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[Funtimes]

Obviously, you haven't seen Zorro. Besides, they sure are lethal to all those poor Dwarven Babies.

- Each trap should only count as one hit blocked (it takes ~equal skill to block one spear with a shield than to block 10 simultaneous spears coming from the same direction).

I like to imagine them coming from every direction, it explains a lot more. No reason why you can't have them coming up in a circle to truly nutshot any poor dwarf, or if in a 1z room then why aren't any coming down from above? It seems so strange to think we have quantum mechanics but can only make spikes bob up and down like a paper bag in a breeze.

[Soapalope]

The only ratio of military to civilian you should have in DF:
1:0

[krenshala]

danger room makes training too easy, with a slight trade off of broken fingers.
and then current training mechanism is bugged, it's so hard to get dwarfs spar and training quickly, even with a great teacher with great skills.

Actually, its quite easy to get dwarves to spar.  All it requires is to tweak the number required for training to take place.

If you have a 10 dwarf squad, and have it set to require 10 dwarves for training, then one dwarf decides he needs a nap, or food, or water, then all TEN have to wait until they are all there and ready.  Of course, as soon as that one returns someone else decides he's hungry ... and they never train.

However, if you drop the trianing requirement to four dwarves, then you can have six slacking off and still have four doing sparring or demonstrations.  In fact, I once had four sparring, while the remaining six were paired off doing different demonstrations (dodging, wresting, and something else that I can't remember off hand) ... all because I reduced the training number from 10 to 4.

In my current fort, I set the minimum to 2.  When I had just the militia commander, she did individual drill.  As soon as the second member was drafted, sparring (wrestling) immediately commenced.  As soon as I assigned them training spears and shields, they immediately started using them.  Its been under six months, and one of my four military dwarves has already reached level 1 speardwarf from zero exp, another has level 1 shield user with the other three about to get it, and all of them having about 300xp in dodging/kicking/wrestling/biting/etc ... all from six months or less of sparring, no danger room, from zero xp in all military skills for all of them.  (If only I'd gotten a military dwarf in one of my migrant waves ).

[SenorOcho]

I keep a dedicated civilian force of whatever is required to maintain the life of the fortress (farmers, crafters, etc).  Anyone without the skill to contribute directly to that is drafted into the military.  Generally this amounts to very few soldiers early on as I need all the haulers and oddjobbers I can get, and a very massive military later.

As for Males:Females, I segregate them, since each of my squads has its own uniform.  However, the crossbow militia (2 squads of 10) is always open to anyone. 

[snelg]

Usually having around 20 civilians, to cover most professions. Rest goes in the military to keep them from idling unless they're really useful for something else.

[xcrissxcrossx]

I have about 100 population and about 20 military dwarves, but I also don't really know anything about military.

[Marshall Burns]

danger room makes training too easy, with a slight trade off of broken fingers.
and then current training mechanism is bugged, it's so hard to get dwarfs spar and training quickly, even with a great teacher with great skills.

Are you making sure that they're not only good at teaching but also at organizing? Because they use the Organizer skill when they're preparing the demonstrations; the better they are, the faster they get prepared. Meaning that the dwarves spend more time watching the demonstrations and less time waiting for them. You can train up the Organizer skill by having your teachers do some time as the manager.