i build everything aboveground except mine shafts and transportation tunnels. I also pave the streets of my town. Also I avoid using crossbows because it isn't honourable.
My favourite fort ever was when i had a huge town with a well-trained squad of champions. A mere ambush killed a few champions who were friends with everyone. Cue rioting. It looked like the LA Riots in my town, the city was in chaos. There was fighting in the streets, people attacking the fortress guardsmen.
The police barracks kind of became the hospital, and there were always tantrumming dwarves coming in to beat wounded people to death. The police had kind of retreated to the barracks to protect the wounded. There were corpses and broken things everywhere.
Eventually I drafted the dwarves who looked the least unhappy, pulled them to the west side of the city, and had a Berlin wall built, condemning the west side to fend for themselves. The main food stockpile was in West Berlin, for a while the Easterners survived on what animals were left in that end, but then I had them do some farming and help themselves.
East Berlin was an utter shithole with lots of fighting and wounded. Berserkers and melancholy were ubiquitous. People were jumping off of the tops of high-rise buildings and such.
West Berlin prospered, it was doing fine. It also had access to the outside world, via the west bridge. The East bridge had been blocked off to seal in the quarantined easterners.
Then a goblin siege came. I frantically knocked down the Berlin wall for the citizens of both sides to unite together to beat back the foreign foe. They won at great cost. The next siege wiped out the whole town though. It was hands down the most fun i've ever had in ANY game.
Some photos:
Below is a good shot of a big part of the city. The red lines are drawn where the Berlin wall used to be. Note that in the riots, civil infrastructure took a big hit, rioting dwarves hate roads. That statue garden was the wild west. All the dwarves loved to gather there and fight. It had some gold and platinum statues that I had moved to the West just before the quarantine.
Below is a scene of part of the Reunification Battle, when the heroic combined forces drove back the goblins.
Below is a scene just before the Fall of Berlin. That building in the top left where there are a tonne of goblins, that was an apartment complex. It had four apartments each on maybe five levels. The goblin horde hit that building first, going door to door slaying wounded and sleeping dwarves. You can see what remained of the active defence force, they didn't stand a chance.