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[☼!!Troll Fur Sock!!☼]

Therefore, starve your metalsmiths for maximum gains.

This captures the essence of !!SCIENCE!!

[slothen]

both chalk and marble.

You're set.  I had a fortress with no native iron and got a nice steel industry after a few years.  The game will supply you with plenty of copper, but more importantly, iron.  You have to import, scavenge, and melt, but it works.  You don't even really need magma or coal.  Trees/logs do the job plenty fine.  You may need to dig out tree farms or start clear-cutting the caverns.

Caravans are important.  I bought out all wood, iron/steel/pig iron bars, all non-decorated metal bolts, all iron and steel anvils.  Further request these items. anvils melt to a single bar.

Slaughter goblin sieges and scavenge their parts.  Reclaim stray bolts/arrows and melt them.  Having no-quality armor/weapon stockpiles for iron/copper/bronze/silver and stocking them with bins will allow your dwarves to actually be reasonably efficient with the DF2012 hauling changes.  Wheelbarrows important though, as the bins get heavy.

As for "training your armorsmith" that should really be a low priority.  By the time I get up to around 100 dwarves, I usually have a reasonably skilled armorsmith migrant.  Or you can embark with a proficient one, which is good enough.  Mostly focus on getting items for everybody of sufficiently good material.  Once you're obliterating sieges and melting their stuff, you should have enough copper to start manually training.  I suppose if you have a bigger than average return on leggings or whatever, you can use steel and continually remelt to both train and generate more steel.

[Larix]

I assume the same works with skill as it does with attribute.

You assume wrongly. Crafting skill is gained per item made - furnace operators skill up fastest when making alloys from ores or refining coke, smiths level fastest when performing multi-output jobs (make goblets/flasks for crafters; presumably gauntlets/high boots for armoursmiths; bolts are _not_ best for weaponsmithing, because the "stack" of bolts counts as a single item). And they level faster the more jobs they perform, so the fastest exp. gain for smiths is got by well-fed, drunk and well-rested dwarfs.

Therefore, starve your metalsmiths to sabotage their skill development.

FTFY.
Incidentally, you can get much slower work and thus more efficient (per metal used) attribute gains without the mood hits by preventing your smiths from drinking alcohol. Since eating and drinking are near-instantaneous now, artificially reducing the numbers of such jobs doesn't really save time any more.

[Girlinhat]

Ah, well that's a shame.  It's still easier to max their attributes using slow actions, and thus their metalsmithing will be better since they have the associated attributes high.  It's nearly useless, but not useless.

[khearn]

I've intentionally embarked in areas with no metals at all, and done well. Embarks with gold and flux, but no weapon-grade metals are actually fairly easy. Trade gold goods for every scrap of metal and steel the caravans bring, and ask for more. Ask for hematite, limonite and magnetite stones, iron, pig iron and steel bars, and all the crafts, weapons, armor, musical instruments, anvils, and anything else that a magnet will stick to. Crank out gold crafts/goblets/statues/whatever, plus get your cook trained up and make masterwork roasts. You can easily buy out everything a caravan brings with good gold & food industries. Buy all the wonderfully crafted stuff the caravan brings, then toss it all in the melting pots. Also grab copper/bronze stuff to melt for use in training smiths. If you're short on trade goods and can't buy everything, skip on the decorated stuff. But it's not hard to get to the point where you can afford those as well.

Also collect goblinite (or humanite if you've managed to convince them to make non-caravan deliveries). Dodge-fall traps are good for harvesting it, but cage traps or just a bunch of weapon traps work as well.

Girlinhat recommended just using one smelter for melting because fractions are recorded for each smelter, but I've found that one smelter ends up being a bottleneck, and I use multiple smelters for melting objects. On average, each will have half a bar of fractional melts, but once you've filled up the pipeline, you don't lose any more. So in the long run it doesn't really hurt you, and it speeds up throughput considerably.

Have one forge that only allows dabblers to use it, and with repeating orders for copper or bronze armor bits. Have enough orders so your manager can't add more to that forge when you want something good built. Then have everyone in the fort who doesn't specialize in a moodable skill have armorsmithing turned on. Dwarf Therapist is useful for keeping track of this, just make sure the option for "Highlight moodable cells in labor/skill columns" is turned on. So all your haulers and farmers will come to that forge, crank out some crappy stuff, and raise their armorsmithing skill to be their highest moodable skill. Once a dwarf has armorsmithing as its highest moodable skill, turn it off for that dwarf to avoid having him/her waste more time/metal. Eventually one of them will get a non-possession strange mood and you'll get a legendary armorsmith.

Within a year or three you should be able to crank out masterwork steel armor for everyone in your military. No exploits needed.

