there would ahve been a notification, could it have to do with my reaching 201 population?
are children counted in population? is it unadvised to kill off kids instead of adults or should i kill just adults? i have too many dwarves as is anyways
Your high population should not keep a king or other noble from coming, but children are indeed counted. A much better way of controlling population is setting population and baby/child limits as opposed to killing the ones you don't need. Especially since the latter is only going to be a temporary solution (after having a lot of casualties you will first be notified of nobody daring to migrate to your supposed death-trap, but I think their hesitation should go away after a couple of years if you don't significantly lower your population limit).
Some questions.
1. How is candy manufactured? Do you need to extract strands first and then forge them into wafers, which then can be used to make items, or what?
2. How high above the surface of magma can a magma forge be?
1. It's been a while for me, but I think raw clownite (freshly-mined) is separately smelted into wafers if you want to make weapons or armor or woven into strands if you want to make clothing out of it. The latter is, obviously, inadvisable due to clownite clothing rotting just the way fiber, silk or leather does.
2. Magma (at a depth of 4/7 or more, to be precise) has to be directly below your forge, smelter, furnace or kiln.
I think they're on par with each other. If not, greaves are probably better.
According to the wiki, greaves are indeed better. This is probably due to leggings being mail, which is supposed to provide subpar protection against blunt weapons, or at least should do so for the sake of realism. Of course, it would realistically make sense to wear mail under plate, as you do on your torso by putting on a mail shirt and a breastplate, and leggings are easily modded to fit under greaves by removing their shaped tag.