I need some ideas on how to build the interior of my new fortress. Usually I go with a modular design I came up with but I've been using it for years and I'm getting bored with it. I need to change things up a bit.
Here's a few things you can try "for a change":
1. De-centralized living plan. This works well with the "organic" style of building, because every time you make a new area - farming, crafts, metal industry, etc - you also have to add bedrooms, dining rooms, and food/booze stockpiles to the area for the local workers. Instead of agonizing about fitting everything together in your fort like some puzzle of maximum efficiency (it will drive you insane,
trust me, you can build freely and often,
and with the comfort of knowing your fort will be pretty darned efficient. Especially with burrows.
For extra points use a different bedroom design in each area, for variety.
2. Defense-in-depth. Yours is a Dwarven Citadel, designed with numerous fallback positions like the castles of old.
Use no channels or drawbridges, instead, see how far your mastery of defensive design can stretch. Cave-in booby traps are still fair game, the time and trouble of rebuilding them will encourage you not to use them unless you must (e.g. Mr.
C.) As your enemies over-run one position, fall back to the next checkpoint deeper in the mountain and keep fighting. The challenge is in incorporating these choke-points without getting in the way of your normal rooms/buildings. For extra challenge, use minimal traps. The focus is on prepared fighting positions for your military and war animals. Spare weapon/ammo stockpiles there are a good idea. Combined with fort-wide militia training.
Most Fun stories you read on the forums end with "and now I've got an Elite Goblin spearman and his squad butchering 80 civilians in the dining hall." It only takes one incidence of unexpected Fun to bypass your defenses and lead to the slaughter. See if you can make a fort designed to kick that right in the tail.
3. Room change-up. I notice, from the map archive, that most players favor huge, cavernous rooms where they can just jam stuff in. Try using smaller rooms on radiating corridors. If you're in the habit of using one central staircase, dispose of it and only put staircases in rooms, whenever possible.
Basically, anything other than a tile cost of 1 (high traffic zone) causes the pathfinder to search for alternate, less expensive routes to the destination, even if the dwarf can simply walk in a straight line to get to the destination.
If you do have dead-end mining tunnels from ore veins or exploration, wall them off or use the Restricted traffic designation once they are empty and useless. This will prevent or lessen the chance that the pathfinder wastes time exploring a tunnel that goes nowhere.
I don't think those particular hints are on the wiki yet, but they ought to be. Good stuff.
A somewhat related question. How deep do you normally dig before you start laying out your fortress?
I used to worry about this a lot, but now my answer is "just deep enough that no channels/pits I make on the surface will cause me undue grief." Which happens to include things like murky pools, too. The really nice thing about z-levels is that it's only one tile to move between them - take a single step down and your dwarf can be in the middle of a huge dining hall, but if it was on the same level he'd have to walk half the length of it, at least, to reach that spot. That helped me stop agonizing about keeping my crafters close to the trade depot - I realized that I could dig 4 z-levels down, have tons of space to house all that industry, and still have it almost no distance from the depot, as long as the staircase emerged near it.
I have made OCD obsession/worry about fortress layout an art and science - in fact, I made a thread about it some days ago. I realized that just using some graph paper to plan things out ahead of time helped immensely - or even a few notes in the game itself. Now that we're almost guaranteed cavern layers with water in them somewhere below the fort, not even reservoirs for wells offers z-level design challenges, thank the Toady One. Once you nail down where the things you really want are going to go, you can pretty much cram the rest in anywhere you feel like it.