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[Mechatronic]

You don't need much metal really. Helm, mail shirt, gauntlets, greaves, boots and a shield, plus a crossbow. That's seven pieces of metal per dwarf.

[Nan]

Actually they don't really need any armor. Give them a metal helmet if you feel compassionate. Because they have no defensive skills they'll get torn apart by a competent melee enemy anyway - at least if you're stuck with copper armor. But if they are moderately well trained by shooting wildlife, then the enemy squads will get showered with so many bolts that none will really get close enough to attack... and you should have some properly trained melee dwarves to act as meat shields / executioners. I mainly only armor my marksdwarfs because my armorsmith needs to produce armorpieces anyway to become legendary. If you are going to give them metal armor, then helmets, gauntlets, high boots and mail shirts are the best investments.

[Garath]

dont forget greaves

I usually have shitloads of ore and bars, and give iron/steel helmet, gauntlet, breastplate, greaves and hig/low boot, sometimes I can't make high boots. Then copper/iron cap, mail shirt, leather hood, cloak, trousers and gloves and any sock. I know you can assign more items on for example head or body, but this is a fairly realistic set up as knights used it. That's 7 metal items, 4 leather and one "any". Especially after the first ambush or two, I have enough leather so I only have to make one or two pieces, and dog breeding helps to get a lot of leather and my militia happily wears troll fur socks

[Tirion]

Somehow, I never have too many migrants- with a population stabilising around 80 (after setting the cap to 40), of which 20-something are juveniles, I rarely ever have idlers.12 dedicated soldiers, legendary weaver making cloth from the output of 30+ tiles of fiber plants, legendary leatherworker turning out 120+ hoods and cloaks from imported leather each year, legendary clothiers making cloth bags or sewing leather image on repeat, 4 kitchens with prepare lavish meal/R, 5 querns with mill plants/R, 1 legendary dyer with Dye Cloth/R (orders: use dyed cloth), you get the idea... With ~10 farmers, milling, butchering and tanning enabled for every non-legendary (all hail Dwarf Therapist!) , and a meat industry in overdrive (if I don't slaughter 3 various speciessposions, they die of old age in droves come spring) plus the bonecarvers working non-stop... etc, etc, I really could do with more haulers.

I just don't understand how people can't make use of migrants.

[Owlbread]

If you wanted you could have every single one of them making stone mugs in their own personal workshops.

[Starver]

In addition I made hundreds of bolts, and they used them up for archery range, then charged goblins into melee and died.

1) Set bone/wooden bolts for training,
2) Make your archery range a "bolt recovery" one, with channels around its edges (only when you hit the target do you lose the bolt, and by the time they're doing that they're Ok for fighting in the wild),
3) Set up kill-zone overlooks at pinch-points, and send your archers there, to fire down on the enemy
3a) Setting up various drawbridges and things to utterly close the outside from the inside means nobody need ever go outside to fight (you can keep them open at all times there is no danger, or keep yourself isolationist permanently, but setting a viable route into your fort that passes, at the beginning, somewhere that hostiles can be spotted by a guard creature is a good idea if you're not actually sending units out to patrol or civvies out on jobs and into potential danger)
4) I like to get the archers trained in hammering, for when they do go into mêlée, but even when I don't, going in against softened up but unkillable-by-bolts enemy has generally turned out Ok.

But YMMV.

[nitus]

Personally, I don't believe there is such a thing as "useless migrants." I crank the max pop to 500.
 
There's no rule that says there's something wrong with having lots of idlers. An idle dwarf is a happy dwarf.
 
Unskilled migrants can fairly rapidly be trained in most professions, and are great for mass labor tasks like hauling, plant gathering, smoothing and engraving, building projects -- and of course a large militia.
 
Lately, as my fortress populations swell, I have been segregating the "elite" population from the "grunt" population. Lower quality quarters, less glorious labors, less defended, crappier food supply, etc.
 
 

[Urist Imiknorris]

I draft the vast majority of my migrants into the "Generic Worker" horde - masonry, architecture, and basically every skill that doesn't affect quality. They also all get wooden crossbows and bolts - when a siege or titan comes, the all-work-and-no-socializing worker horde are the first line of defense.

[Reudh]

If they have useless skills and high strength:

Military (melee).

Useless skills and low strength:

ARMY OF MASONS.

Though this inactive crossbow-hauler thing sounds useful. I reckon I could get by with bone bolts and bone crossbows.

[Yaotzin]

I draft the vast majority of my migrants into the "Generic Worker" horde - masonry, architecture, and basically every skill that doesn't affect quality. They also all get wooden crossbows and bolts - when a siege or titan comes, the all-work-and-no-socializing worker horde are the first line of defense.

Masonry and architecture have quality levels though? Do you just ignore the architecture side and force only legendary masons to work the shops?

[I am Leo]

Make squads of poorly trained, barely armed conscripts led by fully trained and equipped marksdwarf commisars.

[Nameless Archon]

I'm in the "no such thing" category, mostly.

All new arrivals are drafted into the "Hauler" corps. They handle butchering, tanning, fish cleaning, pump operation, block production and construction masonry, stone smoothing (but not engraving), herbalism, wood cutting, animal training, milking, shearing, and sand/clay collection. Some fiddling is needed to exclude them from "production" masonry shops and "production" glass furnaces, but not too much. I turn off smoothing once I get someone I designate for engraving, and switch haulers on when I need a massive smoothed area in a hurry.

Skilled migrants (Where 'skilled' means 'skill I need or want more of') are removed from the Hauler corps and assigned to their specialist duties. Very rarely is there overlap, except for 'farmer' type duties, which are handled by one class of worker (farm workers), and include the milling/brewing/farming tasks. Specialists do not haul. Haulers do not specialize.

Combat migrants (those designated for combat tasks) are haulers when off duty, and always carry their military equipment. All combat migrants are given a labor where they are greater than dabbling, to allow them not to get an uhappy thought for going off-duty. This is often Masonry, as block production NEVER ends.

With the changes to vampire migrants, I'm now going to be forced to implement a two-tier system for migrants, where the first tier are my initial 7 and any 'known clean' migrants. (I am assuming that Toady is excluding Vampires from the initial 7. If this is not true, then we've just added another "whoops, you're screwed re-embark" reason to the list. The starting seven would have been the starting 5 or 4 when they if this were not the case...) The second tier are recently arrived and 'suspect' migrants, who will be burrowed into a rude soil dormitory and produce wood, food and booze for use by themselves. I'm still working out how I'm going to handle making the 'suspect' migrants something more than just a drain on migrant influx rates, as previous fortresses have been very much about securing migrant labor to fill in for bulk processing needs early to get the fort up and running smoothly, and there's a potential issue with making sure a large migrant wave finds the 'suspect dwarves' larder properly stocked before they run out.

[Starver]

Just to note (although this isn't really the thread to dwell on the subject) that I'm considering a "Panopticon" layout for the future suspect immigrants to inhabit for the time that they're still considered 'incomers'.  But wondering if the risk of actually being seen would delay nefarious acts until after the individual responsible is provisionally cleared of wrong-doing.  But I'll have to see what the reality of the situation is, before I know how much and what sort of planning is needed towards this end.

[Yaotzin]

whoops wrong thread