The fortress guard (female migrants are surplus to requirements ...
The military itself is recruited from male migrants. ...
I don't bother to boot-camp train them, ...
There's a big chunk of Restricted access over the main entrance, to discourage anyone wandering outside ...
Squads have a season or two on duty, then the rest of the year off for training and exposure to the meeting zone. ...
1) I assume the gender discrimination is because female immigrants can sometimes haul babies into combat, who then die? Any other reasons?
2) Regarding "boot camp training" (if you don't know what we're talking about, check... "Cross training" ? on the wiki), I agree that it never seemed to make sense - you're gaining xp towards attributes, but you could be gaining xp while doing, say, sparring, which also increases relevant skills. Is there any compelling reason to pursue crosstraining?
3) Restricted traffic zones affect relative costs of different paths. They don't affect whether a dwarf will enter/leave/traverse a region if there's no alternative. (For details, read the traffic section on the wiki.) How does designating your entire entrance as Restricted affect anything, if they need to go through that section - and no alternatives exist - in order to get somewhere in the "unprotected outside" ? The only change I can see would be increased pathfinding cost as the pathfinding algorithm spends more cycles looking for paths inside your fortress.
4) Could someone explain exactly how military dwarves get tired of continued service, and the consequences? I can't find anything on the wiki.
Another option is to hollow out a very large two-z-level tall underground room directly below a forest, prop it up from below with a lever-activted support, then channel out all around it. After recalling all your Dwarves to a safe place, pull the lever, collapsing the forest into the huge underground room. Then roof it over at the first underground level (to prevent enemy archers from standing at the rim and taking pot-shots at your Berry-Pickers, Lumberjacks and Haulers).
Wait... you can do this? Goodness. And the forest is intact, below in your fort? I'd be tempted to try it but I usually do the moat+curtain wall around 99% of the map (once my fort is far enough along that I have the military muscle to protect the workers during the project).
NExt question: 40d, 40d14, 40d16... what all are these versions? What are the big differences? Which one is most stable? Which one is cooler?
The versions with a number after d (like 40d16, the newest, by the way) are released by Baughn (though he's not the only one working on them, AFAIK), and not by the dev Toady himself. They include some bugfixes, but are mostly attempts at speeding up DF. If you haven't tried them already, then you should do so. A lot of people have experienced better performance with those versions.
I notice 40d16 has no "grid" options in its init file. Is this part of the speeding up Open GL?
1) 40d16 has no grid options in the init because a) the grid is automatically calculated when in windowed mode, so resizing the window is equivalent to setting a new grid option, and more convenient, and b) the grid is calculated in fullscreen mode assuming you want tiles at their native resolution, and as many of them as fit into your screen. Both are reasonable assumptions; the only time you might want to specifically set a grid option would be if for some OCD reason you absolutely must have the grid perfectly fill in a windowed-mode window.
2) In my experience, 40d (no OpenGL update) is more stable, and has fewer/no input bugs. 40d16 has problems with losing keyboard input while alt-tabbing in/out of fullscreen mode, and has crashed once for me in ~a week, while 40d has never crashed for me.