Bay 12 Games Forum

Put them all in a single cage, built and linked to a trigger.
 
Then use designations menu to claim and dump the cage. The cage will stay where it is because it's constructed, but your dwarves will disarm and declothe the goblins. Then send in a few squads and pull the lever. They'll make short work of unarmed, naked goblins, and gain valuable experience doing it.
 
As for falling, it varies depending on the creature. In theory bigger and heavier creatures die from a shorter drop, but the deeper you dig the more effective it should be.

Your best bet in the current version is to just not bother having a guard in the first place. They're not really good for anything but disrupting fortress life, usually over some silly mandate you can't meet.

Contaminants can be a big cause of slowdown, so use the current dfhack and make liberal use of the "clean all" command.
 
But also, on some maps slowdown will just occur as a matter of course. I think the game might be storing and referencing all kinds of semi-useless data for the duration, and the list keeps getting longer, because sometimes a map will just slow down over time for no apparant reason.
 
Also, multiple reclaims on a site can cause massive slowdown for some reason.

The wiki has a pretty good explanation of what various tokens do in the raws: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Creature_token

I completely understand why you would ask this here rather than in the mod forum, btw. In a way the metagame of modifying raws is part of advanced gameplay, and the mod forum is a bit intimidating and can seem like more of a place to post mods than to ask advice. I mostly figured it out myself using the wiki and experimentation; the one time I did ask a question in the mod forum the response was not very helpful.
 
My advice would be to start by picking an existing creature and modifying it. Open one of the creature files, like creature_large_mountain.txt, and copy a creature you want to work with into a blank notepad file. Then play with it. You might also consider asking advice in one of the main irc channels.
 
But also, there's a major new version coming out soon, and I am not sure what may have changed. You might want to hold off on doing anything major until it does.
 

Yes I know it's in advanced worldgen.

I have gone as far as setting all good settings to 0 and maxing all evil settings, and even that has no effect -- you still get the typical distribution.

I have never understood players who get themselves into these situations.
 
Why do you have dark stranglers sieging you if you have no desire to fight off sieges? Just turn sieges off, problem solved.

Personally, I don't believe there is such a thing as "useless migrants." I crank the max pop to 500.
 
There's no rule that says there's something wrong with having lots of idlers. An idle dwarf is a happy dwarf.
 
Unskilled migrants can fairly rapidly be trained in most professions, and are great for mass labor tasks like hauling, plant gathering, smoothing and engraving, building projects -- and of course a large militia.
 
Lately, as my fortress populations swell, I have been segregating the "elite" population from the "grunt" population. Lower quality quarters, less glorious labors, less defended, crappier food supply, etc.
 
 

Hi. What I am wondering is if certain tokens will stack. For example if a position has [SUCCESSION:BY_POSITION:X] and also has [APPOINTED_BY:Y] will it cause Y to appoint from position X?