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[SlyStalker]

How do you check the skill levels of the normal enemies?

[Larix]

There's probably some Dwarf Therapist or DFHack method. Inside the game, you'll only be told if an enemy fighter is a recruit (skill level 0), a normal soldier (swordsman/-dwarf, crossbowman/marksdwarf etc.; skills 1-10) or a weaponmaster (elite crossbow*, swordmaster etc., skill 11+). They should also start flashing between the bright and darker shade of their colour when legendary in something (15+).

Quality vs. quantity: for dwarfs, quality wins the day. A notable skill advantage imbalances combat in a ridiculous fashion: a single weaponmaster can take dozens of grunts if the latter line up in an orderly fashion. Full-body metal armour makes even mediocre-skilled dwarfs insanely hard to hurt, except by blunt damage.

Quantity still has a quality of its own, but it'll only allow bypassing skill, not material (armour or thick skin): a surrounded unit will be hit very easily from behind or the side, which makes throwing a dozen war dogs at a dangerous enemy a valid tactic, as long as the enemy has no fire attack which'd simply melt the dogs and interdict the surroundings by turning them into ‼surroundings‼. A dozen dogs can tire out and so tie down a jabberer with a bit of luck but are unlikely to actually hurt it. I wouldn't try this with dwarfs, because losing a dozen dwarfs to a misjudgement of an enemy tends to hit a fort harder than losing a dozen dogs.

[☼!!Troll Fur Sock!!☼]

Remember Adventure, where you legendary++++++++++++++ everything werebeast necromancer husk vampire Urist McAwesome Destroyer of Worlds goes on a 9000< kill rampage only to be stopped by a single bolt to the lung? Yeah.
Melee constripts are just going to slow the enemy down. But ranged ones... 20 WILL kill a legendary goblin. The amount of rolls required to survive every ~3 bolts that actually connect is still too high. And it gets even better with your everyday low-skill goblin horders. Even if they miss, they have a chance to brain the goblin directly behind their target. Or the next one. Or the next one. Or...

[Skullsploder]

Crossbow spam makes short work of pretty much everything. EXCEPT in some cases where you have a goblin weaponmaster with a roughly 150+ kill list. He will dodge, twirl, block, and bat bolts out of the air until he closes into melee. Sure, you may get a lucky shot into his lung or something, but the goblin may just make it all the way to melee and turn your conscripts into showers of limbs and gore. I'd much rather have 5 weaponmasters than one hundred novice conscripts, or even competent conscripts, especially now that steel plate is essentially immune to everything except candy, including ranged weaponry - less soldiers means less equipment shortages means arrows in less knees.

[Illogical_Blox]

Martial Trances are things that happen, and while you can't plan for them, they are rarely anything but amazing.

I've gone through and been hyper paranoid, built up a decked out pimped out highly trained militia, cracked open the caverns and had a miner and a couple of herbalists team up to curbstomp a forgotten beast as it shows up, with only one death that may have been related to trying to catch a baby that she popped out mid-battle (on a 15 z up/down staircase no less) and the only thing left for the military to do was kick at a couple of crundles poking around the area by the time they arrived.

I like to make sure I have at least two fully armored dorfs, I like to have a hammer dorf and one with a good axe or a converted miner as there is a little known feature of mining picks, they have two speeds: kill, and kill faster. None of that silly "slaps the beast with the flat of the blade nonsense", just page after page of "the severed part flies off in an arc" spam.

Well, yeah, but there are also a heck of a lot of stories about how the FB tore through legendary soldiers. I like to have plenty of melee warriors, and a small squad of marksdwarves.

I have also discovered that war dogs are best for distracting the enemy. They were hunting elk; three war dogs and a shield-wielding dwarf kept hammering on it for about 20 seconds until the dwarf passed out from exastion and a hammerdwarf smashed its head in.

[Wumpi]

Recently I started avoiding the "Close and wait" strategy of draw bridges. It's amazingly fun when you actually have to plan a proper defense based on lives. Patrols all around the outside that swap out every season to allow continued training, stationed forces on the walls outside during august to protect incoming caravans, different "ranks" of squads with different specialties. It makes the game a lot more interesting, I think.

What I will be doing this time, is having a squad of "elite" dwarves who are basically all legendary in their skillsets. They'll be picked from the strongest and fastest dwarves. Then I'll train several squads of average dwarves up to be atleast reasonably competent to work on patrols. While one legendary axedwarf can take on an entire 100 goblin siege almost effortlessly, if you back him up with 20 moderately trained dwarves, he will live a lot longer when the arrows start flying.

