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[Lolzwheejars]

If you want to add pictures, you'll need to upload them to the internet somewhere (your image properties suggest that you tried to link the image directly from your desktop) There are several free image-hosting sites like photobucket and imageshack that work well for people new to this, and I recommend either of them. Once the picture has an online address, you can then put that address in between the img tags, or copy-paste the img code directly from the hosting site.

Thanks :3

I use this basic layout for most of my forts:

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-9810-axeglided

Vertical entrance towards the middle-ish of the map which leads to a great hall that is the center of the fortress. Off to the left and right are the main production areas of the fortress, where food/booze, industry, and stockpiles are. Then on the other side of the map, opposite the great hall, is the residential section.

That's neat, but is it all on one level? Would that not be dangerous if something got in? Or somethings.

[Wyvern]

The basic design of my all my forts tends to be pretty similar.  A straight entry hallway dug into a mountainside (with floodgates eventually set up to seal out invaders) leading into a big, round meeting area with a well.  Hallway into a dining room/kitchens/food storage straight ahead, hallway towards bedrooms to the left, hallway to non-food-related workshops to the right.  This is incredibly stupid because any invading force that makes it past the outer gate winds up right on top of the entire idle population with unrestricted central access to the rest of the fortress, but for some reason I keep doing it anyway.  I really need to start experimenting with new layouts.

[Javarock]

I dunno I like to have a slums to laugh at urist mccheesemaker and all those people with just a bed and a door, Huge ass meeting hall barraks near door...

[Lolzwheejars]

Aha! Here we go. This be a living quarters layout.
I didn't finish all the little Worker holes on the picture, just imagine that's what it looks like all around. I was going to get around to using some gird paper to plot that kind of layout effectively. This was just a rough idea when I was coming up with some ideas, so it's not proper yet. :3

[Shoku]

If you want to add pictures, you'll need to upload them to the internet somewhere (your image properties suggest that you tried to link the image directly from your desktop) There are several free image-hosting sites like photobucket and imageshack that work well for people new to this, and I recommend either of them. Once the picture has an online address, you can then put that address in between the img tags, or copy-paste the img code directly from the hosting site.

Thanks :3

I use this basic layout for most of my forts:

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-9810-axeglided

Vertical entrance towards the middle-ish of the map which leads to a great hall that is the center of the fortress. Off to the left and right are the main production areas of the fortress, where food/booze, industry, and stockpiles are. Then on the other side of the map, opposite the great hall, is the residential section.

That's neat, but is it all on one level? Would that not be dangerous if something got in? Or somethings.

How's having it all on one z level more dangerous than multiple levels? Not like stairs/ramps pose any impediment to invaders. If you've made barriers that keep them out once you can do it in anywhere else.

But you could construct a gate out front.

[Lolzwheejars]

Ah, yeah. I suppose so. Derp 

[anqxyr]

One big spiral ramp staircase with corridors to the fortress every 10 z-levels. Each of those levels have smaller staircases, approximately 8 z-levels up and 2 down. All z-levels connected by smaller staircases have the same purpose, like living quarters or stockpiles. It's not very efficient, but it's pretty.
Living quarters:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

160 5x6 rooms on main level. Big dining room in center.

Stockpiles:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

32 25x20 stockpiles currently. In the center will be 4 bigger stockpiles, but I didn't decided yet how should they look like.

In the right upper corner The Staircase could be seen. Other corners reserved for water-pumping-tower, magma-pumping-tower and I-didn't-know-yet-what-tower.
Fortress entrance is on z-level 150, LQ on 120 and stockpiles on 100.

[Shoku]

How long's it take to dig out one of those levels? Seems kind of oversized and anti-compact.

[anqxyr]

Yeah, it's long to build, even longer to smooth, inefficient and took crazy amounts of space. What crazy lunatic would spend so much time and effort on something so useless? This is insane!!! Oh, wait, I remember, it's DF, so it's all fine. Anyhow, I just can't force myself to do anything smaller or less crazy. When I try, my beard says me that it smells like elves.

