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[Centigrade]

I am trying to come up with an optimised armour setup for my military, and I am not sure how best to do it. It is my understanding that adamantine is the best for everything except chain shirts, for which steel would be preferable, but I am not exactly certain why. I am also not sure about the material properties of cloth, leather, silk, and so on, so I am not sure what non-metal pieces I should be layering with the metal pieces. I am particularly curious about what effect clothes have on protection and speed when they are made of different materials.

I would be very appreciative if someone would post an optomised armour setup in proper item order, made of only native items so that they can be made of desired materials, and walk me through why specific things are better than others.

Thanks in advance.

[Matoro]

Wiki has maximum set of armor to best possible coverage:

Armor
1 x breastplate
3 x mail shirts
6 x cloaks

Legs
2 x trousers
1 x greaves

Helm
1 x helm
6 x hood

Gloves
1 x pairs of gauntlets
1 x pairs of mittens

Boots
1 x pairs of socks
1 x pairs of high boots

As you said, adamantine is the best armor metal for everything. I presonally haven't ever heard that steel would be better in mail shirts. For shields steel is better (since its heavier), but adamantine should be clearly superior as an armor metal. Steel is secondly best and then comes bronze-iron -combo. For cloth/leather, leather is always better. Normal clothing really doesen't offer much protection, but sometimes it stops light hits.

[Rince Wind]

i had trouble with dwarfes that were assigned hoods as well as helmets that they only chose to wear the hoods.
They are one with Armok now.

[Loud Whispers]

As you said, adamantine is the best armor metal for everything.

Steel breasplates should offer better blunt protection than adamantine breastplates. Useful for militaries that expect to be fighting almost solely humanoids.

[StruckDown]

Clothing offers minimal protection. I don't even bother with clothes on my military. Full steel armor is good enough for anything you'd want your military fighting in the first place.

[Catsup]

this is what my marksdwarves squad wears, it provides coverage of all areas with at least 1 layer of steel:

steel helm
steel mail shirt x1
steel gauntlets
steel high boots
bone greaves
leather armor
trousers
socks
cloak
wooden shield
bone crossbow

i havent yet started working with candy, but i would replace the greaves with candy greaves and have 3 mail shirts of candy instead of 1, and also wear candy helm and breastplate if i have any left.

the armor suggestion on the wiki only really works if you have a legendary armor user, anything more than 1 very heavy item (ie mail shirt, breastplate, greaves, and metal shields) cause encumbrance in non-armor users.

i dont have any other military besides marksdwarves so far, and i consider this a valid set-up for marksdwarves since they rarely engage enemies in melee anyway. If i were to make melee squads i would likely need to danger room train them before giving them any more gear than the amount listed above, or at least make the gear out of candy.

[Urist Da Vinci]

As you said, adamantine is the best armor metal for everything.

Steel breasplates should offer better blunt protection than adamantine breastplates. Useful for militaries that expect to be fighting almost solely humanoids.

Yes, a dwarf in steel armor is practically immune to wooden arrows from elves, whereas adamantine armor can be shot through with wooden arrows. This is due to how armor weight matters for blunt damage (as well as the absurd damage of arrows).

[mobucks]

I don't layer armor. But I do DFHack "tweak military-training". Skill > armor material in my experience.

[Button]

I'm trying a new armor setup in my newest fort. Instead of making candy armor I plan to make cotton candy, and layer it over steel. We'll see how that goes.

Last time I tried this I just wasted my candy, because civilians kept going "Ooooh shiny" and claiming them as soon as they came out of the clothier's shop. So this time I made duplicates of the high-coverage cloth items (robe, hood, mitten, long skirt; can't remember if I did cloak or not) in the raws and gave them [ARMORLEVEL:1] so that civvies won't auto-claim them.

tl;dr remember you can make cotton candy.

[Jenniretta]

I don't layer armor. But I do DFHack "tweak military-training". Skill > armor material in my experience.

Armour user skill doesn't increase protection, it just makes dwarves move better in their armour and get tired less easily while wearing it. That does mean they attack, dodge, and block more, but it doesn't increase their protection from a hit that actually connects.
From what I can tell, leather is always better than cloth for protection, but I'm not sure how it compares to adamantine, and Steel breastplates help more against Bolt/Arrow damage than adamantine. So for layering, using the maximums from the wiki, the best you can have it probably:

Armor
Steel breastplate - 1
Adamantine mail shirts - 3
Leather (adamantine?) cloaks - 6

Legs
Leather (adamantine?) trousers -2
Adamantine greaves - 1

Helm
Adamantine helm - 1
Leather (Adamantine?) hood - 6

Gloves
Adamantine pairs of gauntlets - 1
Leather (Adamantine?) pairs of mittens - 1

Boots
Leather (Adamantine?) pairs of socks - 1
Adamantine pairs of high boots - 1

If you don't have adamantine, then steel is 2nd best, followed by Iron/Bronze (Bronze is slightly stronger, but heavier and requires tin), then Copper, and Leather is last. Regular cloth provides VERY weak protection - it can be useful for keeping substances off of the skin, though, like syndrome-inducing blood, but the attacks cloth clothing deflects will typically be inconsequential anyway.

