Ya, it takes usually between a week and a month to understand the game enough to not die horribly from starvation or thirst. But for entertainment value, it just can't be beat.
Here's a visualizer image of one of my most ambitious forts, complete with 3 pyramids, a somewhat complete colloseum (right side) and a stargate tribute!

I had quite a bit of fun with that map; I knew I was going to be building tons of stuff, so I turned the homeotherm value of orcs* in the raw files up to 20,000. This meant as soon as they entered the map, they spontaneously all combusted, starting mapwide fires. The goblins, on the other hand, were combatted by my uber-legendary axedwarf. She had around 400 kills by the time I took this shot, and I had so much fun watching the goblins flying through the air before exploding against a tree that I deforested the area around the entrance where she stood. This allowed the goblins to fly even farther before exploding against a tree! 
IIRC, there was also a medium-sized tantrum spiral a few years into it which brought my population back down from 70 to 10.