Well, I lied before. you see, DF is kind of about as peaceful as it will ever get atm. [...]
Goblin sieges sometimes number in the single digits, and ranged combat nerfed. Not one ambush or kobold thief has been seen in fortress mode. [...]
I can't conclude if this is the reality, but I can sure say it was not my first impression.
I had not played for a long while, and made the mistake of colonizing a location too close to goblin settlements, and it didn't even survive the second year. Everything was fine - I had a military(the number of idlers was annoying me, so I made the decision to set up a military a little earlier than I generally would do) composed of a steel armor wrestler and a steel armored, +steel sword+ wielding proficient swordsman - the fort was doing alright. All I saw through the year was just two snatchers(which just ran away at an surprising speed when spotted, leaving my heavy armor wearing soldiers without any chance to strike), and the creatures of the first cave layer would all get instakilled by the military.
Then, the game gave me an announcement of some sort of goblin attack on my fortress. It was a single goblin and two undead - that's it. I was very surprised - never before did I get attacked so early in a fortress - but I thought 3 units shouldn't be much of a problem. Also, they seemed to be very slow.
Well, the goblin was indeed not much of a problem, and easily went down. But then the undead just sprinted towards my military with agility you'd never expect from zombies, slaying both the wrestler and the swordsman with maximum prejudice. Soon enough the two zombies would proceed to slay the entire fort of ~25 dwarves, leaving me with the only option of putting them all into military and issuing an attack order. Which didn't matter anyways, they all went down just as easily as the soldier and wrestler did.
It seems to me there are clearly new opportunities to get a lot of !!FUN!! for these looking for it, and yes,
the undead are definitely the new carp. They just aren't very common(or I think so).