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[Kromgar]

Essentially I am challenging myself to having my dwarves live openly in the caverns allowing rampaging forgotten beasts to attacking.

Also no i am not using danger rooms. I already had too many people debrained by training spears.(I think this is a LNP fix that causes it)


Anyway my last military got killed by a web spraying beast and many of my soldiers have lost legs and lives to the forgotten beast hordes. I lost two fortresses to the bastards

[krenshala]

My standard is to have the soldiers (and war animals) train in the main entrance, so anything attacking the fort itself has to go through them.  This also tends to catch kobolds and goblin thieves trying to get in.  With dedicated soldiers training, and getting 'live fire' exercises on anything that tries to sneak in, you should have decent troops by the time something big comes along.  Just make sure they get their weapons first, so they can start working that skill up right way.  Of course, giving them shields first makes them (slightly) more likely to shield bash in combat.

[PrimusRibbus]

You can use a captured Necromancer to provide training targets for your military. Melee soldiers can perma-wrestle hoary marmot-sized things, and marksdwarves can have a permanent shooting gallery (which is a million times more reliable than having them train on archery targets).

I know you've ruled out Danger Rooms, but the best ways to train really are Danger Rooms and Shafts of Enlightenment. In full iron armor with leather hoods, cloaks, etc I can have soldiers sleep the night in the danger room without injury. Even with injuries or fatalities they're exponentially more effective than any other method.

[smurfingtonthethird]

If you don't mind cheesing, then try the "drop an armored dwarf on an upright spear" trick. It's like a few hours of danger room instantly, makes the dwarves extremely powerful.

If you want to fight off forgotten beasts with minimal casualties, crossbows are your friends. Shoot them before they get a chance to get close enough to use those ridiculous abilities.

Also, if you've got the skills and time, try trapping a forgotten beast, and putting him in a silk farm. Infinite silk!

[Melting Sky]

I definitely second the motion for large numbers of marksdwarves and live fire exercises. Fortifications are your friend. Cage traps can provide a steady supply of training fodder for your troops. I imagine the point of this challenge is for it to actually be a challenge so you probably aren't looking for bug exploits like danger rooms and DFhack cheats, correct?

It might be a good idea to at least make a set of high quality leather armor for every dwarf in your civilization and give them a crossbow by placing them in squads that simply never go on duty. This way in an emergency nobody will be caught off guard and helpless. Even a completely untrained dwarf can put up a decent fight with a crossbow and some masterwork leather. In addition to the untrained militia I also recommend creating at least a couple of full time active duty military squads made up of real soldiers. Melee dwarves can be incredibly powerful but you need to be careful with them in the early game until they are fully suited in good armor and have some solid skills. Until they become weapon lords, you should only use them as clean up duty after the enemies have taken a few volleys of bolts.

[Pukako]

I'd like to pick up on the 'debraining' issue - I've got my squad happily training but none of them will wear the steel caps I lovingly made for them at great cost (no iron ore on map - entirely through trading magnetite). Also using LNP...

Is there a trick or do I have to deal with all my axe lords being decapitated by lucky strikes?

[Panando]

The first thing you probably want to do - depending on the restraints you set yourself - is create some safe edges to limit the number of angles cavern life can attack from. De-ramping is the quickest and cheapest way to do this.
 
If you don't use the dfhack command to increase squad training speed, then for melee use squads of 2 or 3 exclusively. Put their barracks (and beds) at the edges, so they train and defend simultaneously. Note that cavern life tends to be large, and unarmored. This means that sharp and penetrating weapons are good, blunt weapons are bad. Axes, spears and picks tend to be excellent and maces are appallingly bad. The other weapons (hammers and swords) will work reasonably.

Some Forgotten beasts will kill you no matter what you do (short of trapping them), but to maximize the chance of survival you should kill them from a distance with multiple squads of 10 marksdwarves. As a rule you should try to have every "civilian" except the miners and woodcutters in a marksdwarf squad, this will further harden the population against random intrusions and allow you to bring a great deal of firepower against threats.

You should try to arrange some decontamination trenches to keep important areas free of forgotten beast syndromes. This is as simple as digging out channels and filling them with 2/7 water.

Depending on how much you are intending to mine, you might need to rely extensively on leather and bone. Cavern wildlife will provide quite a lot of this in time, but you might want to bring a bunch of extra turkeys to bootstrap your leather and bone industry (at 6pt per turkey, vs 5pt per leather, turkeys are a pretty good deal - otoh metal bolts are pretty cheap to embark with if you embark with ore and coal, in fact they are cheaper than wood bolts if you have bit.coal or lignite and malachite or copper nuggets)

[Melting Sky]

I'd like to pick up on the 'debraining' issue - I've got my squad happily training but none of them will wear the steel caps I lovingly made for them at great cost (no iron ore on map - entirely through trading magnetite). Also using LNP...

Is there a trick or do I have to deal with all my axe lords being decapitated by lucky strikes?

On the military equip screen make sure you switch each soldier to the "replace" clothing option for their uniforms. Your dwarves are probably wearing some type of cap as part of their civilian outfits which is preventing them from wearing the steel versions you've made. Just so you know, caps only provide 50% coverage where as a full helmet covers the entire head save for the face. (Sorry to be the bearer of bad news on that one.)

A quick question for the OP. What do you mean by open cavern fortress? Are you planning to live in the cavern's without building any walls at all or do you mean that you will be building walls but not resorting to completely sealing the fortress by abusing draw bridges and such?

If you are planning on doing this challenge without constructing any sort of fortifications or walls then you might want to consider going with a heavier set of armor on every citizen than the one I originally suggested. I also neglected to mention the crossbows you arm them with should be copper if possible since they will be semi decent in melee and with that many crossbow dwarves you will have to really work to keep them stocked with ammo. You might want to consider making half of the citizens part time miners and arming them with pick axes instead of crossbows. Pick axes are extremely powerful melee weapons and they don't need ammo. Mining trains very quickly and its the stat used for pick axe combat.

[thegoatgod_pan]

My advice (I love the challenge you are doing and almost always end up doing it):

Cleaning waterfall room for the inevitable deadly dust

Marksdwarf squad of ungodly skill levels. again for the inevitable deadly dust.

Editing all the cool cavern animals to have [PET] Jabberers, Rutherers, Cave Dragons, even Crundles make awesome pets. Blind Cave ogres and Jabberers are my favorites, the ogres end up mayors and the Jabberers end up dismembering goblins with ease.

As far as training your military: sparring and arena combat always work for me, I guess the caverns add more things for the arena, cage traps are your friend.  Def. set up a solid marksdwarf range using the bolt recycling method (designate the range and then turn the walls into pits, range will get used, arrows will fall down a z-level for reuse instead of breaking)