interesting enemies coming after you and it brings a whole new kind of problems. Also at 80 dwarves you ll get proper nobles and the economy. The remodelling you ll have to do because of this (if you don't turn the economy off) should keep you busy for awhile.

As for you having to do much micromanagement what I do to make sure my dwarves can keep doing their repetitive task over and over is make sure they have enough materials available. So slightly bigger farms then you really need, I suggest cloth (rope reed or pig tail) if you don't have access to silk webs, A dye farm (Dimple cup underground or Blade weed etc outside) and a food farm (I prefer Sun berries when possible because of the good value from the booze for little processing unlike sweet pods). Lots of wood cutting to match your carpenter's demands, Stone shouldn't be a problem. Once you have these fairly basic things in plenty full supply for very little management. (Farms practically run themselves, Woodcutting can be designated over the whole map at once so It should take a while before you ahve to designate again) You set your appropriate workshops on Repeats, Rock craft repeat dye thread repeat etc.

Keeping an eye on the announcements is usualy enough to prevent the system breaking apart and an occasional overview qith q of those workshops makes it alls tick together.

Metal smelting can run smoothly by using good miners and the job manager. I usually get problems with smelters not smelting fast enough for the forge and having to reset orders so what i do is i go in the job menu "j" and hit "m" for manager, you can set up so your workshops will keep getting orders queud for an object of certain material eg 10 Steel platemails. and they will keep requeing if cancelled without you ahving to worry about it. You can also use this for the smelters as well if your running on a coal based industry with crappy wood burners

Animal butchering is one of those things that's somewhat hard to automate. Using the "z" menu you can select wich animals are to be butchered by setting them as "b" and it "should" happen" although butchers and tanners are quite unreliable when it comes to my fortress so I usually have 3 butcher's to 2 shops and similar arrangemetns for tanners. A close by raw hide only sotckpile keeps the hides from rotting and it all happens on its own.

If you want to have a leather worker workin day and night without having to worry i suggest importing leather, its cheap and easy and you won't have to worry bout butchering animals you don't really feel like killing. Once again repeat is your friend.

Kennels for animal training shouldn't be a cause of micromanagement demand unless you ahve an extensive network of cage traps and buzzling wildlife nothing i can do to help here besides keeping an eye on the animal stockpile.

I'd say keep you mechanics busy. Full time rock mechanism repeat construction and build mass trap systems or pump systems once in awhile to get rid of the excess mechanisms. When you need some ujst stop building trpas and whatnots and you should ahve plenty at your disposal.

Keep your miners busy with explarotary mining if you havn't got ores or gems for them to mine out.

If you want your masons and carpenters to build furniture for a dining hall or new bedrooms use the manager screen for the definite number of each furni you want and all you should ahve to worry about is the building and placement. To make this part simpler order your rooms in specific shape and whatnot and it should be pretty easy to place them your eyes closed. You can keep your caprenter churning out barrles , bins and cages and still build occasional beds thanks to the manager so no worries there.

If nobles screw with you by asking for impossible things all the time kill them. They will get replaced by other immigrants who might have better tastes and make sensible demands and mandates. If its an appointed noble you can just replace the dwarf with another though. Manager once again can help you although when it requires secific materials like elk leather rather then just leather i suggest you have very neat and orderly stockpiles so you can forbid and unforbid the wanted and unwanted materials for the workshop. The workshop itself and its workers shouldn;'t see the difference if you do it right.

Or just kill the nobles... It's just what you do ye know

With all this set up you should have plenty of time to do the things i mentioned at the begining and build a monster defence system or monument to your dwarves glory or just find ever more elaborate and gruesome ways to kill your nobles.

Hope this helps

[Lord Dullard]

I am pretty good at starting a new fortress and getting it up and running.  I have a lot of fun managing the dwarfs at the early stages.  However, it seems that whenever I get to about 50 or so, the sheer amount of micromanaging involved has me abandoning the fortress. 

I am wondering, is there a good strategy for maintaining interest when the fortress population gets large?  Should I try cutting down on the number of industries I am involved in, or is there some trick that I don't know about?

