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Total Members Voted: 212

[TinyPirate]

Two words: grid paper.

If I don't plan a nice symmetrical design I get really emo.

[zehive]

I designate entrance, defensive corridors, then I move to general rooms such as the dining hall and basic barracks/hospital. Then I move on to designate stockpiles and create easy access from that to where I want my workshops to be. Then I designate a food stockpile off the dining hall. Then basic rooms, then designate below ground tree farms and basic farms and designate rudimentary irrigation that obviously needs actual mechanical work.

[Malarauko]

I've tried both an extremely planned fortress (went really well and I loved the finished product) and unplanned fortresses that adapt to things and compromise (mixed results with some good some bad) and now I just aim for the middle. I plot out the general direction and layout (this will be bedrooms, this will be workshops etc) but a lot of it depends on how the rocks and soil are laid out. I don't really like building anything but farms in the soil so if i'm doing a hillside fort then it can affect how everything fits together.

[Rose]

For me it's the other way around. I get an idea for a specific fortress, and that inspires me to play.

but I don't make a fortress for every plan.

[Sus]

I have a sort of iteratively developed(/-ing) general design. The implementation varies slightly between embarks, depending on pasture and river locations, cavern depth etc.
Typically, it's a walled pasture (accessible via drawbridge) on the surface, food industry in the 1st soil layer, trade depot in the first all-stone layer, workshops, forges (each in their own layer), a single level designated for graveyard, hospital and jails and then a couple of "empty" levels down to the dining hall and living quarters, a cistern below those and nobles' quarters at the bottom.
The next (or current) iteration will probably have the jails and hospital on the "commoners" level to avoid noise and provide the hospital (and possibly jail access corridor) with its own well.

Haven't really got around to thinking about the set-up for magma furnaces yet, since my poor old laptop tends to suffer FPS death before I get there. 

Oh, and there's usually a waterfall pump stack going from the cistern level to above the ceiling of the dining hall. The water flows in the hall through a grate in the ceiling and back into the cistern through grates in the floor, after hitting a solid floor block to produce mist. Takes some pretty complex engineering to get it powered all the way down there without exposing the cistern and pumps to invaders...

Now if only I bothered to learn using Chromafort or QuickFort to easily implement the established designs... Then I might even look into some of those beautiful fractal bedrooms instead of the clunky "plain square" design that I currently use.

[RabblerouserGT]

Generally, in a flat embark which I prefer now so thieves don't surprise me and resources are easy to see:
Ground layer: Open air, walled off all around unless there's a spot open to the ocean. A couple of squad training rooms, farms, archery rangles, and the usual outside stuff.
-1: Typically just a huge food backup stockpile in case of seiges
-2: My underground farm layer. Almost always has the lever for my drawbidge. It's a habit from an old fort since my moat was 2 z's deep. Low traffic area that's BOUND to have a closeby dwarf, so levers usually end up here. That and I keep it close to the stairwell.
-3: My meeting hall, kitchen, still, and butchers. I've been trying to wean myself off of adding bedrooms to the same layer as the meeting hall.
-4 Bedroom layer. Sadly, my bedrooms aren't efficient yet. I usually put all 200 bedrooms in one long hallway with hallways of ten bedrooms branching off. Nobles in the same floor, but with some bigger, more lavish rooms.
-5 through -7: Generally blackspace, unused, in case I think of anything else. Currently using them in my current fortress for science (my own research which others probably know). Water science at the moment, Trying to purify some stagnant water with a pump, so I can have a well with decent water. But it's not working.
-8: Workshop layer. Stockpiles, too. Sadly, I don't have a very efficient design for this layer.
-9: (?) Used this layer only once for a huge stockpile layer. But forgot it in my current fort.
Anything below: Mines and looooooong stairways down.

[Telgin]

I tend to plan to some degree.  I don't go nearly as far as grid paper, but I try to layout major features before starting, such as the general size of the fort, above ground fortifications, a moat if there is one, and try to decide which floors will be dedicated to what industries, and things like that.

It quite rarely turns out like I planned.

[RabblerouserGT]

If I don't get a flat embark, I WILL FREAKING MAKE ONE MY CHANNELING THE MOUNTAINS!
Levels up miners real quick-like, too.

[dwarfhoplite]

I used to have perfectionism as a problem: every fort was just the same and they were soulless and dull. I have now fixed it and I no longer care a shit about inefficiency. In my last fortress some dorfs had 450+ distances from bedroom to food stockpile.

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-11100-copperchew

[orius]

Terrain features get in your way, do you just abandon, or do you modify your plans?

My plans are such that they can be adjusted to take surface terrain and caverns into account.

Now if only I bothered to learn using Chromafort or QuickFort to easily implement the established designs... Then I might even look into some of those beautiful fractal bedrooms instead of the clunky "plain square" design that I currently use.

You don't need to go with Quickfort for some basic designs; you can have some good basic designs from just using macros.  It might be harder to set up some of the fractalized bedroom with macros, but I don't really see them as necessary.  Also, I use multiple z-levels for housing, because I noticed my dorfs weren't claiming bedrooms on the fringes when I had a big bedroom sprawl in my older designs.

[Lexx]

I always plan my fortresses layout right after embark. Taking in the layout of the terrain and how best to use it to make an interesting fort that takes advantage of it.

[SkyRender]

 I can't remember the last time I didn't do my traditional "Greek cross with 4 11x11 stockpiles at the corners" layout for each level.  It's just too effective not to use.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Been ages since I linked to this sucker...  Normally those corners are stockpiles, not shops.  Also, normally it's underground and doesn't have windows.  But you get the basic gist of the design, I'm sure.

[Graknorke]

I personally find planning boring. I made a fortress that was planned out from the start with long trap corridors etc and it was pretty much just waiting for FPS death. I MUCH prefer to expand it as I need it, I find that it tends to look better than something symmetrical. But that seems to be just me.

[KodKod]

S/he who fails to plan is planning to fail, right?

I usually designate the major areas of my fortress from the get-go, giving me some basic plans to work from and letting my miners go at it a piece at a time so that they're never out of work forcing me to hastily draw up new plans. That doesn't mean that my entire fortress is sculpted out right away though; as I need to stockpile more and more good and need more workshops to keep up with demand I make various amends, but they all tend to fit in easily with my designs.

Lately what I've been doing is leaving one "blank" Z-level in between major areas, that way if I need something extra and I just happen to have forgotten about it previously, like an extra storeroom or a lane for water or magma, then I always have the space for it.

[Vanaheimer]

Not really. The extent of my planning is "Okay, there's a nice place to dig, I need a stockpile a farm a still and a carpenters workshop".

From that point on, I add bedrooms as needed and mine a few layers for stone/minerals beneath that.

None of my forts have lasted long enough for me to get past that stage yet.