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[Ashery]

Equipment-wise, start with helms, shields and breastplates (I'd say in that order; it's debatable that I'm correct) and then move on to the other stuff.

I'm currently under the impression that a mail shirt is better than a breastplate if you're giving your dwarves a minimal loadout. They're cheaper, offer a greater area of coverage, and protect better against projectiles.

I could, of course, be mistaken, as I'm still getting up to speed on the current version.

[TruePikachu]

You know you can use both mail shirts AND breastplates...

EDIT: Ah, minimal loadout

[C27]

They protect differently - mail armors do nothing against impact attacks, but provide extra protection against edged ones. The same deal goes for greaves for extra leg protection over the mail shirt on the upper legs and high boots on the lower legs.

[Ashery]

They protect differently - mail armors do nothing against impact attacks, but provide extra protection against edged ones. The same deal goes for greaves for extra leg protection over the mail shirt on the upper legs and high boots on the lower legs.

Considering the disproportionate amount of time I've been spending in the current range damage thread, I'm not surprised that my current impression is biased towards bolt/arrow defense, heh.

Do you literally mean nothing in the case of mail vs blunt, though?

[goblolo]

1. You didn't have any helmets. Almost every headshot woud be lethal. Look at stoopid gobbos: they wear breastplates and helmets and feel good!
2. You had hammerdwarves. They are too slow at killing enemies. They do the best agains demons and colossals, but not against gobbos. Use spears/swords instead.
3. You had ~5 half-armored dwarves with quite low skill vs. 4 gobbos. They woud be dead in any way. You said population was about 100 beards. Maybe your production is not as efficient as it could be, but you should have at least 40 spare dwarves out of first 100! In my current aboveground fort I run all the industries I need with ~35 dwarves. The rest goes to military.
4. I was already said, use marksdwarves as a support. Research has been done, they have a good chance of crippling opponent with the first shot while using even wooden ammo. Archery targets are waste. Train them on boars/keas. Bonus for food/leather/bones!!

[Finn]

I don't think you mentioned how the gobbos were armed.  If they were Lashers that would go a long way to explaining what happened.  The modest mod will debug the whips for you.

[Sutremaine]

Another thing you can consider is having all your dwarves in the militia (except hunters and woodcutters, causes unifrom conflicts), but inactive.  Give them a corssbow, bolts, a metal helmet, and maybe armor if you want (though this will slow down untrained dwarves), and set them to wear their kit while off-duty.

Depends what you give them. Assuming average stats, metal helms and metal mail on a dwarf with only leather, wood or bone equipment otherwise is fine, and you may be able to squeeze in a pair of chain leggings (though this will slow them down if they're hauling, as they'll be further over the weight limit). 25 steel bolts weigh 29L, so if you're using those then you'll only be able to fit a metal helm and maybe a metal mail shirt on the stronger or faster dwarves. It's possible for a dwarf to have more than 25 bolts, as if they have 24 bolts or fewer and are assigned more, then they'll go looking for a stack. And that stack may be of 25 steel bolts.

[javierpwn]

The only downside using ranged units is Vomit, Vomit everywhere, everything tends to vomit due to a bolt perforating their guts

[mscantrell]

Consider this very effective early game tactic: Danger rooms.

Ok, just kidding.

Consider this: picks are arguably the best domestic weapon.
Pick use relies on the Mining skill.
Mining is trainable separately from military setup. In fact, it's trainable quickly by doing something you'd probably like to do anyway, namely, dig out soil layers for tree farms.
So. Make any Quick To Heal dwarves miners, and when Legendary, draft to a pick-armed squad.

This is serious killing power achievable without a danger room within a year.

[Damiac]

Were your uniforms set to "Replace clothing"?  If not, they probably weren't even wearing any armor.  As people have said, helmets are the most important piece of armor.
You probably would have had better luck with axes, although if all you have is coppper, maybe not...  As always, crossbows do quite well, but you already seem to know that.

If your military was active, with training scheduled, they should have gotten some skill.  It is not at all true that their skills degrade faster than going up when training.  But it is fairly slow.  I have had better luck with 5 seperate "Train minimum 2" orders instead of the default "Train minimum 10" order, since it seems to lead to more sparring.  None of this is as effective as danger rooms, but they're pretty exploity.

5 barely trained, under armored hammerdwarves vs 4 goblins is not a good matchup.  I'm suprised your entire population couldn't make a dent in them though.

[Set_Beadra]

Alright, this has been quite helpful thank you for the responses.
 

I don't think you mentioned how the gobbos were armed.  If they were Lashers that would go a long way to explaining what happened.  The modest mod will debug the whips for you.

They were goblin spearmen and pikemen. Outside of that I don't know what they had equipped.

I reclaimed the fortress to try again, immediately upon entering (not sure if this is spoilery or not so let me know, I will put it in a spoiler for now.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

two of my dwarves were scared to death by the two children ghosts who had gone berserk and were killed by the military.

So it sure is starting out fun. =) I am still cleaning up the rediculous mess around and inside the fortress. Was working off of only 5 dwarves for quite awhile then 4 migrants showed up to help. So since I still have a lot of useful materials placed around I plan to trade off most of it when the dwarf caravan comes and try to get some useful metals since copper seems to be more worthless than I thought.

[Bloodyharbinger]

Bit of advice, when you come to reclaim, you might want to come prepared for war. It is like starting over but having all the value of the last fort. This means invaders will come much sooner then before and when you least want.

Also you have the problem of ghosts as you mentioned, meaning you will have to bury/slab all the dead. This of course takes time, which you may or may not have before the invasion begins again.

Lets not forget that all your old stuff is now scattered to the four corners which means having guys running all over to get things back in and organize. Which again, more time, plus when invaders to show up, who knows who will be outside picking up socks.

Overall, a reclaim can be all sorts of FUN.

[Sutremaine]

Lets not forget that all your old stuff is now scattered to the four corners which means having guys running all over to get things back in and organize. Which again, more time, plus when invaders to show up, who knows who will be outside picking up socks.

Maybe unforbid the map in sections, starting with the ones further from the fortress and waiting until each is clear before unforbidding another swathe of items. That way those last few socks will be close to the entrance instead of scattered all over the map.

Or, set up multiple stockpiles around the map for important binnable items (like armour and weapons), and let the dwarves collect everything into clusters of bins. Then you can either haul the bins inside, or take advantage of the building material lying around all over the place to throw together some tracks, or you could create an unpathable pit near each stockpile and dump everything down it with the intention of getting inside ASAP and then digging a route to each cache.

[tiresius]

I just want to add this happened to me just now.  I had 2 squads, 8 random melee dwarves and 8 marksdwarves.  When the seige came in 3rd year I was unprepared, without much metal and all leather armor.  About 12 gobbos with iron equip came in and slaughtered my army and everyone else.  Next I'm going to try out a bunch of suggestions here.  Thanks!

[Tirion]

In my experience, Hammerdwarves are the weakest of all melee soldiers in this version. If you want to use blunt attacks, use macedwarves, preferably with imported morningstars. Or maybe very big hammerdwarves with imported mauls?