If you dam the river, you won't have flow unless you give it another pathway. Just be careful with that
. I suggest multiple floodgates in the wall, surrounded by walls. Grates are probably not necessary, but whatever, if you feel like being
safe, that's your problem.
Nutsmountain rolling along. Foolish Expert Macedwarf managed to fail to kill a goblin axeman for about 5 strikes - all by the goblin - before the next one took his weapon hand off. His shield skill must've sucked because he did nothing as the goblin turned him into many assorted body parts, because I still haven't finished out my armor to equip them yet. But the siege broke; final tally is probably 18 dead goblins, 13 because of the rotting dust clouds that came through. They've been forbidden as they're coated in Heinous Dust coverings; I've gotta pump some water to them now, dangit. 4 more in cages; including the wildlife traps on the mountain, which they pathed to for some reason. Good for them; the leader hit a cage, one other hit a cage, and they stood there til the next cloud turned them into goblin-goo.
Second casualty was another Macedwarf; I don't know his level but he has high skill. Got a cut into his right arm from another axe-goblin, caused him to drop the mace because of muscle damage. He's recovered completely shortly after being stitched up by my CMD, who has been permanently relieved of all labors except saving dwarves from themselves.
The Speardwarf showed up, though; goblin was stabbed in both feet and crippled before collapsing, and then lost various appendages before his head was "cloven asunder" or whatever it states. Goblins are lame, I need another megabeast. Minotaurs are also lame, though, so even if it's just a semi-Megabeast, so long as it's not one of those, we're good.
Armor industry rolling along. I am TRYING to train up more high-skill armorsmiths, but so far it's just the two who have reached the levels I want to make good quality steel armor. And I'm out of steel; I ran out of marble in my stockpiles, so I had to go fiddle with emergency burrows to get the miners down there. Now I can resume production, once I clean out these dang gold nugget piles everywhere.