Bay 12 Games Forum

A ballista would work too.
Shoot them full of holes.

Sadly, it would not.

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=24886.msg286634#msg286634

Personally, I never cook alcohol anymore. I embark with a few dozen pieces of meat, cook them all, then trade the cooked meat to the first caravan for more meat. Even paying 200% for meat and fish, I can still buy out every edible non-plant item with enough left over to grab whatever other trinkets I want (usually dogs and above-ground booze, I don't bother with surface farming) and still send the merchants home happy. Negotiation is useless. Butchery is useless. Fishing is useless. With big enough caravans, even Brewing is useless. Cooking wins DF.

Damblock 10000, then. So long as it's counted at all, it's simply a matter of making it absurdly high enough.

You could also consider giving them 100 DAMBLOCK for world gen, then changing it back to normal when you want to play. That should nearly guarantee their survivability in wars without spoiling what little challenge there is in the game.

Worldgen civs should establish these too to expand their list of available materials. Then again, if they're abstracted, then we'd be back at civs having access to everything and Toady doesn't seem to want that. It's not like they actually need to dig though, could just have some elaborate 1 map tile wooden hut site with suitable class of laborers and a few guards mulling about

I'd argue against camps being used to expand a civ's inventory. If you want enough of something to send caravans full of the stuff, you need a proper town that can produce it. A camp should only produce enough for a single site to utilize. Thus, a civ that lacks a particularly useful or valuable resource would have at least as many outposts as larger sites, but still wouldn't be able to provide that resource on a large scale (trade, expeditions, etc.).

Alternatively, you could restrict outposts to a civ's sphere of control so that they can't get anything new anyway.