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[paladin225]

I have very limited steel and iron and no flux stone at the moment.

1. Is there any pieces of armor I should focus on making or acquiring first over other pieces? Like... are steel breastplates and helms what I should invest all my steel in first?   Or is it better to try to get full sets of steel armor? Right now I already have iron gauntlets, high boots and greaves.  So I can mix and match the steel breastplates and helms with iron gauntlets and boots and such.   I do have some skilled armorers that are making masterworks.

2. Should I melt down steel leggings and steel mail shirts or are they worth keeping?

3. Is bronze armor worth using at all or should I just melt it down for something else?

4. Is any metal armor, like even copper, good enough for danger rooms equipped with wood training spears? (Carpenter is making masterwork training spears---hope they aren't more lethal lol)

5.  The DF wiki seems to imply that any silver weapons besides warhammers or bolts are about useless and not worth making? Is this true?

6.  Any non-foreign weapons that are better than other weapons? Like... are swords better than axes?  Are spears any good?

7.  Are legendary miners any good in combat? Should I be putting them in the military?   DF wiki says they're actually very good with picks in battle.

Playing version 0.34

Apologies for all the questions, figured I'd ask a few random ones while posting this. 

Thank you!

[Ionizer]

1. Steel Helms should be Priority Number One for all Military dwarves (possibly for all dwarves).

2. Melting Leggings actually gives you more metal back then what you used to make them.  You can make and melt Steel Leggings over and over to simultaneously train Armorsmithing and increase your steel supply.  The same can be done for Weaponsmithing and Giant Serrated Disks.  Although, this may be considered an exploit.

3. Bronze is better than nothing, but it's only average for metal armor.  I believe the progression is Nothing/Clothes<Leather<Copper<Bronze/Bismuth Bronze=Iron<Steel<Candy.

4. Anything, even Clothing should protect from crap quality wooden training spears in a danger room.  Cloaks are useful because they cover from head to toe.  High quality spears may penetrate armor of lesser materials.

5. Silver cannot hold a sharp edge very well, thus it is useless for edged weapons such as swords, axes and bolts (Bolts are edged now) (saw you're using .34, bolts aren't edged in .34, so silver is fine for them).  However, Silver is fairly dense, this and a few other of it's material properties make it comparable to steel for blunt weapons such as maces and warhammers.  If you're short on steel, silver hammers will work just fine.

6. Spears are generally better for attacking large creatures, such as elephants, dragons and the like, because they pierce deeper into their bodies, making hitting vital organs more likely.  Blunt weapons are useful against humanoid enemies wearing armor (read: Goblins) because the force behind their blows can shatter bone and bruise organs through armor (in practice, this means a Hammer Lord may quickly cripple an enemy, but may take some time finally beating through his helm and skull for the kill).  Axes are great for lopping off limbs, but they might not be able to pierce very far to hit vitals, so you'll be waiting for a beheading, bisection or bleed out for a kill.  Swords are basically the middle ground, they have all types of attacks, but they aren't the best at anything (the randomness of attacks also leads to dwarfs occasionally trying to repeatedly stab something they should be slashing, or vice versa).  Some people boil it down to Hammer for humanoid armor wearers and spears for monsters, but that's not a hard and fast rule.

7. Using a pick as a weapon works off the mining skill, but you need to specify in the dwarf's uniform that he has to use a pick, not just "Individual Choice" or whatever.  Picks are similar to whips in effectiveness (that is to say, very good), but you can more easily control the material and quality of your picks.

Take this all with a grain of salt, as I'm mostly going off of memory of what I've read here and on the wiki.

[Garath]

2: chain shirts are quite good and with regards of protection offered vs resources required a better deal than breastplates

[ragincajun]

A side note to the OP question...how do you control what item(s) are melted down?

When I have selected that it just puts "melt metal item" in the queue but nothing about What Item.  So how do you ensure they melt a legging and not a breastplate or that well crafted silver mace they just made?

[Absentia]

A side note to the OP question...how do you control what item(s) are melted down?

When I have selected that it just puts "melt metal item" in the queue but nothing about What Item.  So how do you ensure they melt a legging and not a breastplate or that well crafted silver mace they just made?

You have to designate the items you want melted, the same way you designate them for dumping (using 'm' instead of 'd'). When the "Melt metal item" job is run, the dwarf will grab one of the designated items and haul it to the smelter.

[Spectre Incarnate]

When I have selected that it just puts "melt metal item" in the queue but nothing about What Item.

Bet that's been in your queue for a long time then. 

You can also use the stocks screen to look through your stuff and mark items for melting from there. I find that to be slightly easier overall.

[Illogical_Blox]

Yeah, helms are REALLY good. Blows to any other part of the body are survivable - not the head.

[paladin225]

Thanks for the answers everyone!

If chain mail shirts are that good I will start focusing on making those then---and helms. 

I forgot about the bugged dwarf skull thing, so I can understand why helmets should be priority, thanks for reminding me.

Are dwarf skulls fixed in the new version of DF?

[Garath]

as far as I heard - no

better use a hammer on an egg than on a dwarf skull

[Walen]

My personal preference is helms first (in .34 all blows vs unconscious combatants were aimed at head so a naked dwarf with a helm had his survivability increased tenfold). The second piece would be body armor mostly because it is the most likely to be hit. Wiki suggests that breastplates are exchangable with mail shirts in that regard. I find it not really true because chainmails protect wider area, are cheaper to make and are not exclusive with leather armor (even cheaper to make as it requires no metal at all). Don't recall any !Science! on the subject but if a gobbo can pierce chainmail easily, using a breastplate instead hardly makes a difference, i.e. the real problem lies somewhere else (training/numbers/additional !fun!).

