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[Schmaven]

The pit trap has now been properly tested.  Two sieges of goblins (about 2 pages total in each siege) and a siege of armored undead were all broken. 

Spoiler: Siege (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Main Defense Level (click to show/hide)

To better deal with giants, ettins, and other large invaters too big to be dropped, they're simply caged, drowned, then dropped into the pit to be reanimated by the evil biome.  This has been the general approach for all caged creatures.  Live giants tend to kill too many zombies before dying, and then reanimate in a damaged condition, which is not ideal. 

Spoiler: Aquifer Fed Drowning Chamber (Adjacent Food Stockpiles) (click to show/hide)

There of course is a lot of potential for improving the design:

• One of the biggest weaknesses is when goblins are dropped into the pit, they occasionally dodge out of it through the wall and into the ballista arrow collection zone. 
• Falling items and corpse pieces sometimes fall through the floor to the z-level below if it is mined out.  All the ballista arrows that clear the whole length of the range end up falling into the catacombs because of this. 
• The marksdwarf bunker should have a gap to prevent goblin archers from so easily shooting in at the dwarves.
• The lever room could be closer to where dwarves typically idle.  Probably a good idea for all levers in general really.
• More space around the exit to give the melee dwarves some room to assemble without being split across walls would improve the mopping-up work
  
  Spoiler: Mop-Up Crew (click to show/hide)

  

I'm not sure to what extent the ballistae are necessary.  But the 4 of them have been used every time to slow down the invaders, and reduce their numbers before they are dropped into the pit.  Maybe once the pit population gets big enough, they can all just be dropped in without needing to be softened up first. 

The armored undead siege troops are definitely the best addition to the pit.  They make short work of the living who are usually a bit stunned from the fall.  It's a bit hard to tell the zombies apart from the carnage now.  The trolls stand out pretty well though.

Spoiler: Pit Inhabitants: Normal View (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Pit Inhabitants: Simplified View (click to show/hide)

One of the benefits to the pit, is that there is no cleanup.  All the body parts, armor, and gore just drops into the pit with the zombies.  Out of sight, out of mind.

With the pit trap now fully functional, the plan now is to establish some trading.  But to do that, the surface needs to be tamed quite a bit.  There are too many undead giant birds up there.  When they're not murdering caravans, they perch high atop trees and scare away all the wood cutters who attempt to clear a safer path.  And they don't path find into the fort like normal zombies or invaders, but are content just to occupy the surface.  Stationing melee and marksdwarves right next to them doesn't even draw them down.  I'm not sure how to deal with them really.

 

[Schmaven]

There were a couple years where no new undead wildlife roamed the surface.  Taking advantage of the unusual safety, a massive lumber harvesting operation was started, as well as basic surface control operations: cutting trees by the map edge and building roads to prevent fauna from spawning in the trees.  Pathfinding of creatures stuck in trees has been suspected of hurting FPS.  Some unicorns were spotted atop the walls and climbing in the trees, so efforts were made to catch a breeding pair.  6 were caught. 

Spoiler: Wood haul (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Unicorn sighting (click to show/hide)

A small goblin siege briefly paused the work, but was quickly routed by the skilled ballista operators.  Their corpses were fed into the pit for reanimation.  When the surface work resumed, a flock of 8 Giant bluejay corpses decended right on top of the workers, killing 10 before the hammerlords got to the scene.

Spoiler: Ballista carnage logs (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Giant undead bird attack (click to show/hide)

It turns out that if you have dwarves assigned to a burrow, and have a lot of stone to haul, with plenty of wheel barrows, you need to have that burrow include the path dwarves will take with the wheel barrows.  I had a 4 tile gap as the route required passing through a potentially dangerous area.  After a bunch of cancellation messages flooded dozens of pages in the announcement window, I found a pile of 90% of the fort's wheelbarrows right in a doorway.  Painting the burrow over them ended up with them just being moved over to the next tile as dwarves grabbed them to try and haul stones.  I had to paint the burrow all the way around the corner and into the entrance to the mines.  The mines were always part of the burrow.  Now the announcement window has returned to normal, and instead of 20+ pages of Stoneworker Olikivish cancels Store Item in Stockpile: Item inaccessible to sift through, it just has 1 page of actually useful announcements. 

Spoiler: Announcement spam (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Announcement spam Solved (click to show/hide)

The announcement spam seemed to also correllate to a lack of other hauling jobs being done.  There was a noticeable backlog in all of the usually empty QSP feeder stockpiles.  They emptied again once the burrow was corrected to fix the stone hauling route.

The safe caravan access route has been completed.  Hopefully this will help restore some of the merchants' confidence.  With raising draw bridges along both sides of the only 3-tile tunnel to the trade depots, they have no option but to spawn in safety. 

Spoiler: Surface area (click to show/hide)

[Schmaven]

Surface work would be much easier if all the undead were not giant birds.  A flock of 4 undead giant peach-faced love birds killed 9 of the construction crew before the troops could get to the scene.

Spoiler: Bird Fight (click to show/hide)

Having just successfully traded 337,000 Urists of tattered clothing away, replacing workers with migrants shouldn't be an issue.  That import to export ratio won't be in the fort's favor for long.

Spoiler: z-Status Screen (click to show/hide)

The sheep herd was recently culled to 50% its former size now that wool cloth is abundant.

Spoiler: Animal Husbandry (click to show/hide)

In case of a zombie outbreak or some other catastrophe, the armory is stocked with enough steel armor to fully gear up 15 dwarves (Masterwork quality gear level not shown below), plus enough weapons for just about everybody else.

Spoiler: Armory (click to show/hide)

Most of the fort has kept busy training in armoring or weapon-smithing depending on their item preferences in order to guarantee more useful artifacts.  The resulting metalsmiths' guilds can be seen combined in the anvil shaped room next to the forges.  Due to trainees occupying all the forges, steel has backed up awaiting some future purpose.  Certainly more ballista arrow heads and crossbow bolts at the very least. 

Spoiler: Metalworks (click to show/hide)

Having a pit of zombies is definitely an entertaining way to deal with problems.  It could also probably serve as a ballast for your FPS.  If a fortification were carved into 1 of the narrow ends of the pit, and a ballista built 25 tiles back from that fortification, a skilled ballista operator could cull the zombie herd and in theory, boost FPS somewhat. 

Spoiler: Zombit Pit Trap (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Armok Vision (click to show/hide)

Here's the fort in case you want to decide its fate from here:
https://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=15327
The DFHack command "gui/mechanisms" is your friend when you look with q at a bridge or lever.