Things are fairly relaxed at Rapidwhip now, a new migrant wave brought us to 76 citizens, and 27 military. The 7 new recruits have been put on troglodyte duty to get them use to their new maces, while the 20 veterans deal with a new wave of ice wolves above ground. Still no armour-worthy metals, not even copper, so things are looking bad when the goblins decide to check up on us, but against the local wildlife the scraps of metal from caravans mixed with leather and some shield training is working fairly well. Last year I requested all the chain and plate armour the mountainhome can spare so the caravan next month will be a welcome sight for our military, I also requested as many metal bars of weapon and armour quality as they can spare, even copper mail would be an improvement for most of our leather-clad defenders.
Update:
for f***'s sake I am never doing this melee only thing with no armour ores again, I am getting wrecked by about a dozen goblins, 4 lashers with silver whips, 2 spearmen who died almost instantly, and 6 marksgobs who's bolts have no problem penetrating leather... -.-;; the only ones surviving are my veterans who have decend shield skill and what little metal armour we've gathered, the military of 27 is already down to 18, with a few heavily wounded, and the fight isn't over yet... we're a bit screwed...
update2:
Well, we won, sorta.. 14 left from the military (so 13 of our least trained recruits are dead) and 5 civilians died... Seems no one popular died though, so maybe we can salvage this, no one is unhappy save the injured who can't do too much harm from the hospital beds, otherwise everyone is fairly content. We're still screwed if they send a larger group next time, but at least the better trained of our forces have shown they can survive a hail of arrows and lashes from silver whips, and now we have some spare metal bits and pieces to melt down.