Well, no exploits, unless you consider being able to sell a stack of pig tallow roasts for thousands of Urists to be an exploit. But selling gold crafts is certainly not an exploit. Or being able to harvest all the metal from a siege without any real risk. Harvesting goblinite without traps would make this much more difficult. But marksdwarves in towers armed with bone bolts can still collect a fair amount of goblinite relatively safely (as long as no enemy bowmasters show up). But you don't need to use any clear exploits like melting metals to get more than you started with.

   Keith

[Pirate Bob]

As for "training your armorsmith" that should really be a low priority. 

This is more correct than perhaps widely realized.  The impact of armor quality on performance is quite minimal, at least for protection from projectiles.  If you look at the material science page of the wiki (and do some simple math) you will find that increasing armor quality from zero to masterwork increases the momentum of a projectile it can block by only about 6%.  Code diving by Urist da Vinci suggests that the same momentum-based mechanism is used for armor protection from melee attacks, meaning this should be about 6% gain as well.  The gains from having armor user skill go from zero to legendary are also about 6% (but the real utility of armor user is it makes worn armor weigh nothing).

It is possible that an increase in momentum stopped by 6% could take a given piece of armor from not deflecting to deflecting a given attack, but this isn't very likely.  It's much more likely that for most attack/armor combinations you would notice no change at all from having masterwork armor as compared to zero quality.

That being said, I (like I assume everyone else) try to armor my dwarves in the best quality armor I can get, just cuz, but if you want to protect them from sieges, any armor quality will be just fine.  If you can manage to get them zero quality steel plate + mail shirt, they will be essentially invulnerable, except for the facial features (eyes, ears, nose), which are not covered.  I had two green soldiers (skills no more than competent) take on a siege on their own (the trained military decided to go pickup equipment or something) and they easily killed them all, with one suffering a cut on the ear and the other unscathed.  As a bonus, their skills went up a ton.  And they didn't have good quality armor - being the lowest of my military squads they had nothing better than +finely crafted+. 

Conversely, if you train your military really well, they should be able to take out a siege even without armor (leather is useless against pretty much all weapons, so I would call this "without").  Especially if you back them up with traps.  I started in a similar situation to you, and got a siege rather early on, before I had managed to get much armor at all made.  I had the military (of 2) retreat into my entry hallway, behind a few cage traps.  Since they were I think "talented" axedwarves (started as proficient), they easily cut down the six or so gobbos that didn't get caged, even though I don't think they had any armor and may have been using copper axes.  Then I melted down all the goblinite to make steel so that next year the fight wasn't even remotely fair, as described above.

[SixOfSpades]

You may need to dig out tree farms or start clear-cutting the caverns. . . . Caravans are important.  I bought out all wood. . . . Further request these items.

Important note: The best way to get wood is to not have any. When a caravan arrives on-site, it magically knows how many (unforbidden) cut logs you have in your stockpiles. If your stock of available logs is less than your current fortress population, the caravan automatically adds enough logs to make up the remainder. So, if you have 137 dwarves, just make sure to use up your entire supply of logs (burn them into charcoal or whatever) before every caravan shows up. Each one is guaranteed to bring you at least 137 more logs.
This works with cloth & leather, too, and I think a couple of other things, but they don't matter as much as wood.

Girlinhat recommended just using one smelter for melting because fractions are recorded for each smelter, but I've found that one smelter ends up being a bottleneck, and I use multiple smelters for melting objects.

The correct setup is one smelter per type of metal. If you're using two smelters to melt, say, bronze, you could have 0.6 bars of bronze "invisibly stuck" inside one smelter, and 0.4 bars in the other. But if you have just 1 smelter for bronze & only bronze, the "loss" is completely minimized.

[khearn]

Girlinhat recommended just using one smelter for melting because fractions are recorded for each smelter, but I've found that one smelter ends up being a bottleneck, and I use multiple smelters for melting objects.

The correct setup is one smelter per type of metal. If you're using two smelters to melt, say, bronze, you could have 0.6 bars of bronze "invisibly stuck" inside one smelter, and 0.4 bars in the other. But if you have just 1 smelter for bronze & only bronze, the "loss" is completely minimized.

Right, but once you have on average .5 bars in each smelter, you don't lose any more. But if you have a bunch of stuff sitting around waiting to get melted when a siege arrives, you might as well not have it. I guess you could start with one smelter doing your melting, and if you start seeing a backlog, enable another, and so on. But if you have a caravan load of iron to melt, you might as well just turn on 3 or 4 smelters and get it done quickly. Yeah, with 4 smelters you'll end up with 0-3.6 bars sitting in the smelters when you are done, but if you got 20 bars from the caravan, "losing" ~2 isn't that bad. And you won't (on average) lose any from future melting. One the pipeline is full, you don't "lose" any more.

   Keith

[Baffler]

Of note is that a bucket will give a 100% melt return. None is lost, but none is pulled from the Aether either. Not useful for your armorsmith, but your metalcrafters will certainly benefit.

