1: I tend to plan out large sections of my fortress early on but break the mining designations so I can specifically control the order that rooms are dug out in. Left to their own miners tend to earthworm their way through the fortress plans digging out random corners and half-rooms for many a season. Unless rooms are micromanaged they'll even leave pillars of dirt or stone conveniently in the middle of everything making it difficult to actually start to furnish or use a room until some drunk miner decides to come back and finish the job.
This is a very good idea, though depending on how your fort is laid out it might not be terribly important. I usually design single (or a few) different areas that I can stick together modularly, make macros of them, and then use the macros whenever I need more space. For instance, my current fort is 49x49 tiles on every z-level, and I have a pair of macros set up that quickly designate the whole thing in seconds. Very nice
2: Stone Management, same idea. I never ever try to d-b-d large clumps of stones for dropping. Maybe one room or two small rooms at a time. Work hallways in segments. That way it actually gets DONE rather then a stone here, a stone there, forever and a season. It makes it much easier to free up inside storerooms in a hurry to get the goods out of the rain.
Personally, I find clearing hallways and stockpiles that will have barrels or bins to be a waste of time. Barrels and bins can be placed on top of
3: Reverse examples, building furniture seems to happen quite quickly and efficiently even when I designate a ton of it at once. Same with cage traps. I have to designate a -lot- of cage traps at once for the process to start to scatter and drag.
4: Chokepoints I can't seem to get around: A - assigning a lot of animals to be placed into one cage [I guess the obvious solution would be to build more cages], and B - danger room construction, hooking up all the spears to a lever takes awhile.
I figure that micromanagement is a state of mind that I'm slowly learning to develop. What other activities or tasks benefit from micromanagement like above?
I find that it's better in the long run to minimize micromanagement. For instance, clearing hallways and any stockpiles that will have barrels or bins in them of stones is more-or-less a waste of time, as the stones don't hinder those areas' function at all. In fact, it's only things like wood and refuse stockpiles that I usually try to clear. Furniture stockpiles are generally a waste of time IMO, since they fill so quickly, and I usually try to make furniture only as I need it via the manager (except doors; I can never have enough stone doors).
Really, the only things I find I
have to micromanage is my metalworks, because I like to constantly melt down anything below masterwork until everything is perfect, my military, since that's just sort of like that, and my meat industry when I have one since I have to monitor when I have enough food and set things to slaughter. Everything else, I try to set up so that I can let the dwarves manage themselves.
Part 2, stockpile efficiency:
I already break up my food stockpiles into seeds, drinks, and foods with the mix food orders turned off. I suppose there isn't really much use to segregating food/drink except it makes it easier to tell in passing when one is about to run out and you haven't hit z in awhile. I've learned the hard way that you want your Trade Depot in a central position to the majority of your stockpiles...
Anyway, I've been experimenting with restricting stockpiles, transferring them, separating out established stockpiles, etc. Recently I noticed a massive abundance of various bags of sand and a never-ending stream of buckets in my furniture stockpile while my workshops ended up *CLT* from whatever they happened to be making. I set up a special furniture stockpile just above the trade depot, played with the settings, then removed the original furniture stockpile designations under what I didn't like and got them seperated. Now I have a waiting bay for shipping excess junk and a functional furniture stockpile again.
Well, as I mentioned before, I usually don't make furniture stockpiles, myself. A refuse stockpile specifically for things that won't rot (bones, skulls, shells, horns) is always nice, as it often lets me get those things closer to my workshops rather than up near the surface where they were rotting in the sunshine.
I have some specialized stone stockpiles floating around and I've gotten into the habit of keeping soap and such out of my metalworking bar piles, and my stone block piles are safetly on the other side of the fortress without crossover.
Are there any other common stockpile customizations that you find will really make your life easier or prettier?
One important tip I've found to be quite useful is to put workshops' input stockpile directly above or below them. That is, make your workshop chambers 4x3 instead of 3x3, make the extra line into stairs, and put a stockpile one level up or down from there. Not only does this let you control what your workers use more easily (as they'll consider the materials 1 level down and 1 away from them to be closest most of the time), it often drastically shortens travel times for the workers, too.
[Also, is there a way to get a stockpile for ONLY stone mechanisms? I tinkered with the settings for awhile but the mechanisms just sat in the workshop. Some of the sub-menus seem to overlap quite a bit with materials and I'm not sure how the overlapping works yet.]
The settings should be... Let's see... Furniture/Siege Ammo stockpile, Type Mechanisms, Material Stone, Metals go through and turn off all "actual" metals and leave the stone-types-that-are-inexplicably-in-the-metal-list on (I have another macro that simply hits enter and down 26 times in a row; very useful, as it toggles all real metal types when used at the top of that list), and then Core and Total Quality whatever you want.
Oh, and as I alluded to before: look into
Macros! Being able to do some things that you do often, like select/deselect metal types or selecting things to bring to the trade depot.
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Topic: Tricks for speeding up labors and stockpile efficiency. (Read 3917 times)