Some of what has already been said is very useful information. I used to be the same way, although I'd normally let fortresses start to linger somewhere around the 80-100 dwarf mark.

Having a fort survive long-term is really just a matter of finding things to do. The micromanagement aspects of the game are actually the worst when you start getting big immigrant waves. Once your dwarf population starts to peak there is really very little micromanagement left for you to worry about.

[coldstone]

i bet your problem is with the micro managing. why dont you stop doing that, by queuing up jobs in your manager screen. hit j then m then q and type in a job to create 30 at a time of whatever. brewing, cooking, stone crafts, blocks, butchering, tanning, etc etc etc. line it all up using the job manager and maybe dont worry too much about creating specific stockpiles.

i have to wonder, do you have defenses dug out?

[Proteus]

Build large buildings and structures, providing a unique fortress look and an interesting place to adventure.

I absolutely agree.
Often the map features themselves provide a good opportunity for projects.
In my current fortress it is, for example the underground river,
that brought me to the idea to build a huge underground arboretum (44*44 tiles)
and in which upon completion large amounts of underground shrubs and towercaps will grow

Other favorite projects often are huge defensive structures (walls, towers and the like).

[supremeMang]

build a tower made of clear glass blocks.

[Arphahat]

Thanks for all the suggestions.  I think they should help.

Part of the issue I have is redundant / non-useful jobbed dwarfs.  For instance, I have three legendary bone carvers right now.  Really?  Is there really a need for more than one?  So, I have two that I'd rather have doing something else, but what?  I try to find jobs that aren't being done or can use more than one doing, but figuring out who is going to do what takes time.  Or, should I just leave them all as bone carvers and also leave hauling on for them?  Hmm... maybe that is what I'll start doing.  There is always something to haul...

Some other things that frustrate is that I have one mason and he never seems to do the task that I want.  I have a number of building tasks setup, as well as items in the masonry shop... a priority system would be awesome, I think.

[Duke 2.0]

 Mass-produce picks. Set everybody to mine. Create a massive underground cavern. Don't care for dangers, health or even the lays of physics.

 Then remove any and all defenses other than military dwarves.

 Remember, loosing is fun.

[Vaftrudner]

I used to be the same, at 50 dwarves the fun disappeared. But after a while I realized that not every dwarf needs to do something all the time, and with such an abundance of labor force, there's no need to be as efficient. Likewise, with the sources of enjoyment I'd already created, it didn't really take any effort to keep them happy, except keeping the stills going. And when I stopped being such a control freak, the fun came back. Now it's all about insane strip mining, retarded building projects, killing kittens and seeing how much vomit and goblin blood I can collect outside the gates.

[Jay]

Right.  You don't need to have everybody working.  In fact, I have a fort, 150 dwarves or so, gets 30 FPS or so when everybody's pathfinding.  That's why there's usually 50 idlers or so, and my fort doesn't get any less efficient for the simple fact that I have around 20-25 legendaries who do all the work where quality matters.  That makes 100 or so haulers (plus 30 children who will help some projects)
I've found that shooting ballistae at the traders is fun.  Shooting them at the guild representative, liaison, etc, even more so, because it incites a siege the next year.  Possibly even the one after that, I haven't gotten that far yet.
I've also modded everything in the body to be EMBEDDED and not SMALL or INTERNAL.  Those ballistae arrows send the hearts/lungs/fingers/toes flying, I tell you.

[WCG]

Part of the issue I have is redundant / non-useful jobbed dwarfs.

The military is great for that. And if you don't rely so much on traps, you can actually use a large military. (I had a dragon visit my fortress just recently. Yeah, it actually said "Dragon Guest." But he'd barely started into my outer perimeter when he stepped on a cage trap - a wooden cage! - and that was it. Of course, I'm taming him now, but still, it was a bit too easy.)

This is only my second fortress, but with 90 dwarves, I'm actually finding there's less micromanagement than when I started. Everything runs pretty smoothly without it. I enjoy the beginning of the game because of the exploration and construction. But there's plenty more exploring I can do, and certainly a LOT of construction possible.

Still, I'm always tempted to start a new fortress, just to try out something different.

Bill