Alright, I'm pretty sure I have to get in on this one. I think I've got a plan that involves more pumps than the others, but will end up letting me work on more levels of the ocean at once.
Four questions, before I embark into an ocean biome:
1. If I dump magma into ocean, does it become obsidian on the floor or the surface?
2. If I drop fully-formed obsidian tiles into the ocean, such as are formed by mixing magma and water, will they settle on the bottom as per the cavein method of stopping aquifers, thereby allowing me to place columns of obsidian with impunity all over the map?
3. If I mod dwarves to be faster so I can post responses to this thread sooner (including my soon-to-come experiments involving terrariums, aquariums, cage traps, chains, and pressure plates) is it cheating? I mean, it'd be purely for research purposes.
4. Why haven't more designs involved pressure plates to regulate fluid level? One pressure plate activates when water is more than 4 tiles deep; it drains the column using water wheels built over basically the entire ocean, or as much of it as I feel like industrializing at a time. Then, a simple lever opens floodgates to let water stream in in a wide column. Cage traps built at the bottom, using glass terrariums pre-filled with water, which ought to prevent drowning unless caging prevents drowning anyways.
I think that plan would require more labor but less cpu struggling than building an inland lake of any decent size. Any other thoughts?
Oh, and for additional dwarfiness: Kill the elves, enslave the goblins (as live archery targets, at max range from your marksdwarves, with fortifications a plenty so there's enough misses that they last), cage the kobolds (nobles like zoos, and levers, and I hear cages with occupants can be attached to levers), lie to the humans, breed the merpeople, and wear armor made from each species' specific bones when they come a'calling.
Human liaisons can go crazy, and I have no idea how losing a liaison affects your relations with the humans; but, if they send a new one and there's not a gender preference, crazy people can still get pregnant, right? Or is it like dwarves, where they require marriage/live-in arrangements? And, can crazy diplomats be caught in cages like crazy dwarves?
Basically, is it remotely possible to breed humans, too?