If your civ has access to both gauntlets and high boots you can theoretically skip legware for the time being. So the third piece of armor is either of these two. Dwarves with missing foot can fully recover in time with a crutch while a severed motor nerve on hand is irreperable.

Thus my algorithm for equipping military in low metal embarks is:
weapon of the intended type made of the first metal that comes along or even bought at embark (can be replaced at any time)
wooden shields are cheap
40 units of leather at embark allow you to make leather armor and leather leggins fot two full squads (enough for the first year)

This makes your military/militia ready for combat almost instantaneously if needed. Once you have your forge set up:
helm of the best metal available at the time, when faced with a dilemma whether to upgrade just make more helms
then chain mail of any metal
then gauntlets
then high boots

Military equipped at this stage should have little problems dispatching goblins provided you don't delay training too much. I would still avoid undead and other sources of fun though. This basic setup requires 5 bars of metal per soldier (to fully clad one you need 10 bars). And this is pretty much all that is necessary. It is better to equip more squad members than send half you army armored to the teeth and the other half naked. After a few caravans it is easy to equip your whole army (or at least the competent part) in full steel even with no metal on site.

[paladin225]

My personal preference is helms first (in .34 all blows vs unconscious combatants were aimed at head so a naked dwarf with a helm had his survivability increased tenfold). The second piece would be body armor mostly because it is the most likely to be hit. Wiki suggests that breastplates are exchangable with mail shirts in that regard. I find it not really true because chainmails protect wider area, are cheaper to make and are not exclusive with leather armor (even cheaper to make as it requires no metal at all). Don't recall any !Science! on the subject but if a gobbo can pierce chainmail easily, using a breastplate instead hardly makes a difference, i.e. the real problem lies somewhere else (training/numbers/additional !fun!).

If your civ has access to both gauntlets and high boots you can theoretically skip legware for the time being. So the third piece of armor is either of these two. Dwarves with missing foot can fully recover in time with a crutch while a severed motor nerve on hand is irreperable.

Thus my algorithm for equipping military in low metal embarks is:
weapon of the intended type made of the first metal that comes along or even bought at embark (can be replaced at any time)
wooden shields are cheap
40 units of leather at embark allow you to make leather armor and leather leggins fot two full squads (enough for the first year)

This makes your military/militia ready for combat almost instantaneously if needed. Once you have your forge set up:
helm of the best metal available at the time, when faced with a dilemma whether to upgrade just make more helms
then chain mail of any metal
then gauntlets
then high boots

Military equipped at this stage should have little problems dispatching goblins provided you don't delay training too much. I would still avoid undead and other sources of fun though. This basic setup requires 5 bars of metal per soldier (to fully clad one you need 10 bars). And this is pretty much all that is necessary. It is better to equip more squad members than send half you army armored to the teeth and the other half naked. After a few caravans it is easy to equip your whole army (or at least the competent part) in full steel even with no metal on site.

Thanks for taking the time to post a comprehensive reply about your strategies!

With all the gold I have at my embark, I've been able to buy all the armor-grade metal that the human and dwarf caravans brought in the second year.  So I have some metal to work with now at least, though it's taking forever to get it all melted down.

I'm glad I learned about mail shirts being as good as breastplates before I started making breastplates. Those things take a lot of bars.

So far I have enough iron and steel armor to completely outfit about four dwarves. More if I use the bronze armor I bought.  So I guess it's time to start training them now...

[Garath]

if you have magma smelters, consider buying weapon grade metal everything. Toys, cooking pots, iron cages and other metal uselessness (make glass cages... or lead, or gold) can be easily melted down. Diamonds encrusted on the toy boat will be destroyed though

[Walen]

I'm glad I learned about mail shirts being as good as breastplates before I started making breastplates. Those things take a lot of bars.

Well it is not exactly what I meant to convey. Breastplates are better than mail shirts against damage that hits upper/lower body (chainmail covers more body parts), if only because according to raws mail shirts are armor class 2 while breastplate is armor class 3 and on top of that a hard target which is supposed to give additional protection against blunt damage. Breastplate+mail shirt is even better. Mail shirts are merely good enough most of the time. My point is early on if chainmail is not able to keep your recruits alive then breastplating will most likely not solve the real cause of the problem.

In other words. If cave wheat is plentiful you can make both beer and flour. When operating under limited resources economy sacrifices have to be made, as any sane dwarf faced with a dilemma: get drunk or not starve to death has his priorities straight.

[m-logik]

I'm a little late to the party here, but I wanted to note that my experience has shown that it's better to have a few dwarves in a full suit of armor than a bunch of dwarves with partial suits. Helms and mail shirts won't save a dwarf who passes out from the pain of a broken toe. I would take three dwarves wrapped head to toe in steel over twenty with a steel helm and mail shirt any day.

[Garath]

The benefit of the greater coverage has been underplayed. A chain shirt will also cover upper arms, upper legs and the throath. Together with gauntlets and high boots, that will completely cover the arms and legs, which is one of the most common cases of early deaths and maimings - hamstringed and cut down, arms lost or mangled beyond use, etc. Compared to that, the extra protection a steel breastplate offers over steel chain isnt actually that much, especially if the enemy will only have iron weapons.

Added to this is that most likely your crew isnt terribly good at moving in armor yet (armor use). Giving them the heaviest armor - the maximum they can use is kinda ridiculous - just means they'll die slow instead of fast

As said in the previous post, it's a matter of situational choices. Sometimes numbers will carry the day, sometimes (more often) the better armor and weapons

Marksdwarves are still OP. Crossbow bolts that hit anywhere will do massive damage