I've hit the point where I know FPS death is the only true enemy and my challenge planning a fort is to get as many interesting potential things happening (sieges, megabeast attacks, 15 neighboring necromancer towers, thralling dust, freezing weather), as possible, for as long as possible, before the game inevitably grinds to a halt from the cumulative weight of bugs and world-activation side effects.
Beyond that, I turtle quickly (because thralling dust is a must-have, but also impossible to defend just with melee dwarves, because until washed off, the dust instantly jumps between combatants), and work first on basic defense and caravan protection (typically attacking the map edge with bridges and constructions), and then on Farming All The Crops and gradually building an interesting place for dwarves to live, ideally with a mix of surface and subterranean.
Here's a few common quirks:
- Go through every dorf's preferences and any that prefer doors, hatches, or floodgates are immediately trained as masons. That way, if one of those masons gets a strange mood, the fortress gains a building-destroyer proof entrance. An artifact door will hold off absolutely anything except kobolds, gremlins, and (I think) some newer necromancer experiments that might randomly get [CANOPENDOORS]. Can't emphasize this enough- mason/carpenter strange moods are critical.
- Add [HUNTS_VERMIN] to all the stock giant cat types in the game, and hope I can have a fortress full of Giant Tigers catching mice.
- Embark with piles of All The Colors of stone for color-coded levers and bridges and such.
- MINIMIZE DIGGING, block off unused tunnels, and in general, do everything possible to reduce pathfinding burden of dwarves. Pathfinding is the path to FPS death. This also makes quantum stockpiles a strict necessity, as well as aggressively limiting the total item count and atom smashing as much as possible.
- This also means that the primary occupation of the dwarves rapidly becomes hauling and destroying corpses and dropped items from necromancer sieges, which are much easier to get than goblin sieges now. (Just use dfhack to relocate a bunch of towers nearby, vs. goblin sieges where you have to risk bugs to send an attack to get their attention, and then pray they come back after you.)
From there, my experience is the same as Syndic's, especially:
- get more and more frustrated at FPS loss, consider (but refuse) to limit gameplay fun for FPS optimization.
- start playing other games/read/watch movies on the side while DF runs slowly
- stop starting up DF on the side while playing other games/reading/watching movies
EXCEPT, right now I stopped playing DF because I was trying to design an optimal Squirt Gun defense megaproject, but need to get more clear on my definition of optimal, and also work through a few different minecart quirks before continuing.