@Meph:
Well, I am still not a good player when it comes to defense, and I never have time to set up a 250 Z-level magma pump to help.
Next time, I will try to have a dwarf dedicated to lever pulling and some kind of water trap at least, that should help a bit.
Anyway, don't get me wrong, I am not complaining and saying it should be easier, else I would go remove the trap avoid and stuff myself, but it's kind of funny how it almost always end the same for all my forts for the whole year I have been playing dwarf fortress. Basically, some ambush kill enough for a start of tantrum spiral, I manage to get the dwarves back, more or less, and when my military gets a little stronger and geared, I think I can take on a little group of invaders and get corpses of my whole military back instead.
Also, I noticed a big lag starting when I kill the first few geared invaders, which is odd because the added items are way less than what I add by mining, farming and all, getting from 190 FPS to 90 with killing like 10-12 goblins, sometimes a little caravan too, but nothing that big, maybe a hundred items , compared to the 3k stones lying around everywhere, tons of pots, crafts, bins and ammo, multiplicating chickens (serve as chained sentinels instead of cats in my forts) and all.
I never seem to find an embark in relatively peaceful environment, flat terrain (or nearly), river, and a magma pipe not too far down, but still a lot of place without caverns.
For all except magma, I like your embarks a lot, the 25 layers minimum before the first cave really help to get a good basic layout before possibly having to confront the beasts bellow.
Also, I didn't manage to set my marksdwarves to train at archery range, even using the old trick of multiple separate ranges, they just wouldn't use them at all, even if Toady said it should be fixed with 34.03, did anyone manage to use them at all, am I the one not understanding their usage?
EDIT:
Reloaded the save from just before the zombies attack, and even while I managed to save my military, I still have the strange "bug" with the ranged dwarves:
They shot one or two zombies, apparently a dwarf one, didn't kill him, and stopped firing for no apparent reason.
There are zombies on their line of sight, merely 5 squares away, no fortifications, they are on top on a wall. They do have ammunitions, rocktip ones if it has anything to do with the matter.
Upon asking them to kill the targets, they drop their ammo on the spot and complain about not having a path for a fist fight.
Seriously? the fully metal geared didn't stand a chance, yet they want to try teir luck without real armours, and with no contact weapons.
They used to fire all they could and then complain, not reloading.
Also, civilians do get scared when seeing the zombies, so it's not a weird "semi ally" bug.
If it happens to anyone else, I would love to know why they won't target them, I made a copy of the save while having the zombies "trapped" in my airlock entrance in the fort, sadly this fort has only one path for the caravan, and it is trapped just a bridge farther (or closer to my fort).
I can post my save if you think it can help with understanding the problem.