Thoughts on the best method of taking over the cave quickly and without loosing many dwarfs? I don't want to use flooding, or traps, especialy cage traps, unless I run into something really exotic in the cave. My current plan is to use doors to section off safe areas from dangeous areas, and take it over section by section.
There was a challenge in the challenge thread that ran like this: given this embarking area, destroy the skeletal cyclops and trolls in the cave, while dealing with the zombie fish, and gaining enough wealth to have at least 10 dwarves before the end of the year, with no mining, no crossbows, and no traps.
I outfitted four of my seven dwarves with 5 points in armor use and 5 points in <weapon> (I used whatever was cheapest; axes?). These dwarves came with leather armor as well.
After embarkation, built a wooden house. After the house was done, one dwarf did woodcutting, one dwarf did carpentry, and one dwarf did woodcrafts (to drive up the wealth to attract immigrants). The other four sparred wrestling. Made wooden shields for them.
When it turned autumn, I switched them from wrestling to <weapon> (I've heard wrestling helps defense; plus, this boosted their armor and shield skills, to minimize sparring injuries). They sparred until the migrants came. Then I sent them into the cave.
The four of them, with less than a year of training, killed everything in the cave without suffering an injury.
And also because of the layout of the map, the cave is at Z-level 0, but the brook is up at z-16. I'm sure I can get a good water supply down there with floodgates and channels, but I would rather not have to micro-manage switches to keep a constant supply. And have no clue as to how to go about getting the water to where I want it without switch micro-management, or flooding the whole area.
Pump it up to where you want it with a pump tower. It will flood if it can get out, but it's trivial to dig a cistern or similar where there's simply no way for it to get out (since it won't go above the level of the pump).