-snip-
If you want them to invade you why don't you just make them a civilization? Then you could set them to ambush you in large numbers and attack your fortress with the intent of slaughtering everything within.
Also are you getting any error messages when you try to add the CURIOUSBEAST_XXXX tokens?
I've tried making them civs. While it's true they will eventually show up, the virtue of animals is that they are 80,000+ of them at worldgen all ready to rock. As civs, they... well, they're slow to show up, and are in much smaller numbers (dozens or hundreds). Goblins work fine as enemies in civs, but they suffer from the bug of "hanging around where their leaders die", which is something I'm trying to avoid by using animals.
If curiousbeast worked, my goal would be reached and I would be happy.
I don't get any errors (checked all the logs, can't seem to find any) when I add the tag, but this is what happens:
For the giants or animal men on the embark when the modification is done, it works. They immediately run into the fort. However, after that, all giant or animal men with the tag no longer spawn on the embark.
So, thinking it was limited to just a problem with giant or animal men, I changed all the base animals and left the giant and animal men alone. Same problem. As the tags are inherited, this wasn't altogether surprising. In fact, if every animal has any CURIOUSBEAST_ tag, no animals will spawn on the embark, ever.
To verify this was the case, I changed every animal to have a CURIOUSBEAST_ tag except eagles. After that change, I only had normal eagles, giant eagles, and eagle men. No other animal would ever spawn on the embark.
It seems like there is some hardcoding regarding back-to-back "curious" beasts coming onto the embark, although this theory is contradicted by what I observed with the eagles. That is, I never saw another type of creature show up, despite them all being available.
It may be something like "8 different normal creatures must spawn before 1 curious" or some other strange rule, I don't know. It's a real shame CURIOUSBEAST_ doesn't work, though. Would make for some awesome customization.