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