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[Kioku]

I've been at this for a few years, and I like to think that I have an at least competent (if not skilled or proficient) grasp of the game... except in military matters, since I've never managed to really form one and get it to do anything.  That's planning to change this time around, but there are a few things I'd quite like cleared up first.

1) I used to like to try giving my military dwarves leather shirt and trousers under their armor, but then I ended up using a civ that doesn't have shirts... in fact the only upper body clothing they had was dresses (and cloaks, of course).  "Okay," I think to myself, "I can't really imagine how they'd be able to wear a dress under their armor, but it *is* on the 'under' layer according to the wiki, and look at that coverage!"  Unfortunately, I never got to test this out, since I got tired of that fortress before actually setting up a military, but the question remains: can Dwarves wear dresses under armor, and does it only count as upper body slot-wise, or can they wear trousers at the same time?

2) Leather is a pain to produce.  Almost all of mine comes from either trading with caravans, or locking up a bunch of fowl to let their eggs hatch, then slaughtering the lot.  Add to that, I need it for backpacks and quivers, and sometimes possibly light armor to go under the mail (my glass industry nearly every game is well up to the task of making vials though, so no waterskins). Fabric, by contrast, I can make a ton of - the question is, then, is it worth it to get leather clothes on my dwarves under their armor at all, or is cloth "good enough" to use instead?  Even if I do end up with cloth clothes, what about the cloaks - is a leather cloak that much better than a cloth one?

3) Obsidian short swords.  Are they remotely good?  Relates directly to 4.

4) Is there a way to make civilians carry a weapon?  I plan on training every dwarf in my fortress up to Adequate or Competent in at least one of Wrestler/Striker/Kicker, but I'd like to get them the same in Swordsman if they will, in fact, keep themselves armed.

[PatrikLundell]

1. Clothing under armor doesn't provide much in the way of additional protection. Since clothing is subject to wear, and militarily assigned clothing won't be replaced until it literally falls off the body of the dorf, I don't bother with anything but a cloak. Armor over civilian clothing basically doesn't work, both because of equipment bugs (wearing only one boot, etc) and because some civilian clothing items block the usage of armor (shaped item conflicts).
I generally provide my civilians with a full set of clothing, i.e. dress, pants, etc. (10 production orders). I would expect a dress to be innermost on the top of the body but outside of the pants.

2. I don't produce any leather clothing at all. My leather goes into armor and backpacks, plus water skins if I don't have access to glass. I've seen someone role playing by making leather shoes. However, native leather production for clothing is not really viable, since you're going to get an explosive increase in the food storage requirements from all the meat byproducts (and cave blobs can't be bred). I don't bother with the difference between a leather and a cloth cloak either.

3. Obsidian swords are supposed to be fairly decent, and definitely better than nothing. Just don't make the mistake I did the first time, to think they are made from obsidian; the wood requirement was a nasty surprise for me, as I only had a single tree on my embark at the time....

4. Yes and no... You can't make civilians carry weapons, but you can draft civilians into inactive squads and assign them weapons (and a shield, preferably feather-wood, worn "over clothing", with no armor assigned). [Note that wood cutters, miners, and hunters have an invisible "military" uniform for their tool/weapon which clashes with military drafting. Don't expect these professions to be draftable, even though some people claim to have sort of succeeded]. The problem with inactive squads is that they start to do individual training to the exclusion of almost all civilian work once they reach some level of proficiency. The way to block that unwanted training is to ensure they don't have any training facilities allocated. It's a bit of a pain to micro manage training by manually assigning and deassigning the squads to/from a training facility, but it does seem to work. In the new needs system, most dwarves seem to have a need to practice martial arts as well.

[Psieye]

Trying to do serious leather industry without modding or trade is unfeasible.

I suggest civilians (casual militia) carry crossbows instead of melee weapons. You can shoot through your own dwarves, so just have a heavy infantry squad 'tank' while 100 incompetent crossbowdwarves exercise Accuracy Through Quantity. No it won't work on all enemies.

[martinuzz]

2) I have a personal thing with ordering giant bat leather from the caravan and selling off any other type of leather.

ALL MY DWARVES ARE BATMAN. OR BATWOMAN, IF I CAN ONLY MAKE DRESSES

[Grimlocke]

I don't think leather has any qualities over cloth material-wise, so there is not all that much of a reason to insist on giving soldiers leathers shirts or dresses (also leather dresses sound really weird).

