So I was thinking, the highest Z level supports constructions right? So, why not make a fortress floating in the sky? Have a spiral stairway with retracting bridges going to the access point, but at most times the fort would not be touching the ground in any way. Should work, right?
The biggest problem is that it is an unparalleled pain to designate the construction of all the blocks, further exacerbated by that you have to wait for the dwarves to put one layer into place before you can make the next layer, and by having to scroll through the materials menu if you don't want to make the fortress a multicolored mess.
Yeah. There's a cool trick that most people figure out over time, which is to designate parts 10 tiles long of one type of thing, then delete the closer 9 designations, then do it again and delete the closer 8 (etc, etc) until you have a full set of designations sticking out over in a 10-tile radius from your starting point, but that's a huge pain in the ass as well. The upside is that you get to go do other stuff instead of returning to designate more stuff every ten seconds.
darkflagrance, I find that if you can spare the time to do it, mass-forbidding all wood, metal, and other material you won't be building with in the stocks screen, designating everything, and then reclaiming everything makes the designation process a lot less painstaking, so long as you can afford to not have metal/wood-based industries going while you build.