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[Lochar]

The use of chokepoints can reduce the chance of a soldier running off alone (as they may be around a corner or other obstacle,) and traps at these points can significantly hurt an enemy attack and easily deter/kill most snatchers and weaken ambushes without being arranged in huge meat grinding halls. Plus if attacks/snatching attempts are frequent you can put the weapons to use.

Another handy thing is to keep clear cutting to a minimum, not to avoid offending the elves' tender sensibilities but so that melee troops have plenty of obstructions/cover when assaulting enemy archers. STarted doing this and my injury rates in such battles has dropped an astounding amount!

Oh I don't deny either, was just was my 2nd playthrough and didn't add them to design. I do have a wall with a drawbridge but because I couldn't figure out why me levers weren't working I just left it down. My main strategy has been to assemble my squads at the entrance and send out. I use a burrow setup on top to living quarters and defend this so usually will curtail snatchers. Also made a child burrow that only allows travel within the living areas and pretty much penned in dwarf kids.

I messed with a few basic stone traps but will wait til next playthrough to try more elaborate setups.

Thanks for tip about trees tho..

[MoloMowChow]

I have my own question with military equipment.

I've been making my uniform recently, and noticed that when selecting material for shields/bucklers, I couldn't find "leather" anywhere. I saw "wood" and several more specific types of "wood" as well as metal, but not leather. I thought for sure it's possible to select leather as material for uniforms though because archery default uniform as "leather shields/bucklers" in there. Am I missing something? How do I apply leather to shield material in uniform?

[Sutremaine]

You can't select leather as a shield material. You need to select brown-coloured shields, which will limit your options to leather or highwood. Highwood weighs the same as leather.

[ShadowHammer]

This post will correct some (no doubt unintentional) errors that have been posted here. Sorry if I get something wrong.

The most important thing which hasn't been mentioned yet is to install DFHack to get the military training fixes.  This increases sparring rate and removes the bad thoughts for "long patrol duty" for dwarves that have never been on a single patrol.

I don't use DFhack and it works fine for me. Really, utilities such as DFhack, DwarfTherapist, etc., are only "necessities" for players who haven't tried hard enough to play without them. That said, there's nothing wrong with using them, it's just kind of an easy way out.

Use wooden or leather shields. Material makes no difference in blocking abilities, only the shield's quality and the user's skill count. Wood and leather are both light, so they won't slow your soldiers as much.

Actually, quality doesn't have an effect on block chance, as shown in this study. I would personally advise the use of copper shields, because that way the shield bash actually does something, rather than just bouncing off (not that it does much anyway, though). However, both sides of the argument have merit, and it's really up to you whether you want to use light shields or heavy shields.