I commit about 48 hours per release of DF. My own personally strategy has developed pretty significantly.
I find that the wide variety of DF's options will suck you into a micromanagement frenzy. However, if you manage to stay strong, there is a very effective approach.
Using the Therapist app, I create a Serf class that has ALL non-quality based skills ticked on (and farming usually- Fishing, Wood Cutting, and Mining excluded). Most immigrants become serfs unless they have a quality-based skill (that is, skills that produce items with quality levels).
Then I set up one permanent squad and cycle all my serfs in 2-3 squads (so that their schedules alternate between training and serfing). All my non-serf units that aren't permanent soldiers become specialists or administrators, that just do whatever it is they're good at.
The dirty part of my strategy comes with the Embark. Now that Bituminous coal nets 8 units of coke, doing a minimalist* steel start-up with a weaponsmith can result in the production of a LOT of steel serrated discs. These babies can have 30k+ trade value. With just the starting ores you embark with, you can buy-out every trade caravan for about 5 years. This effectively means you could spend nearly all of your time building up a military force and laying traps everywhere. You only MIGHT need a fisherdwarf or a herbalist and a few serfs (which have brewing and fish cleaning because they aren't quality skills) to provide a buffer for food and drink if caravans don't bring enough.
*Embark with ores in the following ratios
1 Limonite/Hematite
2 Marble
1 Bituminous Coal
From there, setting up industries is trivial- limited only by the number of serfs you have.
This is more or less the reason why I hate Dwarf Fortress. Once you learn all the tricks, the game is trivial and monotonous. There aren't any dynamic challenges. I embarked to a glacier with 4 biomes of evil and, doing the above strategy, had little trouble mastering all of the threats. All it does is take a lot of time to understand the intuitive methods to fortress design. Once you've learned it, the game itself isn't a ton of fun. You find yourself mundanely prospecting fortress locations and dig-designs. Because the game relies primarily on memorization, entering a state of 'flow' is aggravated by the need to set up all of the micro-components of an industry.
Then again, I'm not a fan of Sandbox games-- unless they have an interesting Narrative. DF has pretty good narrative- Artifact descriptions alone make the game worth playing, but once you understand the game there is little challenge, even in dangerous biomes.
The game itself, however, is very important. Learning how to play it and how to think like Toady is very useful.
