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[Loud Whispers]

Chances are the dwarf is lost with them, though ,so it would be out of the battle anyway. Same as if a xbow dorf does the same. Might be a little less likely for a xbow dorf, but still. I'm willing to bet that happens little enough it's not really a concern.

When you're keeping track of how many masterwork steel and masterwork candy armour is lost, you begin to notice just how frequent it is

I don't think dwarves can effectively dual wield anything yet, right? So they just wouldn't pick up the second one. Or maybe they'd hold it as an inert inventory item or something.

Most of my elite soldiers dual wield weapons, to deal with all varieties of threats. In addition there is a nice thing where issuing a Marksdwarf a crossbow and then a melee weapon will cause that Dwarf to primarily use his or her's crossbow, until the melee begins at which the melee weapon begins to swing, stab and crush.

[GavJ]

Sweet. Didn't know that. Do you have to individuall assign, or can you just do "indiv. choice melee" + "indiv. choice ranged" in the uniform?

[Loud Whispers]

Sweet. Didn't know that. Do you have to individuall assign, or can you just do "indiv. choice melee" + "indiv. choice ranged" in the uniform?

I'd recommend at least specifying the ranged weapon to be the crossbow, so Dwarves don't pick up foreign and inferior bows/blowguns. Otherwise yeah, you can just do normal assignments, indiv assignments or indiv choice assignments.

[Melting Sky]

Second the first point. Have never had a problem dispatching undead with crossbows. Actually, it's super easy due to unknown weirdness in the undead's hitpoint system (as opposed to how all other combat works).
Basically, in vanilla with adequate preparation of firing positions, melee is unnecessary. I still use it because the game's really not fun playing it that safe. Building a hardcore militia and fighting goblin sieges on their own terms is still one of my favorite things to do in this game.

One can actually run an effective vanilla fort using no millitary dwarves at all due to the poor AI and pathing of enemy forces. Having said this, the more versatile and extensive your war tool chest is, the better one tends to do when oversights are made.

For me, a couple of squads of highly skilled and well geared melee dwarves serve as my special forces and last line of defense. They are the tool I pull out when my best laid defensive plans go awry. They are who I turn to when I need to take out an entire incoming goblin siege that has caught a group of civilians out in the open or there are dangerous beasts hiding in the labyrinthine caverns that need to be routed before we can colonize the area. 

[PDF urist master]

crossbows kill very slowly. I usually send melee troops out when clearing caverns as it's easy for marksdwarves to get mobbed in tight corners.

That said, any creature with webs is impossible to kill with melee, so having a good ranged squad is necessary just in case.

[EvilBob22]

That said, any creature with webs is impossible to kill with melee

I've actually done it before.  The key is to split up the squads and attack from opposite sides.  One group is totally stopped, but the other group has a chance.

[Loud Whispers]

That said, any creature with webs is impossible to kill with melee

I've actually done it before.  The key is to split up the squads and attack from opposite sides.  One group is totally stopped, but the other group has a chance.

I've never had a problem with attacking webbers, even if all Dwarves came through one direction. As long as the ground is open, their sheer mass means they'll be able to close distance with FBs, Titans and spiders.
In the caverns this may be more dangerous.

[smurfingtonthethird]

Melee is good because rangers are broken as hell.

Anything that shits webs should be captured and farmed, not sicced with infantry.

[Victor6]

Marksdwarves are a better and easier earlier investment, Melee have their place because they're often the last line of real defence (i.e. when everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong, because this is dwarf fortress.).

But there's no reason not to take both, especially when elite marksdwarves have a nasty tendency to burn through training ammo at an insane rate.

[PDF urist master]

FBs with webs are completely immune to traps, making it very difficult to create a silk farm for them unless you really plan ahead.

Moreover, they cannot be trained and are usually extremely dangerous. I have a "no dwarf left behind" mentality, so I usually try to contain them rather than farm them, then execute them by carving fortifications on their cell and sending my best marksdwarves.

I usually don't assign any training bolts to my elite marksdwarves when there are perfectly good inmates to kill.

[neblime]

Most of my elite soldiers dual wield weapons, to deal with all varieties of threats. In addition there is a nice thing where issuing a Marksdwarf a crossbow and then a melee weapon will cause that Dwarf to primarily use his or her's crossbow, until the melee begins at which the melee weapon begins to swing, stab and crush.

I thought (and have indeed observed) that marksdwarves which also have a melee weapon will just continue using their crossbow in melee, no matter what melee weapon they have.
I also thought if a dwarf just holds 2 melee weapons he will always just use one of them and ignore the other?
unless you're messing around with equipment changing and squad removing/re-adding

[GiglameshDespair]

Sometimes he'll use the other one? It seems pretty random whether he will or he won't. Someone did a bunch f tests on it, but i can't remember the results now.

[Urist Da Vinci]

...
Second the first point. Have never had a problem dispatching undead with crossbows. Actually, it's super easy due to unknown weirdness in the undead's hitpoint system (as opposed to how all other combat works).
...

Not unknown - the momentum of hits is subtracted from the undead hitpoints. It also doesn't matter where on the body you hit the animated corpse.

[BoredVirulence]

Sometimes he'll use the other one? It seems pretty random whether he will or he won't. Someone did a bunch f tests on it, but i can't remember the results now.

If I remember correctly, you have to make the melee weapon ordered above the ranged weapon. I don't do that though, so I'm unsure. It can be made to work effectively though. Even if its random, a stab from a sword is much more lethal than a slap of a crossbow, so it makes a difference eventually.

[pisskop]

tbh, every time I check my dual-wielding xbows they have ammo and are expressing that sentiment liberally.  But I seem to recall assigning xbow then spear is a thing that works very well.