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[Hyndis]

Halp, I'm stuck in a rut.

I keep building ginormous great halls, Mines of Moria style, with large, highly efficient rooms going off of the main hall. The great hall is the meeting zone, central to the industrial, agricultural, bedrooms, and nobles wings of the fortress.

While these layouts are extremely efficient and immensely productive, they're boring.

I want to try something that is much more decentralized, with perhaps numerous meeting zones, everything sort of all jumbled together, yet nice looking. Almost bunker complex style.

Anyone have any inspiration?

[Cotes]

Just start putting shit where-ever it fits or looks nice, connect with hallways where-ever. Pretty soon even you can't tell how exactly the tunnel network runs.

One way is to choose two points, for example the general area you want to fill with bedrooms or such and one area that is dedicated to some starting industry. Just put some space apart those areas and the rest will get stuffed in there somewhere.

[Granite26]

adjust world gen so that caverns are large open spaces, dig down the first one, and build your fort entirely in them, making buildings inside them, around the giant stalagmites.

[Marshall Burns]

Make different districts for different types of industries, each with their own associated living quarters, dining areas, stockpiles, and meeting areas. For bonus points, make each district a separate burrow and segregate the dwarves based on their skills to a specific burrow.

[Aramco]

For bedrooms, the wiki has an article on that.

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Bedroom_design#Decentralized_living

[Sutremaine]

Have rooms running right into each other, but leave some undug space in case you want to create another room there or run a path between one room and some other future one.

[Triaxx2]

Define decentralization. Me, I've taken to altering the way entrances work. Instead of trying to protect the Traders inside my main complex, my Trade Depot is instead built in a 3x5 enclosure outside my primare defenses. It's protected by a drawbridge, that walls it off from the outside, closing them up incase of siege. Once they arrive, a lever closes the bridge, leading to a seven z-pit with an exit a considerable distance away from my fortress. At the same time, it opens the inner door, which lets my trader through to do his job.

The main fort is divided amongst itself. The upper levels are mostly farming, coming off a central shaft that can only be accessed from below.

The main entrance zig-zags through seven or eight levels, providing plenty of room for traps.

Then it divides into three non-connecting descents. One being a bedroom/living space descent. One being a craftshop descent, and the third usually connecting to a series of exploratory pipes. That one also goes back up to the farming area. The only farming surface access is through a single hole for water to flow into, and that later gets blocked with a wall to close it off. The water that runs through the farms, usually being flushed in a spiral pattern then pumped back up into the main cistern.

[Girlinhat]

How do you fit a depot into a 3x5?

Why do you keep water on the farms?  They don't need re-irrigation, do they?

[BishopX]

I'm starting to experiment with vertically integrated production villages. Top level of the stacks is a giant open stockpile level (sometimes two) with a multitude of small stockpiles, ranging from 1 square to nice squares. Below that is a workshop level, with individual workshops or clusters of related workshops (e.g smelters and forges, gem cutters and glass furnaces, looms and clothiers...) The workshops aren't horizontally connected to workshops outside of their 'village'. Below the workshops are individual dining rooms with a pantry containing a small booze stockpile and a small food stockpile(prepared only). The dining rooms are connected (I imagine these as a front doors). Below that are the bed rooms. I have a dedicated hauler class who sleeps in dorms and eats in a caffeteria, along with my soldiers, but all my workshop users have their own dwellings. I typically build a engineering village as a well with my mechanics, miners and construction masons (i.e. no assigned workshop) living here.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Live in the caverns, and don't use hallways. Rooms are either in the open areas, or directly accessed through doorways into the rock. Carve stairs into the sides of the pillars/stalactites/stalagmites. Build a ramp so traders come down from the surface. You may wish to wall off the caverns for security. Biggest security issue is actually the cavern water. Farms are on the open cavern muddy floor.

[veok]

Play a succession fort.

[Buttery_Mess]

Don't centralise; devise a modular generic layout for all rooms and corridors, and then fill up the rooms as and when you need them.

Build an above ground town. It's a massive pain in the arse, but it looks really nice. Bonus if you make it out of clay bricks.

[MarcAFK]

Play a succession fort.

Best idea actually.

[Triaxx2]

By not pressing the wrong buttons. Meant to be 5x7.

And because since that's where the water goes first, I don't have to redig water access if I need the water for something else. Plus I can use the farm to divert attackers where they can't do much harm, and then drown them. At worst, I have to replant.

[Hyndis]

I've considered building in caverns, but as I'm prone to embarking in terrifying areas I imagine that would be an extremely short lived fort due to endless sieges by undead trogs and trolls.

In my latest fort I was trying out a bunker type design. I was aiming for something like a Fallout style vault, with numerous access corridors, multiple pathways to get to any particular place, no central meeting points, many smaller halls at intersections between corridors, iron doors everywhere, and low ceilings.

Things were actually going quite well. Then the caravans appeared. It turns out humans and elves were at war with each other and they began fighting. Endless amounts of caravan crap spewing all over the map. Since there is usually some overlap between the two caravans, this means every year they will spew more and more crap everywhere.