[Gentlefish]

Sure quality over quantity makes sense in this game.

Until you have a bullet-hose made up of an entire fort of marksdwarfs. Sans woodcutters and miners. Then everyone steps out, fires a few rounds of bone bolts. That's, in a fortress of fifty, a hundred bolts. And they gain experience for each bolt fired, regardless if it hits or not. And in a raiding party of ten gobbos, they're all suddenly pincushions.

So you set everyone up to have a month out of the year where they're on the range and practicing, and you have a Switzerland-style fortress of awesome impunity.

[pisskop]

I cant wait until you can do actual army movements.  Either providing troops for an army or sending out raiders (maybe not s a dwarf?) or serious siege defense or whathaveu.

[tonnot98]

I just had 30 slightly trained dwarves decimate a squad of 20 or so marks goblins on giant toads.

[Baffler]

Quality definitely trumps quality. It's also true that quantity has a quality all its own, but the quality's quantity different from quality's quality. Like many DF players, I get a perverse sort of enjoyment out of things going spectacularly wrong. Consider the following:

When an army of peasant levies was broken and scattered in the main hall by a dragon (who broke down the door, no drawbridges here) I was happy with it. It was awesome. The front rows were almost immediately vaporized by dragonfire, but the guys behind them scattered and ran down the big long entrance hallway with the dragon close behind. It spewed dragonfire behind them, and ripped the guys it caught up to to shreds. The dragonfire also helped, melting people's legs and such. Anyway the remains of the militia ran past the emergency cave-in trap, and that was the end of the dragon, but the whole episode was worthy of song. Not very happy songs, but still...

[SlyStalker]

I think we should define what professionals are and what conscripts are. To me, professional fighters are dwarves who train all year round and are at least Proficient in their weapon skill, and conscripts are basically either dwarves who you draft in an emergency or dwarves who are in a kind of army reserve and train about two months a year. So basically, the way I see it is professionals are ~Proficient and levies are ~Adequate.

Quality definitely trumps quality.

Um, OK then.

[Skullsploder]

Ok, well by that definition, half my fort are levies and the other half are professionals.The moment I have a militia captain I create 10 military squads and another "civilian" military squad for each profession group. Migrants get assigned to squads as they come in. Every military dwarf trains year-round, every civilian dwarf gets a mail shirt, helmet, leather armour, and a crossbow, and does individual combat drills in front of the goblin pit when they're idle (place an armour stand in the area around your goblin shooting range and designate it as the barracks for all your civilian squads). It's the best of both worlds, and since my professional marksdwarves often have the highest casualty rate because of Armok-damned elite bowgoblins, I have a lot of competent recruits available.

Basically, there are only so many civilians you can have doing stuff. Once you're at two professionals per skilled job, you already have a mostly idle fort. Better then to put everyone not absolutely essential in the permanent, professional, military, while still training the rest as reservists.

[NullForceOmega]

I don't let any dwarf without legendary in two or three combat skills do anything other than train or kill dangerous wildlife, I can attest to the fact that two fully-armored legendary dwarves can curbstomp an arbitrary number of opponents (if one of them has the right attributes it may not take both of them).  While it is a viable last-ditch tactic to send waves of poorly or unskilled dwarves to attack enemy forces, a dedicated military will always be superior in every way except numbers.  Most of what makes the differences is the vast differences in attributes, a trained soldier has boosted every single one of their physical stats to their lifetime maximum, while random conscript a may have one or two at reasonable levels.

[StagnantSoul]

I had one example where a stray iron bolt ended my legendary axe dwarf, so I slammed the gate shut, armed each dwarf with spears, axes, hammers, and swords, and rushed them out at the siege. Yes, I lost fifty eight dwarves, but I killed a general with eight novice spear dwarves. That has to count for something.

[MDFification]

The thing is, goblins will always, always outnumber your draftable dwarves (Sieges of 150+ are fairly common, at least in .34) and they each come with more experience than your levy is likely to. So massed conscripts is going to be a very inefficient tactic, which is likely to get most of your dwarves killed. The exception to this of course is if you have massed crossbows, which can break sieges now thanks to poor goblin morale.
A mass melee levy however will likely break in the face of mass slaughter, so the advantage of numbers in areas where goblins are likely to trickle in rather than arrive all at once is negated by all your dwarves running away or collapsing and bursting into tears.