Quick question, long explanation ;
FOOD.
I love the DF food mechanics, just because of the wide variety of them.
However, I have never had a fort last longer than two years because of either...
A ; I run out of food/booze/pots
B ; The pain of constantly micro-managing in 10's drives me crazy
-any tips on this?
A1) If you set up like 6 5x5 farm plots and just have them producing plump helmets year round you shouldn't run out of food even with larger dwarves unless you do something stupid.
2) On that note don't cook too much, as it will remove the seeds you would have gotten from said produce and as such reduce your total planting ability.
3) I usually buy every single piece of wood and barrel (save for those really expensive extracts) for traders. It's not that expensive in most cases, and if you then quickly craft all of your wood except for a few "mood-saver" pieces into barrels, bins, and beds then caravans will always bring a lot of wood. Requesting more wood from the dwarves each year will also increase the amounts that they bring. (Do this a lot, I've had fortresses that have gone 20+ years and usually I am still buying all of the wood and all of the barrels that come on caravans just to support my bin/bed/barrel needs.
BOn the note of micromanagement, I strongly suggest that you
1) first go to your stock[p]ile screen and set the "reserved barrel" option to something like 5. This should insure that unless you have already filled up all of your barrels you will still have some for making booze, and then if any empty themselves they will wait to be filled by the still instead of being filled with some type of food immediately, thus blocking booze production.
2) Use the [j]ob [m]anagement screen. It really helps when you can order a given amount of booze jobs without needing to replace them if they get accidentally canceled. I also later on when my farms are definitely over-producing more food then I need just simply have my stills set to [r]epeat the brewing job with brewers that have no hauling jobs enabled. That pretty much guarantees that as long as you have barrels you will have booze.
Note 1: Also though making mead can help make bee-keeping useful I find that because it only really comes in stacks of 5 or so to the barrel it greatly limits your ability to hold booze in your stockpiles (50 barrels x 5 mead each = 250 drinks, whereas 50 barrels x 20 booze each = 1000 drinks)
Note 2: Another good way to free up barrels is to designate a separate stockpile for prepared food that has the "allowed barrels" setting set to 0. Because of the way prepared food works, many times a single prepared food stack will fill up an entire barrel as opposed to having several smaller food stacks fit in the same barrel. 1 stack per barrel is a much worse ratio then 4-5 stacks per barrel, so this can allow you to greatly expand your stockpile's food holding capabilities as well.