Thanks to some modding to make Tigermen common domestic animals and Dfusion to enable multirace fortresses, and of course [CAN_ LEARN] and [CAN_SPEAK] I had Tigermen working as woodworkers, craftsmen and miners. They work and move slower than dwarves in most tasks, save for hauling which for some reason they cook down the halls and probably knock all the dwarves over. Also pulled it off with Ant people, using the soldier ones as a sort of auxilliary to my regular dwarves while the workers mined and chopped wood.
Gave the ant people all the no fear tag to be sure they'd fight to protect the fortress untill the bloody end. And boy did it get pretty damn bloody when I got attacked by a rather angry savvana titan.
As a side benefit, none of the dwarves will give a damn if they die since they only really socialize among themselves. They can still get all pissy though, but when they died so my dwarves need not (ant man woodcutter got mauled by a giant badger, copping wood til he actually got attacked, and a soldier got gored by a troll and died instead of its dwarven captain) made it work out pretty good. I messed something up when I tried to duplicate what I had done before, as I couldn't assign the antmen to my army, and with tigermen I could only assign them room and combat duties after they became ledgendary (I had moods take my tigermen, one making a platinum crossbow, one agem encrusted shirt, and one a red topaz earring) so I only had 3 mighty tigermen out of the 10 I brought to mostly be soldiers acutally serving.
If set to come from the mountain biome like the dwarves and set to common domestic, tiger and and ant men will migrate to the fortress, typically in a juvinile state. So they'd be considered fair game for snatchers. Not that it does them any good when Tigermen like fighting. Tigerman cub died, but he ripped the goblin's knife hand off and broke his leg.A swift pick ax beating finished the job when I let him out of the room.
The downside is that these extras are counted as part of the population for the likes of the mayor and whatnot, but aren't counted on the fortress census, so you'd have to keep track of actual population manually. Liked the idea with castes though.... But at least if a tigerman and dwarf get together the result will be one or the other, not an elf or kobold or something. Also Tigermen auxilliaries can be armed but not armored as those are some big bastards compared to dwarves and dwarves dont manufacture gear big enough for them. Not sure if humans do though, so trade might be the remedy for that.
First Bay12 post and didnt insult anyone! Not too bad if I say so myself, and pardon those blobs of text, I like to go into detail on stuff.