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[Oaktree]

Not hard to do with time and equipment.

Like commented earlier you can armor your initial experienced dwarves and use them for primary defense while you wait for migrants and other draftees to train up and be added to the squads.  Or be lucky and have experienced combat fighters migrate in.  Have a cadre of trained personnel keep the fort running, and the rest can split time between fortress work (hauling and projects) and military training.

As your equipment stocks grow you can earmark more squads for active duty and they then get experience patrolling and fighting.  Soon enough you have the capability to start hunting down enemy siege squads and put the hurt on them directly.

My current fort's military is pretty experienced:
115 Dwarves in full steel armor (serving in a squad that trains 11 months of 12, of 8 of 12)
20 Axe (18 of Level 12+)
 9 Mace (4 of Level 12+)
 7 Hammer (7 of Level 20)
 3 Spear (3 of Level 20)
10 Sword (7 of Level 12+)
 8 Pick (15+ level in Mining, cross-trained in Axe to Level 7-8 mainly to get dodge, Armor User, and Shield Use trained)
58 Crossbow (34 Level 12+ and a lot at Level 10-11; and many of these troops are cross-trained or cross-training in Hammer)

39 Dwarves in light armor (cap, shield, leather armor, weapon)
This is melee reservists in training with axe, sword, spear, or hammer.  Currently twelve of them are "lord" level and need to be promoted to a squad with full armor.

55 Dwarves in light armor (cap, leather, shield, weapon - usually xbow)
This is cadre tasked with fortress industry, food growing, etc.  Wide range of combat skills from practically none to Level 8-12 in Xbow or a melee weapon).  Just about every child that has made it to adulthood in the fortress is currently working in this sector doing scut work.

The fortress is in its 18th year and has seen off 23 sieges at this point.  Plus the occasional hand-to-hand with a few forgotten beasts and demons.  In addition the fort got experienced dwarves early on due to two previous forts being run for a decade or so with the same dwarf civilization.

[birdy51]

It might work pretty well. I say, convert the main dining room into an active danger room, and then commit one dwarf to pulling the lever for a month. Repeat every third month, and you might have a fairly effective force after a while.

The downside, you also won't have any cats anymore. McFluffins doesn't like training spears.

[Bigheaded]

What if you don't even bother with half of the industries?

Keep it to as few as physically possible
so for me i could imagine:
1. food production
2. cooking (i'd recommend it for happy dwarves)
3. armor/weapons production (clothes needed too?)
4. Carpenter (one is all you need, for beds mainly)
5. Stone craft (would probably be on same dwarf as carpenter)
6. 1-2 miners.
7. Mason
8. Engraver?! can probably be skipped.

possibly as few as 7 dwarves needed.

I loved the idea of having some form of "mercenary" style fort, as in imagine 7 mercenaries with weapon skills just plonking down and decide to just live there.
Would make me think:
Above ground
Raid caravans (all? maybe not dwarf?)
small houses.
Very few industries

yet to try it, but can't see why it wouldn't work.

[Loud Whispers]

What if you don't even bother with half of the industries?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Keep it to as few as physically possible
so for me i could imagine:
1. food production
2. cooking (i'd recommend it for happy dwarves)
3. armor/weapons production (clothes needed too?)
4. Carpenter (one is all you need, for beds mainly)
5. Stone craft (would probably be on same dwarf as carpenter)
6. 1-2 miners.
7. Mason
8. Engraver?! can probably be skipped.

possibly as few as 7 dwarves needed.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I loved the idea of having some form of "mercenary" style fort, as in imagine 7 mercenaries with weapon skills just plonking down and decide to just live there.
Would make me think:
Above ground
Raid caravans (all? maybe not dwarf?)
small houses.
Very few industries

yet to try it, but can't see why it wouldn't work.

My set up is as follows:

Starting 7 started with:

• Teaching skills (for training) x2
• Marksdwarf skills x2
• Metalworking (forge weapons, then let the skill rust) x1
• Carpentry (beds) x1
• Growing x2
• Herbalism x2
• Mining x2

After a few years industries added are:

• Textiles (cloth/dyeing make for great exports + armour supplements)
• Clothing (ditto)
• Metalworking and furnace operating (melting down imports and goblinite)
• Mechanics
• Engraving (speedy fortification carving!)
• One Dwarf catering to the minor industries like gem cutting or bee keeping.
• SOAP SOAP SOAP
• Hospital of death

It's rather simple really.
In the end you're confined mainly to masonry and farming. Makes sorting out migrants easy; turn on farming, masonry, add them to the military and that's done.

[Oaktree]

I usually turn on masonry, furnace op, weapon and armor smithing for my recruits along with some hauling tasks.  (And maybe mechanics if I am building a lot of traps).

