Bay 12 Games Forum

While I do have a few traps in my current fort, it seems the best way to deal with archers without totally cheesing them is to force them to path through a region in which they have no range advantage, e.g. a series of diagonally staggered wall tiles:
x_x_x_x_x
_x_x_x_x_
x_x_x_x_x

This also tends to keep your overzealous melee guys from running too far forward of the kill zone, unless they're chasing a fleeing enemy.

Pretty sure you can build pumps on constructed floor, which means you could drown them if you really wanted to, but in answer to your question, they'll never starve or die of thirst.  Maybe die of old age, I don't know about that.

Getting dwarves of lower archery skill to shoot through fortifications seems to require that you get them to stand right next to the fortification tile, although in my experience sometimes that still won't work.  For future attempts there's no particular reason to do this with fortifications, put them in a 1-deep hole with no ramps.  Since they're disarmed anyway it doesn't really matter, they can't flick their boogers or anything.

12 years in and I just went back and looked at my First Settler mayor (I keep appointing him manually) - his last name happens to be "POWERSTAFF".  Legendary fighter, wrestler, herbalist and appraiser, while the skills I embarked him with, 2 in each medical skill, are all pretty nearly what they were when he started.   

So you build a small wall and fortify as early as possible, it's not like you can't manage these with walls and traps.  If you still want hunting and fishing, there's tons of stuff to hunt in the caverns, and you can capture a section of river and some pools with your walls.  It doesn't really take much room to wall up some farm area also.  When you have some more serious armor and other gear manufactured, you can try to take back the surface if you still want to at that point.  If you embark with a working soil layer that will grow cavern stuff, you don't even have to farm or leave the caverns open at all, after you breach them, you can just dig out a large section of cavern and have a few herbalists running around picking shrooms, and you'll have plenty of wood.  Your only issue (not a very big one at that) is a safe entry, which you can pile traps in whatever variety and quantity you want.

Really if you think horses and camels and stuff are nasty, try undead elephants.  I hear undead whales are really horrible also.

If you have magma, rig a dropper bridge for a proper dwarven greeting; at worst just a bridge to crush them and their garbage would do, but for me that's not as satisfying.

This only matters when considering save files; you can have what you're thinking of in terms of the same worldgen, but not within the same save files.  The game is designed for a single continuous experience in whatever mode you're playing, with a single savegame file set.  If you wanted to go fool around with a different mode without abandoning/retiring, you'd have to copy the fsave files and have their histories diverge.

tl;dr no