Hello!
They don't give out any announcements (unless they arrive as a siege, which generates the "The dead walk!" announcement), but if I recall correctly they do give combat reports for the reanimations
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This raises the interesting question, whether we can switch on pausing or the box for the reanimations. I haven't found an obvious entry in the announcements.txt, the best candidates that might be involved would probably be [BODY_TRANSFORMATION], [INTERACTION_ACTOR], or [INTERACTION_TARGET]. But then again, marriage messages also don't seem to have announcement controls, so it may simply not be controllable. As a hint for doing something else while playing: I recommend putting :BOX or at least :P:R to CITIZEN_DEATH and PET_DEATH (and probably also CITIZEN_MISSING and PET_MISSING), so that the game pauses when your population starts to dwindle.
And
Garath, how could you ignore the most fundamental rule of the game :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
My current fortress isn't running at the moment and I am still wondering whether I should do something about my dwarves assigned to masonry - I have too many statues of Litast, the deity of suicide, death, blight, disease, volcanos, fire, the sun, light produced. I wanted to have a few statues to brighten up my initial dining room (things have been starting slowly as the soil layer was unexpectedly thin), and now I have nearly half a dozen statues of a rotting female dwarf (the standard depiction of Litast). I guess I will have to make a temple dedicated to Litast. Maybe I will move the statue of some historical night creature striking down a dwarf also to that temple then - but that is far, far in the future.
My first immigrant wave were 7 dwarves - 5 adults (2 married couples), 2 children, with normal citizen skills (farming, ranger, glassmaking) and a bit of combat training. Autumn has come, so I hope that I will not get too many migrants before the pop cap starts working.
Yours,
Deathworks