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[DonerKebab]

I'm finally tired of my 9million+ fort and am trying to figure out the best way to kill it.  The current plan is to post all military forever (thereby causing tantrums) and never filling any noble mandates.  What else besides starvation and flooding can I do to kill these guys (212 population, 29 champions, many legendaries, 75 children!)?

Wait just thought of refuse piles indoors.

[Magua]

I have two that I'm currently undergoing.

1) Legendary dining room made out of glass.  All dwarves (except one, see below) inside.  Locked.  Submerged in water.  Eventually, food/booze runs out.  Tantrums.

2) Legendary dining room in the sky (second highest z-level).  Connected to stairs by bridge.  Lever to retract bridge.

In both cases, I'm leaving a legendary engraver in a safe place to view the proceedings, who will consequently engrave the walls to tell the demise of the fortress.

[Alabaster]

pressure plate set to water activated at depth 7 at the bottom of a channel to which your dwarves must fill by hand.  Dig out the entire z level underneath the fort with supports attached to the pressure plate.

begin count down.

[DonerKebab]

Good idea saving an engraver.

OMG my queen consort just had triplets.  That's a new one.

[Warlord255]

Dig out the entire z level underneath the fort with supports attached to the pressure plate.

begin count down.

This.

Alternatively, you can dream even bigger and do it to the entire map.

[Jude]

I have a volcano and I'm building all the bedrooms/offices/etc. around it so I can just dig into it and unleash a horrible flood of death if I ever feel like it.

[Neoskel]

2) Legendary dining room in the sky (second highest z-level).  Connected to stairs by bridge.  Lever to retract bridge.

That won't work. Bridges can't provide support.

[Duke 2.0]

2) Legendary dining room in the sky (second highest z-level).  Connected to stairs by bridge.  Lever to retract bridge.

That won't work. Bridges can't provide support.

 The best way is to have an arm above/below that connects to the structure via support. Then you can collapse the support as you wish.

[Alabaster]

Dig out the entire z level underneath the fort with supports attached to the pressure plate.

begin count down.

This.

Alternatively, you can dream even bigger and do it to the entire map.

I agree, do the entire map.  Excuse me for not thinking dwarfish enough.

[Lord Dullard]

Honestly, I think the neatest way to kill off a fort is to devise some kind of situation that seems historically legitimate. I.e., would not result in the dwarves of your civilization teaching their children, 'Well, in the year 215, Templerock, our greatest city, fell when all of its citizens spontaneously decided to commit suicide'. The.. canonical stupidity of this bothers me too much to kill off my forts this way.

I'd rather wait until a goblin siege and make sure my military is accidentally out 'on patrol', thus allowing the goblins free access to my fort (and all its helpless residents). I'm sure the resulting tantrum spiral in the military would pretty much finish things off.

And if it seemed utterly impossible to kill the fort with mundane means, I'd just Abandon. At least that way the resulting horde of monsters gives you the excuse of 'it was destroyed by a horde of monsters', so things make sense to a degree.

[Alabaster]

With all the oppurtunities a dwarf has to become possessed, go berzerk, tantrum, and all the other psychological strain imposed on thier tiny minds I don't think it's too outside the realm of logic to allow a dwarven fortress to succumb to madness by way of a doomsday project.  Consider the desire to not allow all those masterpieces of dwarven craftsmanship fall into the hands of the enemy, nor to allow your citizens and thier children be subjected to goblin slavery or barbarism.  Thus, the maniac in power orders the doomsday megaproject and puts the lever in his bedroom, where he may contemplate what the engravers will carve of him with his finger on the trigger.

[Charlemagne]

This wasn't on purpose, but when I first started playing I made a very nice, completely engraved room that was also a statue garden. However, I had mistakenly made each statue in the room (there were lots) into a seperate statue garden, because I thought this was necessary for them to be included. The result was dwarves were throwing three, four parties at a time, and the entire fort grinded to a halt as everyone just partied instead of farming or brewing. Eventually the fort starved, having literally partied themselves to death.

Your fort is really really big so I don't see this working as well (the population of the fort that partied to death was in the high 20s) but theoretically if you made an expodentially larger super statue garden, you might be able to reproduce the Eternal Party of the Damned.

Edit: I was also using the party room for coin storage, and by the end the few remaining tantruming dwarves were running around the room throwing coins at each other.

[RogerN]

Creating unhappy thoughts is frequently insufficient to destroy a good fortress.  You must also remove sources of happy thoughts: dining rooms, bedrooms, etc...  Any furniture that's high-quality should be removed.  A few other tips:

* Make sure you DON'T have a jail.  Otherwise your dwarves will be locked up when they throw a tantrum, and that prevents them from spreading more misery.

* If you don't plan on starving your dwarves then you should at least get rid of the high-quality food and beverages.  Let only incompetent dwarves prepare meals.  Make 'em all drink water if possible.

* Nobles can get really, really angry if a "lesser" dwarf has a high-quality bedroom or dining room.  Force all of your best nobles to sleep on the floor, while your humble bookkeeper relaxes in the Royal Suite.

* Stage a couple of "accidents" for some of your military dwarves in order to get the tantrum ball rolling.  They typically have lots of friends.  Cave-ins work pretty well for this purpose.

* In my experience it's pretty rare to kill off an entire fortress with tantrums alone.  Goblins can help, but you've probably got dozens of ultra-mighty dwarves at this point.  A good fortress death takes time.  Or fire.... fire almost always does the trick.

[Pie]

I think that the most "realistic" way to destroy the fort would be to simply do various activities involving water and magma without much thought. Just sort of do things that look and FEEL like the solution to your problems. If it all works perfectly, well, you have an awesome water/magma feature. If not... your fortress will be killed off by bad planning and tantrums.
As a rule, NEVER have a back up save. So if you miscalculate magma pressure, it will start to flood.

Oh, and another idea is to have a bunch of really great military nobles, armed with your best armour and weapons. Have no jail and don't fulfil any mandates.

[Porpoisepower]

you could set dwarves to evaporate at 60 degrees...