I've found a fortress plan effective enough to follow for several games now: World has one cavern layer. Dig a small surface den in whatever defensible location is closest to the wagon, and dig an exploratory shaft all the way down to the magma sea. If I hit SMR, tunnel around until I find magma. If I missed the cavern find that too. Fort is built between cavern and magma sea.
Basement level: foundry floor is the ceiling of a suitably large chamber in the magma sea (I channel down from the layer above the foundry to avoid warm rock cancellations) that I channel into for forge, furnace, kiln, and smelter access. Sometimes the prison is on this level too. Also, "retirement homes" for nobles are built one level farther down, or on this level, whichever allows them to be horizontally adjacent to magma. 5x5 rough-hewn rooms with a door and a bed; not luxury accommodations, but nobles assigned to these chambers don't have time to get upset.
Main floor: Located as high above the basement as necessary to get completely above warm rock, the only obstacles here to freedom of layout are the occasional spoiler tube. 3x3 stairway comes straight down from the den to the center of the floor. This floor sprawls out to cover nearly the entire z level, in 25x25 city blocks separated by 2-tile passages in a repeating grid. Main floor includes workshops, storage, hospital, meeting hall, mausoleum, and any other utility-based construction. The cistern is a pool on this level and the level below, and is filled by diverting the surface river (since cavern lakes can easily be polluted by FBs) into a tunnel that becomes a chute down through natural columns in the cavern and part of the cistern's city block. The farm and pasture are on either side of the cistern.
Dormitories: The city-block design is repeated just above the main floor, except for the central block containing the stairway and additional meeting space. Each block contains 25 3x3 rooms allowing for fully furnished, happy dwarves.
Noble apartments: Well-behaved nobles live one level above the dorms. Depending on proximity to the lower caverns, the layout on this level may be block-based or driven by the geometry of cavern walls or moist rock.
Den: Houses barracks, defenses, and the trade depot.
The first year consists of a mad rush to map the cavern for a suitable aqueduct column and then a 6-dwarf team mines the aqueduct, cistern and farm while the other dwarf fells trees, builds floodgates and mechanisms, butchers animals, makes trade goods, etc., eventually aided by the first migrant waves. The cistern is usually filled sometime in late summer, at which point the focus turns to getting the foundry up and running (the first caravan brings an anvil right around the time we need one) so we can make iron weapons and armor during the winter to give to the large spring migrant wave when they get conscripted on arrival. Once the militia is created, everyone can relax and go about engraving hallways, making crafts, equipping the hospital, and all that other stuff.
The biggest dangers of this plan are taking too long to get irrigation and therefore running out of food, and the small chance that the fall caravan might not bring an anvil. Also, hauling the embark supplies and excess stone probably isn't practical without Peterix's dfautodump, as it will take several months to move just your supplies down to the main floor. But I know from experience that unloading and hauling supplies for anywhere between 10 and 30 people in the wilderness, even when the hauling distance is close to a mile, takes only an hour at most in real life, so I figure the hauling system in DF is broken anyway and dfautodump is the only reasonable way to do things.
Anyway, by the time I have 100 dwarves, I know exactly what you mean by horizontal movement; the main floor is a storm of dwarven activity and really makes it feel like the settlement is an actual city.
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Topic: Argument for horizontal fortresses (Read 9118 times)