First five-squad orc siege (third year autumn) was beaten off with no losses. I think that getting off to a slow start on the trade goods front has worked in my favour. It made the orcs stay away for the extra year I needed to get good military and defenses.
I have 15 weapon trap layers flanked by channels guarding our main gate, loaded with flint greatswords and green glass disks. If I add more I'll be using captured orc weapons. We have plenty of (iron swords), (mauls), (flails) et cetera, and we don't need much of it when we can make flint longswords.
I've equipped a couple of guys with morningstars for the fun of it. Faerie can't produce Mace/Hammer type weapons, so there's no way to make sparring equipment. To reflect this the Faerie Hammerman/Maceman professions are named "Avenger" and "Punisher", because they get their weapons off kills.
I've not noticed (DAMBLOCK-1) leading to much more sparring injuries. We have one spinal case who is training in bow. We do get a degree of superficial bruising.
The Orcs seem to be in a pattern of getting their leaders chewed up by the traps and then sitting there under bowfire until they run. Only our bow-armed Faerie have kills. Next time we should have enough training to take the fight to them.
Incidentally, Orcs die under bowfire just like anything else. It's like undead. They may take an extra hit, but they still die. In fact quite easily, because they're too dumb to move away.
I'm thinking that [IMPROVED_BOWS] might well have more effect than the wiki suggests. OK, we still get the total newbs that fire off a whole quiver to no result but more commonly, we get cases where a total newb goes out and kills a skeletal pike with one shot, or a cougar with two, or three wolves with five arrows.
Waiting on nobles to see how they work.