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[Kire93]

What main design do you use for you fortress? A central ramp spiraling down, a central staircase? Or do you put everything on one z-level?

[Hyndis]

Some of my favorite forts:

http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-27278-greathall
http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-25998-dorms

[JimDale]

I usually get to several large 10x10 rooms and a hallway off the side with a few dozen bedrooms before I succumb to FPS death.

[Splint]

I use the very first layer as a workshop/trade cinter, and then however many Z's down goes the residential areas. On the bottom floor, if I keep interest long enough, is the magma forges.

[KodKod]

I don't so much use a central staircase as a central room. The initial stairs down into the earth lead into a huge open area which serves as a grand dining hall, as well as everything else in the early years of the fortress.

Something like this.

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Once I've settled in my miners carve out food stockpiles and kitchen areas undernearth for quick access to food, and bedrooms, workshops, hospitals and temples brancing off to the sides; everything eventually gets moved out of the central room except tables, chairs, statues and animal cages. Ultimately I end up with one central z-level with everything on it, while the z-levels above and below that are used for stockpile areas directly underneath each workshop.

[GhostDwemer]

I usually construct a ditch around my wagon. Depending on how many soil layers I have, this is either big enough to fit a 13x13 room and two 7x7 rooms, with a small space for an entrance, or, if I have few soil layers, big enough to fit two 13x13 and 3 7x7 rooms. One 13x13 is my starting stockpile room, the other is my farming room. The farming room hold 8 3x3 plots, and a farmer's workshop in the middle. One 7x7 room holds my initial workshops: masonry, carpentry, mechanics, and crafts. Another forms the top of the stairwell, the third holds the depot. If I have multiple soil layers, the depot goes on the second level, next to the farms.

After building this, I sink a stairwell down until I've found magma. Then I put my main fort about halfway between the surface and the magma. This area gets the food workshops, dining room, well and cistern, main workshops after I disassemble my initial four up top, and my pinwheel arrangement of 1x4 bedrooms.

After getting a start on my main fort area, I aim to have at least a small magma forge area set up at the bottom of my fort by late fall when the caravan shows.

[NonconsensualSurgery]

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If I have plentiful surface water, I build a 3x3 central stairwell with the entire thing as a mist generator.

There's cityscape on every other level with branching 3-wide boulevards coming off the stairwell. I try to spread this over as many z-levels as possible for efficient travel times.

Clusters of related workshops are in 9x? rooms. Above and/or below these workshop rooms in the "empty" levels, there are storerooms for appropriate goods.

There are no residential areas. 2x2 bedrooms are inserted randomly in empty areas, often sprouting from workshop or storeroom pods or otherwise empty hallways. Masons sleep near the masonry workshop, engineers near the engineering workshop, military sleeps near the entrance etc.

Dining halls are randomly placed, but there's always one somewhere near the entrance and it always consists of two rows of tables and chairs with a well somewhere convenient along the edge of the room. All wells draw from the same secure water source in the caverns.

There are occasionally coffin farms in areas where I'd like to slow down a rampaging building destroyer, such as near the entrance or by the path to the caverns, but many dorfs are buried in mined-out ore veins. These mined out areas are eventually walled off to save FPS.

In well-planned forts, the trade depot is near the entryway and adjacent to a 3-wide ramped path to the caverns that's lined with cage traps and numbered "SCP pods" designed to trap building destroyers. This allows me to feed traders to cavern wildlife traders to leave via the caverns if needed.

Doors. Doors everywhere, especially when doing anything complex with fluids. I use the wall-deconstruction trick to make three wide ones. Also, cage traps. Sometimes sections are deliberately flooded with water anyway just so cavern life will grow and my base is also a tree farm/pasture.

The overall result would give someone with OCD seizures, but it's reasonably efficient and looks vaguely like a city should.

[Kire93]

That central room design looks really interesting

[wierd]

I cluster workcenters.

Take for instance, the following inter-related industries:

Farming
Threshing
Milling
Weaving
Dying
Jewel encrusting
Metal decoration

I like to establish work flow diagrams on paper to understand the connections between industries, so that workcenters and intermediate stockpiles function efficiently.

So, for the above:

Farming (ropereed/pigtail)->custom food stockpile-> farmer's workshop(threshing)->thread stockpile

From there we have either:

Thread stockpile->dyer->thread stockpile->loom->cloth stockpile
Thread stockpile->loom->cloth stockpile->dyer->cloth stockpile

Then we have:

Cloth pile-> clothier->finished goods->clothier (image)->finished goods->jeweler(encrust)->finished goods->forge (decorate)->finished goods->trade depot

These manufacturing processes need continual and cheap access to raw materials. So, consider what each one needs.

Farm plot needs a food stockpile to quickly get crops in to minimize crop loss, and needs a seed stockpile to maximize planting speed.

Farmer's workshop can be a dedicated process in several sites in the fortress. Here, we grow fiber and dye only at the farm plot. (Pigtail/ropereed/bladeweed/dimplecup/redroot/etc). Pigtails and ropereeds are alcohol sources, so an expedient path to the fortress pantry and the brewery is prudent.

Millers have to take dyestuff raw material to the mill to get dye. Dyers need dye to dye fabric. This means the dyers and the millers have to be in close proximity to each other, and their respective stockpiles.

What I usally end up doing is a multi z-level workshop tower. It has sublevels underground, and vertical levels above.  It has duplicate industries converging on the ground floor.

