Bay 12 Games Forum

I think the siege aspect of the game is inspired by Tolkien's world, where a fortress is sieged based on rumours of it's great wealth and prosperity.
But goblin ambushes can appear much more unpredictably, without a defence strategy an ambush can cause serious damage, but they are deterred very easily. A few traps in the entranceway will probably be enough to make them think twice about coming inside (but they'll slaughter unarmed dwarves they catch outside). In some fortresses gobs will ambush a lot, in others you can go for years and years without them coming.

Burrows are a broker's best friend. In particular, a burrow encompassing nothing more than the depot. When the caravan comes, add him to the depot burrow, when the trading is done, remove him from the burrow. They can still piss around a bit (like depots often have some booze from a previous caravan, right?) but there's not much which can be done in a trade depot other than, well, trade. The only thing which can go wrong is they go on break, a dwarf who is on break can't be motivated to do anything (unless put in the military), in that case all you can do is wait for on break to expire, or assign another broker.

If your embark has no metal, you can order it from the outpost liason. Order iron ores, copper ores, copper bars, iron bars, pig iron bars, steel bars, bronze bars, bismuth bronze bars and marble (other fluxstones too) and coal or charcoal. For every stone you get 4 bars, and if you maximize the order, you get 4 stones per ore. That means 16 bars per ore type. If your civilization is quite well off in the ores department you can get over a hundred bars per caravan, even if they aren't, you can always buy 4 steel bars, 4 bronze bars and 4 bismuth bronze bars, plus the anvils which can be melted down, plus steel armor and weapons, and since you have tin ore, you can also make a good deal of bronze using imported copper, this means you can always outfit at least one or two military dwarves per year.

Leather armor doesn't do much compared with ordinary clothing, it's a bit of an improvement, but unlike metal armor it doesn't make your dwarves totally immune to certain attack types. Leather and wooden shields are just as good for defense as metal shields but a dwarf needs to be conscious to use a shield, which hampers their utility in a semi-controlled mauling.

Vampire is chained due to justice system with a bed next to the chain.
Annoying nobles or other dwarves get assigned to the bed next to the vampire.
When said annoyance becomes drained, the vampire is convicted of the murder and its sentence is thereby increased.

I caught a vamp in my latest game after a drained macedwarf was discovered (I used the burrow everyone in room and fill it with water method to identify the vamp, he was another macedwarf).

I chained him up in the entrance, and put a bed next to him.
Assigned the bed to a child..
And he drinks the assigned child . I'm so happy.

On zombie maps I make a bridge-wall zombie smasher.

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       p!!!!!!!!!!!!
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p = pressure plate
! = bridge raising north

You have a straight-through path with a pressure plate like to a bridge-wall (the bridge raises north or south, so the bridge is entirely "edge"). The bridge is set to low traffic [strictly speaking, this is optional since dwarves wont trigger the pressure plate if it's set to enemy, but I like on principle for dwarves to not enter death traps at all]
Dwarves (and caravans) go the long way around, but zombies, ignoring traffic designation, shamble onto the pressure plate, and due to the bridge raising delay, then get smashed by the bridge.

Normally my entry-way will have 2 or 3 such bends, each with a short-cut zombie-smasher. It's important to have some strategy for dealing with zombies which re-path while the bridge is raised, causing them to go the long (safe) way. (Another is to have the safe way also blocked off by a raising bridge linked to the same pressure plate, but this is not so good for filtering out immigrants from zombies)

To improve your chances of catching stray zombies which are chasing an immigrant (or idiot) along the entry way, include traps on the inside of corners, where they don't prevent caravans, but they catch any baddies which try to take a shortcut. The bridge walls wont ever jam and leave no mess, so are the preferred way of disposing of zombies, traps are strictly for those which somehow slip through. Cage traps are probably best because they leave no mess and you can pit the zombie into magma.

Immigrants, when they come, will normally set off the zombie camels or whatever, the zombies will chase an immigrant or animal, while the zombies are distracted, the immigrants which aren't being chased will escape into the entry way. Often an immigrant or immigrant's child or pet will end up being 'sacrificed' to the zombies since dwarves (and pets) are dumb like that, they are unable to simultaneously both run away from danger, and towards safety, so they end up being cornered.
You can improve the odds of a single dwarf being chased by zombies survival by having multiple safe underground tunnels into the fortress (i.e. in each corner of the map), each with a zombie smasher setup. You can force a dwarf to always go to the nearest safe-hole (provided they are not running from danger), by setting the entire surface to low or restricted traffic designation, this will make the pathfinder considers any path on the surface extremely undesirable, making it prefer the shortest surface path.

Personally I prefer to use the "drop the minecart" approach, the falling minecart lands on a track stop which has it dump onto the final stockpile. A dwarf then hauls the empty minecart back to the top. The advantage of this setup is you don't need to worry about locking doors, because dwarves never have any legitimate business being at the base of the drop chute.

I think the real advantage of werebeasts is that they heal all injuries with the full moon, so unless your dwarves sustain lethal injuries (which is quite difficult with good body armour), they will basically remain fully operational until old age kills them off. You could also use these to make total cripples useful members of the fortress again. For this kind of thing a weaker werebeast might be more desirable, like a wererabbit or something.