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[cavedog]

I've always done a professional standing army. Always. And that got boring in DF2015. So I'm going to set up a system in my next fort where everybody is drafted and given a minimum level of training (I don't want them to be Greek demigods or anything, but I need them to at least be capable of going 1-v-1 with a goblin and have a 50/50 shot of not dying). So I've got some questions:

1. What is a good "target" skill level for weapon/armor/dodge/shield/discipline to produce a dwarf that won't melt into a pool of blood and/or tears at the sight of combat?

2. Once they reach that target, how many weeks per year do they have to train to shake off the rust and maintain their competence?

3. Is any particular weapon better/worse for this type of "mass levy"-type of military?

4. Aside from miners, a lumberjack, and maybe full-time hunters, is there any type of profession/personality that isn't suited to part-time militia duty?

5. Any other stuff I'm probably not thinking of?

Thanks!

[darkflagrance]

You should learn how to manipulate the "schedules" section of the military screen. You'd want to put every dwarf into a squad, then set all squads to active on the (a)lerts screen. Press s to get to the months during which each of your current squads trains. You'd want to use the arrow keys and 'x' to set most of the months for each squad to "no scheduled order" leaving about three-six or so in a block for each squad. You'd want to stagger them so that each month some squads are inactive and some training.

With that you can have dwarves train for a month or a few, then go back to civilian life each year, with no micro needed from you beyond initial set-up. You could probably have a quarter of your fort train each season (every three months), rotating a to different quarter each season change, and get them to a decent skill level if each squad is captained by an experienced veteran (proficient at least?).

Make sure that each militia member wears full armor, has a barracks they train at, and is ordered to wear armor even off duty. This should ensure that a lone civilian caught off guard by a squad might be able to take a couple of them out, or even survive.

There's no need to fiddle with the game to get a minimum skill level. The set-up described above should get decent soldiers within a year or two.

Axes are the best normal weapon against gobbos. Picks are great too. Most dwarves can do this; some pansy dwarves will suffer stress, but they would suffer stress by existing regardless, and would naturally have culled themselves.

[King Kitteh]

I know it's not really related to making a whole fort army. But if you just want to protect some civilians, assign some war animals to them.

If you get war tigers or something then they'll be able to escape with time to spare, and who knows the the tiger might even kill the goblin.

[cavedog]

I know it's not really related to making a whole fort army. But if you just want to protect some civilians, assign some war animals to them.

If you get war tigers or something then they'll be able to escape with time to spare, and who knows the the tiger might even kill the goblin.

Its more of a "I want to try playing a different way" thing at the moment. Though maybe a goal of combining a fort-wide militia with exotic war-pets is something to try...

[Loci]

Due to a known bug, military uniforms conflict with Mining, Woodcutting, and Hunting labors. Either exclude those dwarves from service, disable the problematic labors, or accept that those dwarves will never be properly equipped.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

I switch training squads manually. For exmaple, I have 10 squads, 4 of them are formal soldiers who are always training, 2 squads of them are essential workers who would work in turns, the rest of them are mixed workers and haulers, and I will recruit all nobles in one squad just in case (because manager and bookkeeper need to be in civilian mode when needed).

When I want a squad to work, I deactive them, and remove the squad from the barrack settings. Don't worry about skill rusting, they can catch up quickly in their training seasons.

PS: I don't use hunters and woodcutter can be retired when I have enough logs. That leaves only miners I need to micro manage.

[Goatmaan]

I simply make picks/axes. Enable woodcutting/mining on them, designate areas to give them skill.
Legendary hunters are put into marksdwarf squads, replaced by rookie hunters.
I don't get the strength/agility gains this way, but so what, I've got dwarfs.
Nothing like a *steel pick* to the head, or "some critter bit" sailing of in an arc

  Goatmaan

[Skullsploder]

Crossbows are the best militia weapon, and battleaxes are second best. Best of all is to give your dwarves both, with the crossbows being copper and the axes iron, bronze or steel so as to be more valuable. Also assign the axes first in the uniform. This should ensure that they use the axes in melee most of the time while still using crossbows constantly at range in their off hand. In terms of armour, wood, leather, or copper shields are vital and priority for metal armour goes helm>mail shirt>gauntlets>boots>greaves>breastplates.

Set up the barracks to overlook a zombie pit or similar so that they will fire bolts while training melee and thus train archery as well. Also assign a serious military veteran axedwarf as the squad leader to ensure that axe training takes priority over hammer (crossbow) training.

Following all these steps will get you a mob of axe wielding militiadwarves who advance with a crippling hail of crossbow bolts, and requires little to no micromanagement once set up.