I like to give my citizens various types of daggers and a doublet, but that's mostly roleplay. Inactive-military civvies have no problems lugging a giant polearm everywhere they go.

You can also schedule training, which can get quite micromanage-y but it does let you give each group of civvies some time to swing weapons about without borking their productivity.

Also... martinuzz has made me imagine a horde of squat, beardy dwarves dressed as batwoman. Only on Bay12 

[Kioku]

Very helpful. XD  I suppose the rotting clothes thing is a bit more of a problem than just ignoring under-armor then, and my task now is to leave all the leather to backpack/quiver/armor duty only (and maybe shoes!) and make good use of all these dimple cups.  Assign some blue cloth cloaks if I feel like being fancy.  (Actually wait, is a waterskin lighter weight than a glass vial?)

If the civies can't carry weapons without the potential of going off to do individual training while off duty... ehh, getting them to learn dodging is the most important part really, so I'll have them gain some unarmed skills and then let them go do their thing.  Don't expect them to actually fight anyway, it's mostly just in case wild animals or sneaky ambushers come after the fishers / woodcutters / herbalists / someone else who works outside.

I re-read after that and why didn't I think of just un-assigning the barracks after they're trained to a certain level?  I think I'd want to assign a cloak to be worn over clothing as part of the uniform, just for a little extra protection, and... honestly this is for equal amounts self-defense ability, training up attributes, and roleplay, or else I'd hand them all wood crossbows and a quiver of copper bolts (I managed to find an embark with a volcano, next to a stream, in a forest, with tons of native copper/hematite/galena).

... Also I do like the image of Batdwarf.

[Kneenibble]

Trying to do serious leather industry without modding or trade is unfeasible.

I cannot agree with this: cave creatures are disgustingly fecund.  Capture and tame a few cave crocodiles, giant olms, and voracious cave crawlers, get them breeding, and you will be slaughtering and tanning non-stop.

[PatrikLundell]

Good luck tanning croc hides... They're scales, and can't be used for the time being.

Also, to get the number of hides you need for a clothing industry you need to slaughter 5 animals per year per dwarf (assuming you equip them with with clothing for all 10 dwarf available clothing production slots). The amount of excess meat and bone from this is enormous, and just the hauling of all that will have a rather negative impact on your work force ability to do productive work, even if you atom smash/magma dump all/most of the food, bone, cartilage, etc.
To top things up, all those animals will have a significant negative effect on your FPS (the pathing cost of the pig tail plants, in contrast, is zero, and each plant will give you 1-5 pieces of cloth, with only seeds as additional hauling, although you need to thresh and weave the plants rather than the single tanning step for hides).

Thus, I'd say it's not completely unfeasible, just utterly ridiculous.

[Kneenibble]

Good luck tanning croc hides... They're scales, and can't be used for the time being.

Also, to get the number of hides you need for a clothing industry you need to slaughter 5 animals per year per dwarf (assuming you equip them with with clothing for all 10 dwarf available clothing production slots). The amount of excess meat and bone from this is enormous, and just the hauling of all that will have a rather negative impact on your work force ability to do productive work, even if you atom smash/magma dump all/most of the food, bone, cartilage, etc.
To top things up, all those animals will have a significant negative effect on your FPS (the pathing cost of the pig tail plants, in contrast, is zero, and each plant will give you 1-5 pieces of cloth, with only seeds as additional hauling, although you need to thresh and weave the plants rather than the single tanning step for hides).

Thus, I'd say it's not completely unfeasible, just utterly ridiculous.

That is ridiculous, but there's a pretty broad ground between a leather industry being serious and it supplying every possible piece of clothing for every dwarf in a fort.

[Niddhoger]

That is ridiculous, but there's a pretty broad ground between a leather industry being serious and it supplying every possible piece of clothing for every dwarf in a fort.

Pretty much.  Supplying just shoes and a cloak is 2 pieces of clothing every... 3? years for your dorfs.  This isn't too bad as its just ~120 leather a year after you get one-time costs (backpacks/quivers) out of the way.  However, even using low meat-yield animals (like fowl) will still give you so much food as to completely replace your need to farm AND THEN SOME. 

So long as a f*cking ELEPHANT and kitten give the same amount of leather, we are going to have a problem with domestic leather production.  The only "feasible" way to get a thriving leather industry is to import most of the pieces.  Otherwise, you WILL drown in food even with shutting off non-booze/textile production on your farms.  You can also buy quivers/backpacks as their quality really doesn't matter. 