In the sublevels, the deepest level grows pigtails and dimple cups. It stores the raw plant material on the same floor.  Right in the middle of the stockpile is a stairwell going up to the next level, which houses threshers, millers and dyers, and their respective stockpiles. The next level up houses the cloth and thread stockpiles. Here is where the looms and clothier shops are.
Next level up contains a magma glassworks, optimally has a sand patch, and contains the gem stockpile, a finished goods stockpile, and a sandbag stockpile. It contains jewelers shops.
Next level up is ground floor.  It houses the main food stockpile, the magma metal works, a finished goods and furniture stockpile, the carpenter's shops, the still, and kitchens. Outside the front door is the trade depot.

The above ground layout is the inverse order of the below ground layout for this industry pipeline.

Clothing is created from dyed fabric, enhanced each step, and accumulates on the ground floor near the depot. 

I usually use a 4 tower design with distributed central space, and lower central subfloors for the residential district, employing the easy magma access of a volcano.

1 vertical tower pipeline produces fabric, like I listed.  Another produces obsidian and rock products, greenglass block, and other glass products. Another stockpiles metal, wood farms and the like. The last is the food production tower, and houses the leatherworks and animal pens as well as the food crop plots.

Entire fortress layout is designed for central workforce deployment, and product flow from the edge of the fortress to the central chamber.  Long term "fortress hoarde" (artifacts, super awesome multiple masterpiece quality multiplier goods, etc) goes below the residential district in the central area.

The idea is to exploit that verical distance is shorter than horizontal distance, so that the space between workshops can be reduced drastically, increasing speed of hauler job completion.

I am still experimenting half-assedly with improving performance, but that's kinda boring.
Some experiments with direct gangways between production towers (getting obsidian cabochons from the obsidian reactor tower to the clothier tower without going through the ground floor, etc.)

My current project is a departure from efficiency for pure aesthetic quality, being a mega construction.

[Vanaheimer]

Entrance, room (will become barracks later on), massive store room for everything I brought with me, down to stone, bedrooms. Down a few levels from the bedrooms (or above if I have the room) is the workshop level, stone dumps, bar/block stockpile, etc. This is usually a very large open room that contains all the industry of the fort. If I ever decide to try my luck with magma, I'll move the entire room down to that level. The in between serves as the "flux" of the fort. More bedrooms needed, they go here. Dining room goes in here. Graveyard/hall of memories/whatever you wanna call it goes here.

[Kire93]

It is cool how every person has a different design and goal behind it

[zach123b]

i usually try a modular fortress having a base hallway of 3 passages with enough room for 3 11x11 rooms in between then a few macros for bedrooms to dungeons for inside them
i often add to it as i go with a main staircase
typically end up with madly disorganized workshops with most room to storage
2x2 dungeons with 4x1 bedrooms and 3x3 noble rooms

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don't have a current fort atm, forgot to unreveal with dfhack before i saved T.T

probably never would use a 3x3 room for workshops as i tried once and had a dwarf die due to being locked in >.>
to lazy to distinguish which tiles block movement

[MrLobster]

One of my favorite variations is to restrict myself to 1 (fairly deep) z-level as much as possible, carving out a web of streets and hollowing out solid areas into "buildings".  This can be really fun. For example: taking a 9x9 area and making a little "mechanics' guild" out of it, giving the mechanics their own sleeping hall with assigned beds, etc.

It takes a lot of digging in the early months of a fortress, so it can be something of a hassle.

[TSTwizby]

I usually just try to follow the geology. I dig out some bedrooms wherever I can, since that's usually the first thing I'm rushing to do, then I look for a nice soily area to set up farms/food preparation/dining/grazing areas with some farmers/butchers/tanners workshops nearby, with a loom and clothier not too far off. I usually dig down to the caverns next, so I can find some water and set up a well to use for a hospital, which I put my sparring room next to just in case. Apart from that, I usually dig out some veins of whatever and then convert the space to workshop/bedroom/tomb areas depending on what's needed.

I've always wanted to set up a fort divided into sections based off of jobs, like with a group of farmers down in the caverns, a group of craftsmen/traders up on the surface and a group of smiths down near the magma, each sending the necessary items to the other and each with their own sleeping/eating/hospital areas. Maybe a big castle on top with the nobles and some servants. I keep putting it off, though I think that I'll do it in the next release when minecarts will solve most of the problems with it.

[Himmelblau]

I usually dig a few large rooms in the first underground layer to move my stuff underground and start farming. A couple z-levels down from there I carve 11x11 rooms to be dining rooms, meeting halls and dormitories, as well as some space for the most essential workshops. Pretty vertical this far, a 1x3 central staircase with rooms surrounding it.

After I get basic industries running I start making the main entrance, a long hallway that goes through some crossbow-defended 2-z-level rooms and ends in a great hall where the trade depot is located. From there I start expanding the fortress horizontally, with larger workshop areas and specific stockpiles, barracks for militia and personal bedrooms at some point.

I generally build workshop areas as a 11x11 stockpile room surrounded by 9 workshops that use the same materials; for example, carpenter's, bowyer's and craftdwarf's workshops and wood furnaces around a wood stockpile, smelters and forges around coal/metal bar/flux stockpiles. Whenever some industry seems to run low, I place a new cluster of these somewhere.

Leads to a quite chaotic layout with long hauling distances.