Just finished strangling my second consecutive jaguar to death. My character is a master fighter and wrestler, which is ironic, given that he was supposed to be a swordsman. However, I've perfected my large cat killing strategy: I throw my sword at the cat, nicking it and drawing blood. Then I grab it by the head and gouge out it's eyes. Now blinded, I release the head and grab the throat, apply a choke, and start strangling. After the first strangle, the leopard passes out, and I can begin strangling at my leisure, choking the beast as it slowly bleeds to death. I suppose I could just drop the sword, apply choke hold, and strangle without gouging or cutting, but I like to soften up my kills a little before I start the asphyxiation: I'm a patient man, but I don't have ALL day long to enjoy choking a giant forest predator to death. Just part of the day. After I've attained a couple of ranks in legendary swordsman, I'll start working on my swordsmanship again, but the last time I swung my sword, I'd sliced a giant lion in half on the first blow. While that is cool, it doesn't net much in the way of experience. I want my warrior to be the mightiest warrior he can be, so I'm cross training him to net as many points as possible. When I begin destroying the elven civilizations, I want to be sure that I'm at my peak.
(I'm not doing Vanilla DF, I altered the races slightly, so that everyone builds cities, and everyone (except Gobs and Cutebolds, but who cares about them) can produce Adamantine. My computer chugs a bit, so getting Adamant via a Dwarf Fortress would take weeks, even if I did the fortress right the first time. I don't want to wait THAT long to be super awesome. Besides, even the elves can use adamantine weapons, so it's close to a fair fight. Well, as close to a fair fight as you can get with a bunch of tree huggin', flower sniffin', maypole dancin' sissy-faced nancy boys can ever get XD . Of course, the merchants are charging me out the arse for adamantine weapons, but hey, why shouldn't they?)