[Loci]

Of note is that a bucket will give a 100% melt return. None is lost, but none is pulled from the Aether either. Not useful for your armorsmith, but your metalcrafters will certainly benefit.

Actually your blacksmiths will benefit, since buckets use/train blacksmithing. To train metalcrafting, use chains instead--they also provide a 100% melt return.

[FoiledFencer]

Okay, so in conclusion, there's really no good way to do it without exploits, and I should just import what I can, and train what I can. In the mean time, Masterwork Silver Warhammers for everybody! Let's hope they can crush the enemy before they get a shot in

Interestingly, combat speed is implemented in the new update so leather clad dwarves should be getting more actions in a given period of time than fully armoured ones. It could prove interesting to have a fast, hardhitting (silver blunts!) military. Perhaps a combination of massed crossbows behind fortifications and a rapid response team of hammerdwarves to rush out there and wreak some havoc among the downed goblins?

At any rate the wealth will attract goblinite, so you can gradually build up your armour supplies.

[StagnantSoul]

Import metal for mail shirts and helms, then make everything else out of leather, wood for the shields.

[Quartz_Mace]

This might not help people who have already started a fort and need metal, but in embark you can buy copper ore and tin ore for 3 points a piece, depending on the exact ores chosen. You can also buy one piece of bituminous coal for 6 points each, and smelting will produce 8 coke bars from these. By getting rid of the useless splints, crutches, wheelbarrows, and quivers (replace those with leather to make some. It's cheaper) and minimizing cloth, thread, food, and other things that you can easily produce/buy later on, you can easily embark with 180+ bars worth of bronze and plenty of coal to forge with. Later on, you can upgrade to magma and import flux, iron, and even coal in all their forms. By doing this, it is completely possible to have a healthy metal industry, even with absolutely no ore on the map.

[Girlinhat]

This might not help people who have already started a fort and need metal, but in embark you can buy copper ore and tin ore for 3 points a piece, depending on the exact ores chosen. You can also buy one piece of bituminous coal for 6 points each, and smelting will produce 8 coke bars from these. By getting rid of the useless splints, crutches, wheelbarrows, and quivers (replace those with leather to make some. It's cheaper) and minimizing cloth, thread, food, and other things that you can easily produce/buy later on, you can easily embark with 180+ bars worth of bronze and plenty of coal to forge with. Later on, you can upgrade to magma and import flux, iron, and even coal in all their forms. By doing this, it is completely possible to have a healthy metal industry, even with absolutely no ore on the map.

Bismuth Bronze is cheaper per ingot than Bronze.  Bismuth costs less than copper, and it counts for another bar in smelting, so you can get cheaper bars of bismuth bronze, which has the same combat value.

[Kneenibble]

This is more correct than perhaps widely realized.  The impact of armor quality on performance is quite minimal, at least for protection from projectiles.  If you look at the material science page of the wiki (and do some simple math) you will find that increasing armor quality from zero to masterwork increases the momentum of a projectile it can block by only about 6%.  Code diving by Urist da Vinci suggests that the same momentum-based mechanism is used for armor protection from melee attacks, meaning this should be about 6% gain as well.  The gains from having armor user skill go from zero to legendary are also about 6% (but the real utility of armor user is it makes worn armor weigh nothing).

It is possible that an increase in momentum stopped by 6% could take a given piece of armor from not deflecting to deflecting a given attack, but this isn't very likely.  It's much more likely that for most attack/armor combinations you would notice no change at all from having masterwork armor as compared to zero quality.

That being said, I (like I assume everyone else) try to armor my dwarves in the best quality armor I can get, just cuz, but if you want to protect them from sieges, any armor quality will be just fine.  If you can manage to get them zero quality steel plate + mail shirt, they will be essentially invulnerable, except for the facial features (eyes, ears, nose), which are not covered.  I had two green soldiers (skills no more than competent) take on a siege on their own (the trained military decided to go pickup equipment or something) and they easily killed them all, with one suffering a cut on the ear and the other unscathed.  As a bonus, their skills went up a ton.  And they didn't have good quality armor - being the lowest of my military squads they had nothing better than +finely crafted+. 

Conversely, if you train your military really well, they should be able to take out a siege even without armor (leather is useless against pretty much all weapons, so I would call this "without").  Especially if you back them up with traps.  I started in a similar situation to you, and got a siege rather early on, before I had managed to get much armor at all made.  I had the military (of 2) retreat into my entry hallway, behind a few cage traps.  Since they were I think "talented" axedwarves (started as proficient), they easily cut down the six or so gobbos that didn't get caged, even though I don't think they had any armor and may have been using copper axes.  Then I melted down all the goblinite to make steel so that next year the fight wasn't even remotely fair, as described above.

I understand that the numbers add up in this way -- similarly, I have learned that material and quality don't make much difference for the blow-deflecting power of shields.  However, to clad my military in anything less than a masterwork suit of steel just feels uncivilized.