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[HmH]

I haven't played for a while.
But when I play DF, my fortresses are laboratories.
I usually have at least a vaguely defined experiment in mind, or I don't start the game at all. The rest of the fortress exists to support the experiment, and gets abandoned when the FPS becomes too bad for any further experimentation.

In concrete terms, that means using every exploit I know about to make the fortress as low-maintenance as possible.
If you walk into a fortress and see:
- cage traps with cave-in generators to collect volunteers,
- upright spikes to take care of everything else,
- legions of chickens,
- ten years' worth of syrup roasts and dwarven rum quantum-compacted into a single tile,
- and the reddest of all red flags: weapon traps in an otherwise undecorated dormitory,
you should probably expect the "slaves to absentee Armok, god of unethical experiments" experience.

[Loud Whispers]

I tend to try playing fortress mode as some weird 4x game where I try to influence politics through capturing enemy territories. Obviously it never really works because the game isn't designed for that yet...

One day my friend! One day!

[mross]

Wall off the surface, dig to magma, get bored after about 3 years, restart

[Nopenope]

The game has felt extremely samey for the last 8-10 years with most of the new features being bugged, invisible or hard to use. I come back to it every 2-3 years or so, play the same way I usually do (since the game more or less plays the same), find out a bunch of stuff about those new features that hasn't been on the wiki despite it being present for the same 2-3 years, update the wiki with what I know, get bored, start firing up DFHack magic to see how far I can push the game's limits, get bored again, leave. Rinse and repeat

[chaotic skies]

>Pick stupid goal
>Fail to achieve stupid goal
>Try and fail again
>Return in 6-60 months

My most recent attempt involved building two separate forts: One to tame giant elephants, and one to make use of them as war mounts.

[RLS0812]

My fortresses grow "organically" with very little planning at the start. I play on tiny maps with a hard 60 to 120 dork population cap. ( laptop melts if I attempt any more ).
 The world gen I like to let run for 500 years or so - makes the in-depth histories far more interesting to read while I'm playing.

 Each Z level of my fortresses usually ends up being dedicated to a purpose eventually ... once I hit lava, I usually build a secure stairwell down, and safely establish large numbers of magma forges, kilns, e.t.c. , that gets turned into my metal and glass production floor.

   Generally my forts are reliant on imported goods to survive. Encrusted craft goods and green glass spiked balls are my main export. Elven traders usually end up with my rags.

 I attempt to finish at least 1 large project in my tiny map before FPS death forces me to retire the fortress and start another one.

[PABadger]

Boy, it's been a while since I played, sadly. Distracted by work and other computer games.

My fortresses have followed a fairly predictable path:
- Generally, I try to build a fairly small outpost of the main civilization. I try to avoid at all costs becoming the mountainhome, and having any degree of nobility beyond the functional offices (mayor, sheriff, broker, manager, etc.)
- I like either "beginning of time" or fairly young worldbuilding, and generally try to embark in neutral forested tiles that have a brook, fireclay, sand, shallow and deep metals, and flux stone. I'll worldbuild several different worlds at a shot to get this. Sometimes my fortress mode stops here, when I get bored trying to hammer out the perfect embark and move on to other projects.
- I like building into mountainsides, and usually build multiple layers rather than sprawling over a single layer.
- I overplan my fortresses, and many of them do not move beyond rudimentary drawings on graph paper because I get distracted by some minor esoterica or trying to overplan how to avoid flying enemies (curse you, keas).
- I frequently use the same name for fortresses over and over again.
- A rather frequent thing that I do is to create an adventurer who goes and actually looks at the site, as a prospector, and then goes back to the civilization and retires. Then I do the actual "strike the earth" bit.
- I have not had a fortess crumble yet. Generally my fortresses fall when I lose interest, throw a temper tantrum, or get busy with other things...or just realize that I screwed up a small but important room, and reset the entire world.

However, I just read the entire Boatmurdered Saga, and am feeling nostalgic. Maybe I'll pick it back up again.
Strike the Earth!

[Drecon]

It's been ages since I last played, but when I did my whole idea would be to start off with nothing (just an Axe and a Cart, nothing else) and build up with the end goal of getting filled stockpiles of everything.

My whole gameplay would center around building giant stockpile areas while still making things as comfortable for all of my dwarves.

I have stopped playing multiple times when migrant waves got too big for me to feel like I was in full control of everything, but my main goal has always been to amass 'infinite everything'.
Maybe not the most attainable goal, but it brings me some kind of satisfaction.

[muldrake]

It depends on whether I'm doing my current thing of dwarftopias surrounded by evil or just directly embarking on evil biomes.  My usual in the first is to take advantage of the lush environment but have a "naive" approach to the world where the taverns and temples are open to all and while I generally have a "turtle up" lever somewhere that can completely lock the place down instantly, I am agnostic to the foreign villains congregating in the place.

In genuinely horrific biomes, though, I use the technique of immediately channeling down, turning on dumping refuse outside, and then dumping absolutely everything in the wagon into a 1 square quantum stockpile underground, deconstructing the wagon, and moving everyone underground and blocking the entrance with constructed floors/walls/etc. and just gauging what is going on while making a bunch of bronze weapons with the cassiterite/tetrahedrite I brought along.

ETA:  remember to unforbid everything, do away with the dump, and turn dumping outside refuse back off (unless you have reasons for wanting that).  Also the quantum stockpile should include food so it doesn't go rotten.  You don't want a giant stinkbomb and on top of that to run out of food.

Oh wait, I thought you'd asked what I did when I know what I'm doing.  Not "generally."

Okay, well, generally, I dig into the magma pipe and flood my fort with magma, or accidentally lose half my population in a sad attempt at a megaproject that ends in a tragically imprudent digging designation that somehow drops an entire mountain on top of us.  One of my favorites was when my attempt to create a pleasant waterfall resulted in drowning every single dwarf.