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[Shurhaian]

Right, so. Your fortress is puttering along, life is good, and suddenly "The monster Badguy McNastybeast has come!"

Get the military dwarves moving. Pull people inside. Check the traps. And then...

Something really silly happens.

What are the most underwhelming megabeasts you've seen?

I just had a hydra show up on my map. This worried me - my military ALWAYS lags behind as I try to have awesome equipment(well, awesome armor) before I even draft them. I had a couple marksdwarves and some war dogs. Drafted some more marksdwarves in a hurry.

As they were grabbing gear, an existing pair went more or less to their places. One of them... had a pair of steel bolts in the quiver. The other didn't have that much, and charged out into the open, to boot, beyond the fortifications.

The hydra tore him in half without pausing, while his squad leader just stood there and didn't even bother USING those two steel bolts. The hydra went up and around toward the trade depot...

And there it met one of my war dogs.

Did minor(grey) damage to one eye and another neck before the hydra sliced it open, then lumbered around the crossbow tower and toward the trade depot...

And collapsed.

The dog had inflicted enough harm to knock it out cold. Before it could recover, the caravan guards pounded it into the dirt.

Total casualties: One dog, one marksdwarf. An earlier goblin siege inflicted DOUBLE that, and it wasn't even a very imposing siege - not a marksman among them. (Thankfully, the marksdwarf who distinguished herself THAT day - seven kills to her name alone - isn't the one who was dumb enough to swing at the hydra with an unloaded crossbow.)

The real injustice? The dead dog was assigned to, I think, the dead marksdwarf. Or maybe assigned war dogs don't count as pets. Either way, the dwarves just hauled the dog off to the refuse pile.

Well, if they're not going to give their four-footed savior proper respects, I'll have them build a shrine in its honor. Suggestions? Other tales of not-so-world-shaking terrors tripping over their own feet and becoming easier prey than a hoary marmot?

[Bryan Derksen]

I've had a dragon show up on the edge of the map and then immediately collapse into permanent unconsciousness from the agony of wounds it had suffered during world generation. I'm sure most long-time players have had something like that happen at some point.

I don't even recall how it eventually died. I probably eventually put it out of its misery with a couple of marksdwarves.

[Shurhaian]

This hydra walked onto the map at full health, though. It wasn't weakened by its prior battles - after it bit my marksdwarf into seven tasty chunks, a single dog did enough damage to make it pass out.

[Holy Mittens]

All vanilla MegaBeasts are pretty puny for a variety of reasons. They aren't all that big, they have no dam block, their damage isn't spectacular, and they aren't too fast. So anyone with armor and some training can beat them up. And, as you saw, things like dogs can get lucky shots on them.

I know I mod mine up to be far tougher and I think a lot of others do the same. The biggest thing you can do to make them stronger, at least from my experience, is give them the [CAN_LEARN] tag before you do a world gen. That way they'll show up with experience fighting and have stats, which makes them much, much stronger than they would be otherwise.

[Slashcko]

I was playing vanilla, I had some pretty nice defenses, but I never got any use out of them.
A single one of my hammerdwarfs could take out an entire goblin seige.

Then I had a dragon arrive, I was pretty excited, I was getting prepared to postion my marksdwarfs on the roof when I noticed it was already dead, apparently ONE of my champions was out getting a drink from the river, he killed it without an injury.

Pretty lame.

[Untelligent]

They aren't all that big, . . . their damage isn't spectacular

The hell are you talking about, they're the biggest creatures in the game and relative size has a pretty big effect on damage.

[Seraph]

In one vanilla game I had an uninjured dragon show up. I did all the usual stuff, bringing my civilians in and readying my military. The dragon approaches  my enterence, walks into my anti weenie trap (A single iron whip) which is designed to kill weak creatures before they enter my fort. The single whip takes out the dragons throat, and falls over dead a few steps later. Total letdown.

[Ieb]

I had a muskox kill a giant. It must have helped that the giant was more interested at squashing the merchant riding the wagon with the muskox pulling.

It was sort of a bummer.

[Heliman]

The first megabeast I ever got was this fearsome dragon named Somthingorother, eater of dreams. quickly I sent out all my warhound army (that were all pets on one of my recruits.) in one fell blow the dragon burnt them all to a crisp with it's fire. horrified, I set commands to raise all the bridges and wait out the storm. little did I know that one of my wrestler recruits, urist or somthing, was having a pathing issue where he thought he had to go outside the fort to get inside it. he CHARGED the dragon and tore it limb from limb with his bare hands. Afterward, I promoted him to be the head of his own, single man platoon.

[Vester]

They aren't all that big, . . . their damage isn't spectacular

The hell are you talking about, they're the biggest creatures in the game and relative size has a pretty big effect on damage.

They're only about four times the size of a dwarf. That's nowhere near enough to oneshot an unarmored civilian.

[Lord Dakoth]

Dragon shows up, decides to take a dip in the magma moat.
The end.

[Skorpion]

A titan. I quiver in dread. It walks into a cage trap. It gets hauled to the animal stockpile, then later assigned to the same trapped and walled up stockpile as the unicorns.
Then I have it released. It hurls the releaser out the door, and into a trap. Then it walks into one itself, and straight into the waiting military.

A dragon. It walked up, toppling statues. It roasted a guard bear, then got riddled with steel bolts.

[XSI]

Dragon comes onto the map, runs at the entrance..sees the trade depot and decided to use his fire breath on a cat walking there. He burned the cat and some items, and then tried to either eat it or claw at it.

He was standing on a square with a burning bin of trade goods, and burned himself to death. The end.

[Flaming Dorf]

As far as anticlimatic goes, there was a bronze colossus that fail-pathfinded its way into my magma pits. 

[Holy Mittens]

They aren't all that big, . . . their damage isn't spectacular

The hell are you talking about, they're the biggest creatures in the game and relative size has a pretty big effect on damage.

And yet vanilla MegaBeasts are puny and should die to anyone who has anything beyond the most basic of preparation. Even modded to size 45 (over twice their normal size), dragons will be abused by a single champion with even average quality iron equipment, except in the rare chance that the dragon actually hits it with its fire (I've watched dragons breathe into a group of three fleeing civilians each with a pet following them and none of them were even hurt). And even then, the Champion is likely to kill the dragon before he decides to go burn to death on top of the booze.

On topic, I've only really had two non-anticlimactic MegaBeast encounters and both were with Titans. Most times when they show up, I draft a single dwarf, position him in the path of the MegaBeast, watch it die in one shot, and then unforbid the corpse so my butcher can grab it.