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[Cocoprimate]

Yeah, as VerdantSF said, if you want them to breed you might want to add them the child tag, and maybe modify the number of eggs in a clutch. While you are at it, give them improved skills, as they won't gain experience and all their attacks are capped at skill level 6, which means a one-armed bowgoblin can one-shot them.

If you don't want them to use eggs to be born, remove the segment from [CASTE FEMALE]. You don't need to make a new world for any of this. Add the [FLIER] tag if you want them to fly, and feel free to look at the bodyplan from a winged creature, such as the roc, so you can add wings to the dragons.

These are my babies for proof. I added to them some additional skill levels to make them less wimpy, wings and the flier tag. I also tried adding different colors but it didn't work for some reason. Maybe color inheritance is genetic and because my breeding pair was two greens I couldn't get anything else other than that.

The war dragons at the arena

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The hatchlings and the moms at the hatchery

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My other breeding projects

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I had to add the child tag to many of them. Otherwise untouched. I also have jabberers and pigs that didn't fit inside the picture, and I'm waiting for another cave dragon so I can breed those too 

[VerdantSF]

Cool set-up you've got there, Coco!  It's like a DF exotic animal sanctuary .

[MerkerBenson]

Cool, thanks for the advice. Unfortunately, because I only have newb trainers I'll have to wait until I can even put that single dragon on a chain, lol. Once I have it trained for war and I get a female dragon then I might try a breeding pit .
Btw, how do you capture all those creatures without losing 101 dwarfs in the process, Coco?

[Cocoprimate]

Thanks Verdant!

Merker, First I had the dorfs make like 1000 mechanisms and 300 cages. Then I sent the army to occupy and explore the caverns to discover all the cavern exits at the edges. Then I cagetrapped the entrances one by one by making a line of cagetraps a tile away from the edge.

I still lost maybe 12 dwarfs during the cage-trapping of the caverns though, because sometimes blind cave ogres would spawn at the exit the dwarves were currently working on, and they would beat a couple dwarves to death before the military squads got to them. Also, forgotten beasts spawn in the caverns and often ruined the day of the workers.

By the way, it helps if you don't have many water edges, as you can't cage-trap those easily. What I eventually did was construct an artificial floor reaching up to the water map edges so I could reach. But that takes very long.

[TheSaberTooth]

Meh. Dragons in my world (or any other mega beasts for that matter) don't survive World gen too often, forcing me to-

A) Stop world gen early, making the world less fun
B) Make the world generate more mega beasts, which includes them all.
C) Mod in races of lesser dragons (Such as a Drake).

Never had a breeding pair of dragons in my forts.

[Cocoprimate]

Well, the trick to get a breeding pair is the following:

Semi-megabeasts and megabeasts attacks on fortress mode always happen the same day. So, if you save really often, you will eventually manage to get a save just a few ingame days before a smb or mb attack. So you can just reload until you get a dragon of the desired sex.

For example, on the 12th of Galena you get a visit from a minotaur. You saved on the 9th, so you save-scum and reload that save. Now, on the 12th you get a giant. So you do it again. Repeat until dragon.

And yes, semi-megabeasts also count for this, you can get a dragon reloading after getting a smb in the first place.

Keep in mind though, that you must have the necessary amount of created wealth to attract the dragons, and that your world needs to have at least 2 dragons of different sex.

Otherwise, you can just wait. Which is what I did for 30 years, until I decided to try the above method, which yielded my breeding pair in a year or two.

[Zanthra]

Well, the trick to get a breeding pair is the following:

Semi-megabeasts and megabeasts attacks on fortress mode always happen the same day. So, if you save really often, you will eventually manage to get a save just a few ingame days before a smb or mb attack. So you can just reload until you get a dragon of the desired sex.

For example, on the 12th of Galena you get a visit from a minotaur. You saved on the 9th, so you save-scum and reload that save. Now, on the 12th you get a giant. So you do it again. Repeat until dragon.

...

Does this work for normal animal migrations like Giant Eagles?  Or just (semi)mega beasts?

[Cocoprimate]

No. The spawning of normal animals is controlled by a few different factors:

1- Biome (if you want giant eagles, their biome needs to be present. I don't know which one is it, you can check the raws for it)
2- Site populations. Each site (embark) has a given number of creatures within a species, this is called population.

For instance, say your embark site has a population of 30 monkeys. Once all of those monkeys have been spawned into your map, you will never get monkeys of that species again. So yes, wild game will eventually run out. You can check your embark's populations using DFhack, the "region-pops list" command. You can also use a command (DFhack will let you know which) to increase the pops number so you can get more animals after you've depleted their population.

3- The number of types of animals already present on your map. Say that you want giant eagles to spawn, but your map already has 7 badgers and 24 storks present, or something. The eagles won't spawn until those animals leave or are killed. At least in my experience, I can't really confirm that.

Also, once the map is empty, the animal that is spawned is randomly selected, I think. So you might have to perform wildlife cullings several times before you get your eagles.