One thing that I do miss about older versions is the insanely unbalanced wildlife. In the current version, even large predators tend to steer clear of you unless they can pick off some livestock while there's no dwarves around. In older versions everything wanted you dead. Features included:
- killer fish. Skill use raises a critter's stats. Swimming counts as skill use. Fish were effectivel stat-grinding all the time. Back in 40d and earlier, carp were considered one of the most terrifying organisms in the known world, and with good reason.
- Killer elephants. A critter's size used to have a scaling effect on its stats, which meant that large animals effectively had obscenely badass stats. Fighting anything bigger than a cow was a pretty dicey proposition, and elephants were unstoppable murderous juggernaut.
- killer unicorns. Before undead animals were introduced, good biomes tended to be every bit as deadly as evil biomes just because of goddamn unicorns. They're still pretty badass, but nowhere near what they used to be.
- killer predators. None of this lounging around and occasionally eating a goat business. If you had a pulse, you were definitely on the menu for anything with fangs.
- killer training. Back in the good old days your military dwarves didn't train by "training" and "drilling". They just belted the fuck out of each other with whatever weapon they were equipped with at the time, and if you wanted to be totally Dwarfy you'd say "to hell with wooden practice weapons" and give them steel battleaxes. Training with real weapons was an exercise in Darwinian natural selection, and it was hilarious.