I've been messing with my raws and looking at various civilizations in the mods I have set up, and I've started to get a few ideas. In the past, I have found that meat/leather economies with good breeding populations tend to do ridiculously well, since you get food, bone/leather commodities, war animals, and awesome menageries to impress your dwarves. It's also just plain fun to have pits full of cave crocodiles and merpeople (yes, that thread was amazing.)
However, I'm trying to make up innovative ways to expand on this pliable economy. First off, are megabeasts, by default, capable of breeding? Even if not, it would be easily editable and would make world gen and megabeast farms an intense fortress worthy of epic stories. Now, that's really just a side idea to the main one in this thread that I want to propose.
All the sentient races (dwarves, elves, humans, kobolds, and goblins) strictly adhere to monogamy and will only reproduce with their spouse, and will never remarry even if the spouse dies. Like all mating in Dwarf Fortress, it's done through spores. As such, you can't kidnap a few traders and expect a human or elf farm up and running within a few years, as they won't mate unless conveniently married. However, two approaches could be made to possibly start up a breeding farm of sentient creatures.
One option would be to simply raise the wealth of your fortress to ridiculously high levels, then capture every singly goblin and kobold that comes onto your territory, and toss them all into pits together, and hope that you caught a married couple. If not, there is always the next ambush. Within time, this model ideally would set you up with several married pairs that would begin to create offspring that could then marry the single captives or each other to create a stable breeding population.
Another option that is much more time efficient and seems more plausible, would be to generate a pocket world (for ideal circumstances) and start underneath a human town, goblin fortress, or elf land. Depending on how war-torn your world is, you should have a town with several married couples (since they obviously live together) that would naturally breed during your stay there. It would be very easy to set up traps or chutes to slowly begin to collect the breeding pairs, and to engineer a system to "flush" their babies into a butchery, as proposed in a thread I read previously.
What I'm asking is, does anyone have any experience on this that could help expand on this idea, or rule it out? I'm considering making a test run when I get more free time, possibly after the new version as well, but not necessarily.
Discuss.