A few fatalities since my last post. Most notably I lost a legendary miner to madness when he failed to complete his artifact. To my chagrin he was wielding a steel pick when he went bonkers, managing to permanently cripple a farmer before being dispatched by a sword through the skull.
The elven caravan was ambushed by goblins and chased off, but they managed to knock one of the packs loose from the mule so it was not a total loss. When the third dwarven caravan showed up a very smalls siege maybe 10 goblins showed up. The two marksdwarves with the caravan did enough damage before they died that the siegers left.
I have produced approximately 1,000,000 worth of large serrated iron discs; a little over a hundred. I have them 7x3x5 on my main entrance and a few more by bridges etc in the wilds now. I imagine the visage of goblins entering my fort to be somewhat similar to a certain level in Rise of the Triad. The archery tower meant to cover the entrance to my fort is 2z tall now, I intend to make it 4z with fortifications on floors 3 and 4.
In year 4 I plan on starting steel production, getting a glass industry going and prepping fortifications to stage an invasion of cavern layers 1-2. The hold up is my axedwarves need time to train, so much stuff has grown in the caverns that my squads can't move without lumberjacks. I intend to put glass floors above my stockpiles and main hallways to cure the cave adaptation that is setting in. However my framerate seems to oscillate between 60 and 80 now, I'm going to begin trying to make the paths as straight as possible using constructions to see if that improves the impact of hauling long distances with lots of dwarves.
Apparently I have to tell the dwarves to pickup refuse outside the fort to get them to move the goblins off exterior traps. Thanks for the advice.