So when the liaison comes a-knocking, just ask to import extra leather.  With DFHack, you can shift+left/right to increase the priority of all leather types.  Its one of the only things I ask for the liaison for consistently. 

[MobRules]

Yup. I import crazy amounts of leather, both from the Mountainhome and from the humans (buy all the humans' leather at 100% profit, and they'll bring a huge amount next year)

[krenshala]

So long as a f*cking ELEPHANT and kitten give the same amount of leather, we are going to have a problem with domestic leather production.

Can the butcher job be modified to output different amounts of leather for different sized creatures via the raws?  I know the output for other things can be manipulated that way.  For those willing to put in the work (or download the raws from someene that does) that should be a viable way to 'fix' leather creation issues.  I haven't done much with the raws, however, so it is possible (probable, even) that this is not a setting than can be changed that easily.

Personally, I think it should be tied to creature size -- the bigger it is, the more leather it produces. e.g., 1 "peice" of leather for every 1000 size, round down.  Assuming an adult dwarf is 60k size (iirc) this is probably still to low, but I think you get the idea.

[slashnul]

I did something similar recently.  A few versions ago I had a fort in an reanimating glacier embark.  Undead were much stronger and I had to keep everyone armed 24/7.  The only embark resource was ice and flux.  An occasional caravan made it through, and I made a tree farm.  It was enough for me to get access to magma and plenty of wood for obsidian swords.  The leather items that count as armor and wont decay are leggings, boots, helm, leather armor.  I started by putting everyone in a squad and giving them leather boots, leather shields, and obsidian short swords as they became available.  My clothiers only made socks, shirts, trousers and cloaks... and let everyones shoes decay... otherwise theyd never equip their boots.  Once I got a squad equipped I gave them some basic combat training and deactivated (not disband) them from the Military Screen and also made sure no barracks had them as Training.  They'll wear that uniform indefinitely, perform like regular civilians, but when attacked will use their shield to block, and sword to kill if theyre brave.  You can expand that uniform to include leggings and leather armor if you want to reduce the workload on the clothiers, but youll still need non-leather cloaks.  It'll give them happy thoughts to put on something nice from time to time anyways.  But to get them to check to see if they should add or modify their uniform you have to add their squads to another active barracks and activate them again.  Once theyre equipped. just Free the barracks.  As for the leather I used turkeys, geese, and chickens.  It takes time but its not so bad.... butchering was always fun.  My butcher squad saw more action than my military dwarves.  Oh, and obsidian short swords are excellent against normal sized creatures... just dont expect to decapitate a forgotten beast with one.

[PatrikLundell]

I believe adjusting leather to take creature size into consideration is one of the "some time in the future" DF tasks for Toady. However, to do it properly you'd have to somehow decide how big pieces you can get out of a hide to determine if it's fit for a particular purpose, and decide what to do with the excess. Of course, you could just assume smaller pieces are stitched together, and just measure pieces of leather in square centimeters. I think you'd then end up with something similar to how bars of soap can be partial, but in a more complex manner. You'd also have to decide what you'd call the leather glove made out of leather from 5 different creatures.

I can also add that apparently, leather armor DOES decay, but it seems to take about 30 years to decay to the x level.

[mgotthard]

I believe adjusting leather to take creature size into consideration is one of the "some time in the future" DF tasks for Toady. However, to do it properly you'd have to somehow decide how big pieces you can get out of a hide to determine if it's fit for a particular purpose, and decide what to do with the excess. Of course, you could just assume smaller pieces are stitched together, and just measure pieces of leather in square centimeters. I think you'd then end up with something similar to how bars of soap can be partial, but in a more complex manner. You'd also have to decide what you'd call the leather glove made out of leather from 5 different creatures.

I can also add that apparently, leather armor DOES decay, but it seems to take about 30 years to decay to the x level.

Morphologically, people and dwarves are essentially a torus (Or, if you ignore the mouth and anus, a sphere).  That means that surface area varies proportionately to height, and also to volume.   

Thr correct (and simple) relationship to use for DF to determine number of bits of leather is basically the relationship of the volume of a sphere to its surface area.

Surface area = 4 Pi r squared
Volume =  4/3 Pi r cubed

So, as radius goes from 1 => 2 => 3
Volume goes from 1.333 => 10.3333 = 36.0
surface area goes from 4 => 16 => 36

Put another way, if a size 1,000 chicken yields 1 leather, a size 10,000 (mutant) chicken should yield 4 leather. And an emu (size 35,000) maybe 9 leather.

Easy enough to program that relationship in.