Of course you should always give the dwarves a shield, too, if they can use one.

Personally, I don't bother with all that, unless you modded in some ridiculous weapons or a race of siegeing giants or something like that, usually the following is more than enough:
1 Breastplate
1 Mail Shirt
1 Cloak
1 Helm
1 Hood
1 Gauntlets
1 Socks
1 High Boots
1 Greaves
1 Trousers
1 Shield
1 Weapon

The clothing items I make out of Leather. It provides complete coverage with at least chain armour, with redundancy in a lot of places, and provides as much plate coverage as possible.

I usually make all my armour out of the best non-adamantine metal I have, only making adamantine gear for veterans. I like to use my adamantine for other things, so the amount I put aside for military use is limited, and I want to save it for the soldiers who can put it to the best use.

[Centigrade]

As you said, adamantine is the best armor metal for everything.

Steel breasplates should offer better blunt protection than adamantine breastplates. Useful for militaries that expect to be fighting almost solely humanoids.

Yes, a dwarf in steel armor is practically immune to wooden arrows from elves, whereas adamantine armor can be shot through with wooden arrows. This is due to how armor weight matters for blunt damage (as well as the absurd damage of arrows).

Why make the breastplate steel instead of the mail shirt(s)?

[DWC]

This issue about clothing and the protection it offers has gotten a lot of my attention lately. Clothes make surprisingly decent protection, cloaks and hoods can be stacked to the point of abuse and they do make a difference against things like wooden and silver weapons.

I did some unscientific arena testing and I believe material wise, plant fiber clothes offer the most protection (better then leather) and leather armor is equal to leather clothing. Also, leather armor weighs virtually nothing, while clothing is surprisingly heavy, a shirt weighs 3 kilos for example, but, I think weight is broken for all armor and clothing, but that's off-topic. Why I like to throw a leather armor piece over a mail shirt for lower-skilled soldiers, it's added protection, covers a wide area and it only weighs 1 urist.

I still haven't determined if the clothing article (vest, robe, dress, shirt, ect) has any protective effect beyond it's material and what body parts it covers. So dresses vs robes, might be my next project, idk.

[Centigrade]

This issue about clothing and the protection it offers has gotten a lot of my attention lately. Clothes make surprisingly decent protection, cloaks and hoods can be stacked to the point of abuse and they do make a difference against things like wooden and silver weapons.

I did some unscientific arena testing and I believe material wise, plant fiber clothes offer the most protection (better then leather) and leather armor is equal to leather clothing. Also, leather armor weighs virtually nothing, while clothing is surprisingly heavy, a shirt weighs 3 kilos for example, but, I think weight is broken for all armor and clothing, but that's off-topic. Why I like to throw a leather armor piece over a mail shirt for lower-skilled soldiers, it's added protection, covers a wide area and it only weighs 1 urist.

I still haven't determined if the clothing article (vest, robe, dress, shirt, ect) has any protective effect beyond it's material and what body parts it covers. So dresses vs robes, might be my next project, idk.

I would hypothesize that the "size" value of the clothing item would, with all other variables constant, afford greater effective protection.

[Drazinononda]

I still haven't determined if the clothing article (vest, robe, dress, shirt, ect) has any protective effect beyond it's material and what body parts it covers. So dresses vs robes, might be my next project, idk.

I would hypothesize that the "size" value of the clothing item would, with all other variables constant, afford greater effective protection.

The difference between any two items of clothing or armor, coverage wise, are the [COVERAGE] and [UBSTEP]/[LBSTEP] tags. [COVERAGE] determines how likely the armor is to actually play into a defensive calculation: e.g. caps, with [COVERAGE:50] (percent) only actually attempt to deflect half of all blows aimed at the head, whereas a helm with [COVERAGE:100] will always be accounted for. [UBSTEP] and [LBSTEP] ('upper-body' and 'lower-body step,' respectively) determine how far along the body the armor goes, beyond the body part it anchors to -- as examples for upper body armor: a vest has both tags at 0, meaning it covers only the upper body; mail shirts have both tags at 1, meaning it covers one extra step (in this case, the upper arms and the lower torso); coats have [UBSTEP:MAX] to cover the entire arm (excepting fingers, which are currently impossible to cover) and [LBSTEP:1] so it covers the lower torso; robes have both [UBSTEP:MAX] and [LBSTEP:MAX] so they cover the entire body, from halfway up the face to down over the feet.

[Catsup]

Why make the breastplate steel instead of the mail shirt(s)?

because breastplates are shaped armor designed to stop the force of impact, and candy does this more poorly than steel because of its low density. Mail shirts being made out of candy makes sense because mail shirts cannot stop blunt damage anyway due to not being shaped and are designed to stop cutting and stabbing damage, which candy does very well due to its high damage resistance.