Bay 12 Games Forum

The shield's material actually doesn't make a difference when it comes to blocking, however, it matters in shield bashes. You may be better off with copper shields, as they're the densest that you can normally get.
EDIT: Lighter shields do mean that your non-legendary-amor-user dwarves will move a bit faster. I'm not sure how much that matters.

As for adamantine, I'd first get a legendary weaponsmith, then try to get as many masterwork adamantine edged weapons as necessary. Steel armor should protect your dwarves quite well from everything but bolts/arrows, but adamantine doesn't tend to help with those either. Adamantine edged weapons, however, cut through virtually all types of armor with incredible ease. I've seen a masterwork battleaxe bisect megabeasts on several occasions.

There doesn't seem to be any reason why they wouldn't. Sometimes bandits die of old age, so I'd assume you can do so as well. But jdf318 is correct that you likely won't die until you play again and take a turn, similarly to how bandits sometimes die right after ambushing you.

You can load magma, and, perhaps, extract-laden water into a minecart autoshotgun as well, IIRC.

Zombie creatures don't seem to care whether they're on fire or not, and it definitely doesn't kill them. It will, however, make them much harder to kill because they can set fire to your dwarves. Perhaps you can lure the porcupine onto a weapon trap...

Minecart track laying could be streamlined a bit more, IMO. It's a little complicated trying to keep track of whether you need a N track here, or a S track, or whether you should use a NS track. But other than that, they are awesome.

It would be nice if there was an additional generic track tile that would make connections similarly to how the game connects constructed/smoothed wall tiles. Fine-tuning could be done with the track pieces we have now.

How long is their adolescent stage?

The raws posted in the wiki have CHILD:3, so it should be 3 years.

I switch between Taritus, a slightly-modified curses_640x300 with diagonal wall corners, and the Vidumec tileset, which looks like this:

I use this color scheme to make some of the darker colors more visible.

If you like small tilesets, the Dorten tilesets are also nice-looking and quite readable.

Mouse designations for constructions (such as walls), and the ability to draw lines with the mouse; i.e. one could click in one place, then click elsewhere to draw a line of the selected designation type between the two points.