They build walls and smelt stuff.  And hopefully have dabbling armor or weapon smith in case they get chosen for a mood.  Mainly from making bolts and shields since quality for those items is not really important.

[Rokdog]

How many of you who have replied in this thread who have had successful armies practice armor layering? I just learned about it, and it's a real pain and makes gearing my soldiers up take 2-3x longer, and I don't have enough experience yet to tell if it's worth it. Is it just assumed that everyone knows about armor layering and does it? Are most of you just using default templates or some variation of them?

I'm on my 3rd or 4th 100+ pop fortress now, and I still feel like I'm doing something fundamentally wrong with soldiers and combat, but with all the randomness it's hard to pin down what it is. I haven't been able to get full steel in any game yet due to the lack of flux and trading for it is slow. My squads are in full layered iron+leather for the most part with a sprinkling of steel weapons. Doing "okay" in my current game but I still feel like I have a lot of casualties and I'm training wrong.

The only philosophy I've seen on training is to have small squads of 3, with 2/3 training all the time so that they spar or do more individual combat drills to avoid demonstrations which are somewhat buggy and slow right now supposedly. Is this also what everyone else is doing? How are you going about training?

Sorry for the random, rambly questions. Loving this game and I'm past the basics, just hard to figure out where to go from here. I guess I have months of figuring this out on my own to look forward to as well

[AutomataKittay]

How many of you who have replied in this thread who have had successful armies practice armor layering? I just learned about it, and it's a real pain and makes gearing my soldiers up take 2-3x longer, and I don't have enough experience yet to tell if it's worth it. Is it just assumed that everyone knows about armor layering and does it? Are most of you just using default templates or some variation of them?

I'm on my 3rd or 4th 100+ pop fortress now, and I still feel like I'm doing something fundamentally wrong with soldiers and combat, but with all the randomness it's hard to pin down what it is. I haven't been able to get full steel in any game yet due to the lack of flux and trading for it is slow. My squads are in full layered iron+leather for the most part with a sprinkling of steel weapons. Doing "okay" in my current game but I still feel like I have a lot of casualties and I'm training wrong.

The only philosophy I've seen on training is to have small squads of 3, with 2/3 training all the time so that they spar or do more individual combat drills to avoid demonstrations which are somewhat buggy and slow right now supposedly. Is this also what everyone else is doing? How are you going about training?

Sorry for the random, rambly questions. Loving this game and I'm past the basics, just hard to figure out where to go from here. I guess I have months of figuring this out on my own to look forward to as well

I used to do a bit of armor layering, though it's more leftover practice from 31.xx, I have armor with replace clothing and, for example cloak, breastplate, chainmaille, robe and dress for body. It don't really works much better than just breastplate and chainmaille, but in older version ( like 34.09 ) it'll keep dwarves happier and give a small chance of deflecting stuffs. Only issues I've had with boots and socks not being allocated properly but that's easily fixed with assignment and having socks set after assigning boots.

Multiple maille and cloaks don't really give extra noticible protection ( last I saw research done on such thing, might be out of date now! ) over having just one of those.

My military's pretty much just mostly shields and crossbow for everyone, it works perfectly well against anything organic and that bleeds

[Loud Whispers]

How many of you who have replied in this thread who have had successful armies practice armor layering? I just learned about it, and it's a real pain and makes gearing my soldiers up take 2-3x longer, and I don't have enough experience yet to tell if it's worth it. Is it just assumed that everyone knows about armor layering and does it? Are most of you just using default templates or some variation of them?

I just tell my Dwarves to wear their armour over their clothing; they keep most of it on whilst off duty. In any regards, keep 1/2 - 2/3 of your Fort training at any time and you've got a hefty number of Dwarves already fully geared.

[Oaktree]

I basically go with two "uniforms" - civilian and military.  Put it on "replace clothing" and am careful about assigning dwarves to squads until after I have accumulated enough clothing, armor, and weapons for the squad to use.  And I have given up on messing with socks.

In an iron/steel poor fortress I might split the military uniform into a "alpha" set with full steel and a "beta" set with any metal armor.  Reserve formations use the "beta" uniform since it's not as good. 

Civilian - Metal Cap, cloth hood, tunic, cloak, mittens, trousers, low boots

Military - Helm, Mail Shirt, Breastplate, Gauntlets, Greaves, Metal low boots, Cloth hood, tunic, cloak, mittens, trousers.

Using high boots gives some overlap cover the legs with the gauntlets.

And I fully armor my marksdwarves.  Yes, it might slow them down, but they also might need to deploy outside the fortifications in a pinch and I don't want to worry about having to suddenly issue more equipment or finding a marksdwarf squad that is fully equipped.

Per the extra layering I have not seen a lot of cases where it helps that much compared to the extra weight.  Though some of the recent research in the "efficiency of bolts" thread indicates that for receiving bolt fire double chain mail might be better than chain mail and breastplate.