[Shoku]

No, there's an alternative that can still fulfill your needs: Numerous barely connected tower-like structures. Each it it's own industry, housing, dining, and so on for those that work there. You could have the hospital as either some central area up where they all connect or have a hospital layer that goes through all of them (I'm nut but not enough to try and have that many separate hospitals.)

Rectangles are without a doubt the most compact way to use space but since you're not going for compact you should go with round shafts.

Plus you'd have the advantage of being about to do most things small scale as you dug out the first one then move them out to their proper locations once the other inverted towers were in place. That way you could play with invasions turned on~

[shadowform]

I usually try attaching themes to my forts and base the architecture off that.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This one was intended as an epic mountainhome - a 26-story structure that is undeniably a fortress literally carved into a mountain, guarded by a 'moat' that's more like a quarry (4-5 story drop with a curving 3-4 tile wide pathway leading to the entrance with an archery tower on either side), a courtyard filled with statuary depicting the history from around the world and the locally worshipped gods, an interiro chapel with carefully arranged and heavily decorated statues (one adamantine statue of the local god of scholarship has a value over 100k), three pyramids outside (one large with a 20x20 base, the others with 10x10 bases), a castle-like structure three stories tall with a footprint of maybe 50 tiles square, and a circular shrine-thing with silver-lined reflecting pools.

One of my other sites is in my sig, which should be pretty self explanatory: it's a huge damn wall.

Sometimes I just build a small outpost with a trading depot and maybe 20 beds before either abandoning or deliberately letting it get wiped out by goblins for the sake of including an interesting site in the world.

My current fort is going to turn into a sprawling aboveground mega-fort with different sections added in distinct bits.  The initial fort is a 3 story square made of bauxite, the second addition is a jet construction that got tacked on later.  I think I'm going to (in no real order) add a wing made from diorite, a large hall made of gabbro, a tall marble tower, a short courtyard made of microline or gypsum, and then maybe a marble wall surrounding the whole shebang just to prove that I can.

[Samoorai]

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-9816-roadhouse

[blue sam3]

I'm working on a fortress that will basically amounts to carving a huge hole in the ground (ramps on all edges, heading down 10zs, centre 48x48 square, adding 4 wide roads through the centre of this area, splitting it into four towers (11x11 inc. walls). Then I'll add entries at the bottom of the four towers and carve out fortress inside them thus:
NW: Burial tower (likely to get much use)
NE: Industry tower (inc. farming, upper surface has above-ground farm)
SW: Housing tower (10 rooms per floor, each with bed+chest, all except 6 on ground floor also with a statue)
SE: Military tower (lots needed due to absence of any kind of traps or other non-dwarf methods of keeping enemies out. Also contains trade depot on ground floor and water reservoir on first floor. I wonder why that one could be?)

Once the burial tower becomes full, I'll be sealing it off and digging straight down from it. All the way down.

[celem]

All of my recent forts have had 1 design theme in common.

The entrance is cut into a hillside, about 8 tiles wide, the roof above this is then channeled out to the same width and 6 tiles back into the hill.  In this openair entranceway i then build a room from constructed walls, this serves as the barracks, advantages are that the only entrance to my fort (flying or ground-based) is through said barracks (which of course contains a wall of dwarves).  In addition your military are proofed against cave adaptation, though they do grumble from being rained/snowed on

[decius]

I like diving straight to the first cavern, walling off as large a section as I can manage, and carving various industries into the cavern walls, while using the cavern itself as a type of hallway. I'll even go so far as to build a ramp to allow caravan access into the cavern.

Most recently, said ramp went through the seasonally frozen brook, with the water held back after thaw by constructed ice walls. The final section of ramp will be constructed either of marble blocks or precious metal blocks once I get the industries going.