this fortress was epicly, horribly made
No, this fortress was very well made, had a great start for what we had to work with including provisions for defense, aesthetics and long term survival...until our second overseer who had apparently never played anything but vanilla and did nothing during his year except:
1) Dig vainly in hope of finding iron on a map that has no iron.
2) Kill off our entire military, which during my term constituted half the population.
3) Drink all our booze without making more despite the fact that I spent a third of my term irrigating a map that had no surface water specifically so we could make booze
The fortress was also complicated by the fact that apparently nobody recognizes the 17x17 city grid fortress design I started us out with. At one time this was a fairly common design (isn't it still? don't people use 17x17 with 3-wide hallways anymore?) because its grid width is an even multiple of the default shift+arrow key cursor move distance. I was expecting people to look at what I did I think "oh, it's one of those. I can work with that." Instead the reaction was "...huh?"
I spent huge amounts of time leveling out multiple z-levels of the surface, but here we are several overseers later and nobody has finished that? We started on a glacier, but I made an irrigation system and gave us a way to make booze, but apparently we have none? In addition to two barracks I mined out 28 individual bedrooms plus several dedicated bedroom+dining area+office rooms for nobles, all back when we only had 15 dwarves...but here we are years later with 70+ dwarves and those bedrooms still aren't being used?
I don't know what to tell you guys. I think I gave you a pretty good start. It was a glacial map, it had no iron, our starting gear was not chosen to accommodate the scarcities of the embark site, Masterwork was incorrectly configured to make immigrants arrive naked and with no weapons...this was a difficult site to work with. All things considered I feel pretty good about what I did with it.