[Sutremaine]

How many of you who have replied in this thread who have had successful armies practice armor layering? I just learned about it, and it's a real pain and makes gearing my soldiers up take 2-3x longer, and I don't have enough experience yet to tell if it's worth it. Is it just assumed that everyone knows about armor layering and does it?

I layer armour and clothing, but not metal. It feels kind of exploity, plus if your dwarves don't have enough Armour skill they'll be slowed down immensely by the extra mail. Usual uniform is:

Weapon: Edged steel
Shield: Initially wood (only because leather isn't a selectable shield material), copper once their Armour skill rises
Head: best possible metal helm, hood
Upper body: bronze or better mail shirt, dress, cloak, leather armour
Lower body: bronze or better leggings, trousers
Feet: metal high boots
Hands: metal gauntlets, mittens

Anything without a material specified is leather, and the uniform is set to 'replace clothing' as soon as all the items are claimed. Dwarves are dumb about foot coverings and there are no clothing items for the feet that are [COVER] layer, so it's boots only. I think cloaks and dresses go down that far as well. As time goes on I start getting lazy about replacing anything but cloaks and hoods, but by then they don't need every scrap of protection.

Civilians get a bone crossbow, bone bolts, and a wooden shield. Later on they may get leather armour, and a helm and a mail shirt would probably cut down on fatalities without slowing them down. I also like to collect daggers from the kobolds.

[Drazinononda]

It feels kind of exploity, plus if your dwarves don't have enough Armour skill they'll be slowed down immensely by the extra mail.

I.E. it isn't really all that exploity. Armor layering as it exists in DF is fairly consistent with real life: it does offer more protection to the covered areas, at the cost of requiring more material and the soldiers lugging around more weight.

[Rokdog]

Shield: Initially wood (only because leather isn't a selectable shield material)

Not to nitpick, but I guess you didn't know: Leather can be used for shields. In the Leatherworks, near the bottom if you scroll all the way down or reverse-scroll up, it's there. You can also queue up jobs for leather shields in through the Manager interface. Thanks for the replies about layering.

EDIT: To get this thread back on topic, I had an idea:

This... is... GIRDERGROOVES!

1) After your fort's basics are setup (farms and minimal workshops), throw every dwarf into military training (6 of 7 so someone can keep food and booze going) until the first migrant wave shows up.

2) Assess all of your dwarfs at this point, migrant wave and original 7 both.  Anyone with military prowess gets the nickname 'Spartan', everyone else gets the nickname 'Slave'.

3) Spartans train non-stop, live in a separate burrow, have personal grand bedrooms, and their own legendary dining hall sustained by the Slaves, which is the only contact the Spartans and Slaves have.

4) The slaves have minimal everything, living in a giant dorm and toiling all day for the Spartans.

5) Slaves have their own militia, clad in leather and armed with bone, wood, copper or bronze. Only Spartans touch iron or steel.

6) As Slaves train, if one begins to show promise and stand out from its peers, they may ascend to Spartan-hood.

If I do this, and I think I definitely will, I'll try to write it up somewhere around here.

[Sutremaine]

Shield: Initially wood (only because leather isn't a selectable shield material)

Not to nitpick, but I guess you didn't know: Leather can be used for shields.

But once you've made the shields, you can't select them as part of a uniform. Your options are any material (the only category leather falls under), any wood, any metal, and then each individual type of wood and metal. Shield weight matters if the dwarf holding is is slow or weak and carrying a fat stack of copper or silver bolts, and if all I want is an arrow-blocker then I'd rather the dwarf use masterwork wood or leather than base-quality iron from goblin invaders.

I use leather shields on embark sometimes. I'm more likely to embark with a Proficient Leatherworker and 50 turkeys than a Proficient Carpenter and 50 logs and right at the start, the shields you make or bring will be the only ones available.

[Rokdog]

Hm, strange, but what you're saying is consistent with what I'm experiencing. I used the "Play Now!" option (no shields on embark), and have ONLY crafted Leather Shields. My uniform has the shield set to any material, so the only shields equipped are the leather ones. I guess trading off/atomizing any unwanted shields is one way to get dwarfs to use leather shields, but that sucks. You could also force your dwarfs to use the shield by picking a specific shield, but again, ew. I see what you're saying now how you can't make it part of the actual uniform template. Seems like an obvious oversight to have left out leather from the materials list eh?

[Loud Whispers]

This... is... GIRDERGROOVES!

1) After your fort's basics are setup (farms and minimal workshops), throw every dwarf into military training (6 of 7 so someone can keep food and booze going) until the first migrant wave shows up.

2) Assess all of your dwarfs at this point, migrant wave and original 7 both.  Anyone with military prowess gets the nickname 'Spartan', everyone else gets the nickname 'Slave'. Helots.

Ftfy.