Hello everybody. First off, this is the first post I've made on these forums, and I'd like to say that Dwarf Fortress is the most heartbreakingly hard and spirit-crushing game I've ever played, and it's the best.
However, I had a fort, Trustchannel, and everything went smoothly; I irrigated a room with a murky pool to grow enough plump helmets to sustain a still making wine, I turned migrants into soldiers for a budding militia in order to fend off the inevitable first goblin siege, and I equipped them all with iron shields, armor, and weapons. When that siege came, I raised my drawbridge, trapping a few unlucky dwarves outside, and when I had my military readied behind the gate, set the squads to attack the goblins, and watched in horror as my 25 metal-armored dwarves were slaughtered by bowfire in the 10 tiles span before reaching the goblins. Two or three managed to enter into melee with goblins, and they scuffled, but ultimately my entire military faltered. Even two isolated skirmishes of two of my dwarves versus one of their goblin bowmen resulted in both of my dwarves being dismembered.
Unbeknown to me, as soon as I had lowered the drawbridge, my entire population flooded the battlefield, I presume to collect bodies, and resultingly found their own deaths.
Having read my story, my questions are as follows:
1. How can I prevent my citizens from scrambling like lemmings to their deaths outside of the fort? Do I just have to turn off the burial labor, or is there a more sophisticated and efficient system (like with burrows or something else?)
2. Why was it that with 1.5:1 odds in my favor, goblin bowmen were able to make a joke out of my military? I thought I had them training in a barracks designated earlier. I had them training with weapons, which I read on the wiki is not optimal.
2a. If sparring with their weapons is not the best choice, should I make them spar with no uniforms, or should they wear some armor, but no weapons?
2b. Is this the reason my dwarves were so coolly slaughtered by the goblins, my foolish weaponed sparring policy?
Any other general thoughts?