dang you did it I just max Savageness and getting Cave Dragons from Goblins is pretty reliable

...My own testing with this mod doesn't support that though. It seems more like the simulated-combats heavily favour equipment and skills over size and attributes (as you say).

would modifying dragon's scales (and claws) to have material properties analogous to one of the lesser weapons-grade metals work as a means of adding additional survivability to dragons (without making them excessively powerful)? right now they are using the same material for their scales as fish, so it should be a big improvement.

You can collapse constructed walls/floors to knock-out creatures the same as dug ones. You can test out your design by pasturing a bunch of domestic animals and triggering the collapse. Here is an example: https://ibb.co/album/hckcPx?sort=name_asc

So I can't really cave anything in on my dragon because my for T is mostly above ground lol

If I create a trap hall and have a dwarf beat the crap out of the dragon could they potentially knock it out and trap it that way?

You can remove [TRAPAVOID] from creature_dragon.txt to remove this. I did not add any of the tags that make creatures break out of cages, so that should be all you need.

Note that you can still catch trap-avoiders in cages, it is just much harder. You just have to knock them over to do it. You can do this by causing a small collapse nearby, though getting the timing right can be hard. If you can manage to get beast-webs on a trap, that will work too (same as how you catch megabeasts).

It might be a good idea for me to post a tutorial video on how to catch trap-avoiders.

Theres any way of editing the dragon raws, to make it donr have trapavoid ( i havent read that this mod makes so that dragons cant be trapped, but i want to have some tamed dragons)

Adding intelligence/equipment to dragons would probably help them survive better, but it does change the flavor of the creature quite a lot, which I was trying not to do.

Anecdotally, on the DF forums I had always heard that the reason dragons specifically tend to die so quickly is that they grew *very* slowly (which I have corrected). My own testing with this mod doesn't support that though. It seems more like the simulated-combats heavily favour equipment and skills over size and attributes (as you say).

I am still experimenting with world-generations and may have to do some statistical analysis to determine how strong the effect of something like growth-rate is on worldgen combats.

maybe change the body type to [BODY:QUADRUPED_NECK_FRONT_GRASP:TAIL:2EYES:NOSE:2LUNGS:HEART:GUTS:ORGANS:THROAT:NECK:SPINE:BRAIN:SKULL:4TOES_FQ_REG:4TOES_RQ_REG:MOUTH:TONGUE:GENERIC_TEETH_WITH_LARGE_EYE_TEETH:RIBCAGE]

and add these tags
[EQUIPS]
[INTELLIGENT]

so they may hold weapons in their front hands.
i had a dragon get a Great steel axe during world gen and get a kill count of 78

Nice quality! I have to combine it with my personal mode. I wanted to improve the dragons, but my drawing skill was sucks.