I've got a suggestion related to a pet-peeve of mine that I'm losing hair over; smaller building sizes - at least for future buildings, if not current ones. 3x3 workshops Meph, remember those
?
I'm always trying to design efficient, compact, vertical forts with as little pathing and used (dug out) space as possible to maximize production and minimize FPS death. I get that you can't have 100 reactions on every workshop, so the count can't really change, and you want a clear sense of progression, but big workshops just hamper design such that it that can only be compensated for to a
limited extent. That is, the space they take up can't be reduced through any sort of skill, if all tiles aren't passable then entrances and so on are limited, and workshops with similar reagents can only be so close together when they're all so big. I'm guessing(?) you also want to have the sizes relative to their purpose realistic (eg: guildhall/temples), but I think you should leave more of the surrounding architecture for things like that up to us. The building tiles are pretty, but so are decorations, so they might see more use this way.
To give you some numbers just on space, I'm currently designing a QF blueprint for MW dwarves (about 150 of them living in segregated luxury, catacombs included, + 3.5 Zlevels for 75 more). I've roughly calculated that I could squeeze everything besides the larger temples and the admin/magic buildings into a 40x40x17-18 fort, but that
handful of omitted buildings, many of which don't see constant use, would take up a couple Z levels on their own. Now that I think about it, my forge/magma levels would also be bursting at the seams... back to the
drawing board spreadsheet.