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[Girlinhat]

Start importing Platinum, Diamonds, and anything you can that's valuable.  With the amount of bloodshed happening here, you're going to need THE most ASTOUNDING dining hall in all of DF history, if you want to avoid tantrum spirals.  Since you're going to have at least a few deaths every ambush, and you're going to have ambushes from all civs and all manner of underground nasties, then yeah, tantrum spirals will be killer.

Also, mod your entity file, where it says something like [MORAL_MAKE_TROPHY_SENTIENTS] or something like that, change it to ACCEPTABLE, and same with eating sentients.  This will allow you to butcher dead creatures for skulls and bones (and meat and skin, if it's fresh) and make lovely goblin skull totems, adorned with goblin bone and goblin leather.  Also might want to see about adding the little "display case" mod, it's a "workshop" created from a piece of glass, a block, and any item.  This would let you put those goblin totems on display in a sort of museum of horrors, or in the killer's own bedroom.  Sadly though, when crafted into a totem, the name is lost, so you can only get "Random Goblin Totem" instead of a proper name.  Still, you could give your soldiers one displayed totem per 10 kills or something, so that the long-lived soldiers don't have acres of allotted killspace.  Alternatively, don't add display cases, and just make a 1x1 stockpile that only accepts goblin totems.

[jester]

Field of skulls always looks good outside a big fort, have an above ground graveyard right next to it so the world can see the score.   Boring passages from outside the fort down into each of the caverns has worked ok for me getting a few extra interesting critters to the surface.

[Rhaken]

How come nobody is talking about burial arrangements?

When I play military forts, it goes something like this: untrained civilians, non-military and children (and pets, if I'm feeling particularly generous) are buried in unoccupied coffins or caskets in a massive underground necropolis, arranged in neat rows. Deeper down, in an equally large, but infinitely more majestic vault, are the soldier's graves. They each get a metal sarcophagus, adjacent to a statue. The entire area is a statue garden, so idle dwarves will sometimes go down there and pay their respects to the defenders of their home. Squad leaders and any particularly awesome Urist McSoldier is entitled to a walled tomb, made of solid gold or something else that is valuable. You can have their burial arrangements improved based on their kills if you assign them tombs while they still live, and even customize each one with some symbol of their accomplishments (dragon skull totem for the mighty dwarf who killed a dragon, for instance).

You could also assign squad leaders modest apartments near the barracks. The entrance from the barracks is a neat office, with some chairs around a couple tables, and some cabinets for filing. A door at the back leads to the rest of the captain's home, such as dining room, bedroom, personal garden, whatever you want. To make your fort particularly interesting, build secret access tunnels inside each squad leader's apartment, leading to a hidden briefing room, spy quarters, torture room, prison, or something equally shady that the average soldier shouldn't see.

[Lamphare]

my current military oriented fort is in genesis mod, it means quite a lot enemies, atcually three civs are at war, including one human, which normally would trade rather than trash. then i pissed all elves so hopefully i'd get sieged more often.
i've danger rooms, but i didnt want to exploiting to far so i only train the best - make them better, so they can teach the rest green hands how to fight, along with few awesome training facilities genesis mod offers. also i set six catapults, to train as many as half of the fort, into siege operators. so upon being sieged, my 20 ballista could sweep invaders clean, or at least mortally wound them, leaving the easy jobs for my red steel army.
it's fun, i've like at least 20 pitted prisoner for training/entertainming, and hundreds of corpses. i even have a huge half-done engraved 'musemu' displaying many records, mainly engraving and engraved slabs of dead enermy, displaying the glorious moments, and occasionaly tragic accidents(like some civillian wonders into ballistas' line of fire and gotten roasted, or plant gatherer got ambushed and turned into archery dummy etc.).
still, i made some mistakes so irreversible that i had to roll back save 
never really interested into the HFS, so maybe one day i'd have to redesign the fort to fit against them.
yeah, military fort is real fun.

[Korva]

Well, I did start this fort but I have a problem: the goblins don't want to play. I had two small sieges in year three and two ambush squads afterwards, but nothing for the last year. I wasn't remotely ready to meet the sieges head-on (some deaths are acceptable, but losing half my population or more was nothing I wanted to risk), now that I feel more prepared and my dwarves are better equipped, they have nothing to do. As a consequence, I only have about six "proven residents" who have scored at least one kill in live melee combat, three marksdwarves with a kill under their belt, and three more who have killed a prisoner in single combat. Nothing to get excited about. At least my medical team is highly motivated this time, taking care of broken bones and cuts with remarkable speed.

I've "lost" forts to boredom before, but I don't want to shelve this one just yet. I think next year I'll butcher the human caravan and hope the humans will declare war. I can also open the caverns, which I planned to do anyway, though with four FBs down there I'm leery to send raw recruits out to wrestle crundles. Of the beasts, one has webs, one deadly spittle, one poisonous vapors and one a poisonous bite. None of those are plague-bearers, right? I think that's just "noxious secretions" and "deadly blood". So maybe they can provide some exercise. Or if I do get bored of the fort, I could open the caverns and let them come in for mass slaughter.

Stupid unreliable goblins.

One other thing that really bugs me still is that it seems to be impossible to get completely unskilled dwarves to get even a single point in a combat skill without a danger room before they throw fits over the draft. I can't barely put the raw recruit squads (5 dwarves, 3 on duty at a time) on Active because they drop to unhappy despite having great booze and food, a great dining room and a decent barracks. Any suggestions with that? I had them go up against deer and unicorn, but saw no noticeable gain from that either.

[TheyTarget]

One other thing that really bugs me still is that it seems to be impossible to get completely unskilled dwarves to get even a single point in a combat skill without a danger room before they throw fits over the draft. I can't barely put the raw recruit squads (5 dwarves, 3 on duty at a time) on Active because they drop to unhappy despite having great booze and food, a great dining room and a decent barracks. Any suggestions with that? I had them go up against deer and unicorn, but saw no noticeable gain from that either.

Thoughts last for 6 months if I'm right. So before you draft them, let them eat in the dinning hall, maybe see a waterfall, give them a nice royal bedroom for a day or two, and then draft them. They will be pissed but it should be cancelled out by the last few days, and after 6 months hopefully they have done some battles and will calm down. At least thats what I would try.

[Girlinhat]

Place them in a "new recruit" squad.  Make a barracks in a lavishly designed armory with waterfall and ready meals, so they'll train somewhere nice and won't get pissy, then move them to an actual squad with barebones setup.

[rephikul]

To quickly and safely get a recruit to at least 1 rank in any skills, use the linked lever trick and have him train crossbow on captured creatures, he'd get to novice in a month and if the target happen to die too soon for whatever reason, the joy in slaughter will cancel out any unhappiness caused by drafting. After that, start training him normally in whatever career you have originally designed for him.

[Girlinhat]

If you have a few captured creatures, just pit them all at once into the firing range, keep targets on stock.