Also they should generally not try to charge into melee when not on duty, from my observations. Instead they tend to remain stationery upon sighting an enemy and loose bolts until their quiver is empty or the enemy move out of range. They will then either charge or go about their business depending on whether they can see the enemy or not.

Also the reason for battleaxes is that they are effective against every enemy that a dwarf might have to face. A spear or pick or hammer has problems with larger creatures, amd a sword is less effective than an axe in lopping off giant limbs.

I recommend having two squads made up of an identical mix of professions (eg 2 squads each with 2 masons, 1 carpenter, 3 haulers, 1 weaponsmith, and 3 farmers) and have each train half the year, to ensure that professions are always available. Additionally it's very useful to have low-value workers in one squad and high-value workers in another, so that when scrambling squads to deal with an invasion you can have the more valuable dwarves further from danger.

[Sanctume]

1. Create dummy squads / reserved squad positions for the real army.

Why? it's easier to manage regular army than civilian army. 
For a population of 120, do I want all my civilians in the regular army? or say perhaps 2/3 of them = 80, or maybe even 100 army, 20 civilians/nobles? 
Why is this an issue?  It's when I press "s" to order a squad, the first 10 squads from a to j are selected.
I find it convenient to have the first 5 or 6 are my melee army, then 7 to 10 crossbows, and the civilians will be the 11th+ army.
Also, equipment upgrades availability trickle via squad position from 1.  I want my first batch of candy armors and weapons to go to the real army first.

2. Schedule. 

Winter season is a good time to stop farming, brewing, chopping trees, gathering herbs, hunting, and even mining. 
Set schedule for the civilian squads to train on the last 3 months of the year. 
If you use DTherapist, you can utilize the "custom professions".  Make some for your civilians, and make one for military in training.  It would then be simple to sort by squad and set toggle professions when the game pauses with "Winter has arrived."

3. Perfectionist trap

I often find myself delaying of making the civilian squads to start training because I am waiting for weapons or armor.  I learned that I should not wait on equipment because they can still learn about other aspects of fighting: dodger, wrestling, kicking, observer, discipline.

4. Min/Max trap

Oh there are different ways to go about training a dwarf.  Sure I can start with no weapons and no armor and start training in a barracks.  But some skill progress are worth noting. 

A rookie equipped with shield + armor, the block skill will gain more and leave behind armor user.  So it is worth considering to delay giving shield so that armor user skill go up faster.  The benefits of high armor user is wearing heavier armor such as copper has little effect for a legendary armor user in terms of movement and number of attacks (well, and weapon skills for number of attacks).

Other than that, not exact science, but it seems that having higher weapon skill increases the likelihood to sparring.  Sparring is the goal to increase the speed of level up of skills via training.  So it is worth giving them even wooden training weapons for those civilian squads.

[Khalari]

Just FYI, I did not read all posts so maybe someone's already said this.

What you can do, which works very nicely is set up all civilians in squads with no weapons or armor. Set squads' schedule to Train one month out of every year (not all at once or you'll have a month of no progress LOL).

After a couple of years your main civilian mass should have respectable Fighter, Dodger, Discipline, Wrestler, etc skill levels. Gives them time to survive until your proper army shows up, as well as being extremely low maintenance.

Just remember you can't have Miners and Wood Cutters in squads.

[Sanctume]

The the miners, wood cutters, and hunters are ok in squads set with "no uniform."  They will need separate work tool (pick, axe, bow) from military tool (pick, axe, bow)

[Zac]

I did something similar to what Sanctume explained in one of my fort (exept for ordering the squads, that's a pretty neat idea)

I had every male dwarf required to serve in the militia (I included females to the consription later but only in ranged unit, because when you send all your population to battle, managing mothers and their babies become a real issue) plus the nobles and a dozen hand chosen dwarven knights and rangers serving permanently as royal guards and town guards.

The standard equipement for the militia was iron chainmail, iron helm and leather everywhere else with a steel spear and a wooden shield for the melee units and whatever melee weapon was availlable and a crossbow for the ranged ones. I was a bit worried with that set up at first but didn't had the ressources to give them better gears at that time. Turned out to not be so bad, the metal armor protecting all the vital parts avoided a lot of casualties and the few deaths, injuries and lost limbs made the fights overall funnier.
The spear was mostly for roleplaying reasons since it was the weapon used by every single civilian levy in melee accross the ages, I guess maces or battleaxes would be better. They definitively need a shield however, since they rarely are good enough dodger and will have a relatively poor armour it's hard to keep them alive without.

The training was also in winter for most of them, but only for two month with an old crippled grumpy legendary veteran to oversee their training and initiate sparing.