Modding the raws to make dwarf children grow up faster may be necessary. I wonder if anyone would consider this overly cheaty if I were to pursue this goal and posted progress?
Anyway, I suppose a plan if I were to strive for both aims would be first to screen migrants for similar appearance traits, work on creating the "ethnic group" through forced pairings as explained above by selecting parents with similar features and decent stats. Then when I have a more or less homogenous group, and several offspring with excellent traits, I could attempt to pair ideal children together so they can form a friendship and avoid contact with problematic love interests. This is assuming these interactions and "friendship level" are taken into account when marriage partners are chosen. At this stage to avoid issues with pairings I'd continue to coax marriage, and might consider sacrificing inferior specimens to Armok with a nice warm magma bath. I've considered using "lite-eugenics" before on previous fortresses where migrants arriving with traits such as "weak" were introduced to the bottom of a drawbridge, and it still seems like it would fit in here somewhere, and can more or less slot into anyone's migrant management with minimal effort.
Some things I've been wondering, if you find yourself with a super dwarf who is technically the size of a human, does the game still allow them to wear standard dwarf size clothing? For some reason I can't imagine that this would change and can't find any information regarding it, although I know large dwarves gain the ability to wield large weapons. Simple raw editing to allow native production would be a resolution in this case and would be ideal for weapons anyway. And also, according to the wiki a lot of information about genetics appears to be relatively unknown at this stage including recessiveness and dominance, but do we know if a child's traits are 100% governed by their parents or is there still some small degree of chance? I'm going to assume generational accumulation of stats doesn't happen, e.g. tall parent + tall parent = taller offspring. I ask in case it may be necessary to outcross with dwarves who have maximum height and width at some stage as opposed to just edging slowly towards that goal with a small controlled group who don't already exhibit those features. If this is the case then I'll just reverse the process and breed for size and function (
) first then appearance last.
Though few have the patience, it's interesting to think that if a fortress lasted a great amount of time with migration eventually being disabled and a high child cap, a fortress could more or less naturally develop its own ethnic group.
If I set out with this as my primary goal with a suitably dedicated fortress, c) shouldn't really be a problem. I'm thinking as much isolation as possible, no cavern breaches and certainly no candy until I've achieved super dwarfism. I can see this whole escapade taking a long time but I'm using a medium-high gaming rig so FPS death isn't likely to be a problem if I embark conservatively, try to avoid accumulating too much material wealth, don't mine for goblinite, utilise magma dumps, and all of the other standard FPS saving techniques.