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[Alkyon]

I've been having trouble with my dwarfs.  I've been bouncing between super-effective miners/militia and completely ineffective militia.  No happy, or at least grudgingly accepted, median.  Lately I've been trying to set up in the caverns, digging down until I've got me a nice, muddy, open space to start work, and then set up.  The problem with this?  The creatures in the first cave often upset my worker bee dwarfs.  I've figured out how to turn my wood cutters and miners into a make-shift militia, and it works...right up to the point that everyone forgets their weapons.

Latest fort: 
Start with Vultures harassing my wagon and I don't want them to steal my food, so I make my woodcutter/carpenter and woodcutter/engineer axemen (enlist and set weapon to "Battle axe" and set them to "KILL VULTURE", killing a couple with no trouble and scattering the rest.  My manager is set to butchering and my miners dig until they find the first cavern.  I find some trogs in the cavern, so add my two miners to the militia group (setting their weapon to picks).  The first of the two trogs I found is cut down in no time while the other gets away.  My dwarfs go and have a victory drink while I set up the farms.  They sit there, just drinking, while I set a kill order and one of my farmers runs around screaming.  Ignoring the nearby vultures while they're at it (luckily my cave pig, a modified tameable subterannean pig I've added that has a shell, the females are also trainable and milkable, is eating vulture for breakfast).

Anyways, Dwarfs go about their business, chug-a-lug, and finally go downstairs to deal with the Trogs...and forget their weapons.  What should have been an outright slaughter is now a wrestling match that my dwarfs are losing.  Why does this keep happening to me?  This has to be the third start-up fort I've lost due to military laying down their weapons and trying to suplex the enemies since 31.04 came out!  Forth fort in total if you include the mature fort that I lost to a goblin ambush when the militia wanted to go boxing!

[Black_Legion]

I don't have the exact details but I believe one fix is to disband the squad (or kick the weaponless dwarfs out of the squad) and wait a few minutes. After that reenlist them and see if they pick up a weapon. If they don't repeat until they do or you lose patience and pick another dwarf. I can't find the thread where this solution was posted but I do remember this method being mentioned as a fix.

*Also I have to say those dwarven pigs are quite the addition to a fortress, you could say they've saved my bacon several times already.

[Raviaric]

Soak the weapons in booze, it'll help your dwarves find them. Just make sure they don't cut their tongues on the blades.