There are very few high quality foreign weapons in the average dwarf fortress world. Once I start produce masterwork steel weapons, almost all non-dwarves in my fortress swap weapon to a dwarven made one. A grand master lasher is one of the few exceptions. A morning star is nice, but everyone likes masterwork maces better.
Steel weapons are preferred over other materials, even while silver works quite well for blunt weapons. Do not make steel warhammers or maces if you want your dwarves to use the silver one, or you have to explicitly assign silver weapons.
The default uniforms have individual choice, melee for metal armor and individual choice, ranged for archer. I suggest changing the archer uniform to crossbow and changing leather shield/buckler to just shield. Having bow dwarves and no way to produce arrows is a problem you don't want to sort during a siege. Leather shields are just not durable enough.
Currently using the following squad setup:
Administrators: everyone with important jobs manager, broker and mayor that you do not want to be occupied all the time with training. Schedule to train last month only to keep somewhat happy (most dwarves want more training). Metal armor over clothing to be able to pickup jewelry and fulfill acquisition and be happy.
Workers: woodcutters, miners and sometimes hunters (normally I disable hunting). No uniform. This prevents messing up with the civilian uniform that comes with the job. No scheduled training. Manually activated when no work.
Melee squads: everyone not in another squad. Full metal armor - melee individual choice custom uniform. A few squads are set to train 10/12 months and have some offtime. Initially everyone trains to get at least some armor skill. Later most squads are set to train 3/12 months and armor over clothing as they are regular workers too.
After about 5 years the squads that train a lot will be weapon masters and start to name their weapon or shield. The other squads will be more than able to fight as well.
Archer squads. Full armor, crossbow. My archers shoot from behind fortifications. They do not need to be fast so they can pick up anything they like. Training on an archery target costs an insane amount of bolts. Training on the job is much and much faster. Training schedule depends on amount of bolts and life targets available, 10/12 if I can afford.
From a military perspective it works perfect. The few times civilians came unexpectedly in combat they had no problem dealing with the issues. Downside is that dwarves start to spend a lot of their free time to do individual training so much that jobs slow down.
When using armor over clothing dwarves often keep their regular shoes, caps and mittens on, preventing the armored versions. However it allows a dwarf to wear jewelry like rings and earrings that can make the dwarf happy. Not producing those clothing parts might help to get armor equipped, but creates other problems. There will be always dwarves, miners and children for example, that cannot be assigned to a uniform and will get unhappy without those clothes. A bit quirky at the least, deal with it in the way you like.
My dwarves that are likely to come into combat wear uniform replacing clothing to make sure they wear it all. When I can afford, I add cloak, hood, gloves and sock to the uniform. Like civilian clothes they will degrade. Like civilian clothes they can give good thoughts when replacing. The cloak and hood actually help sometimes to avoid serious damage too.
Just as with armor and weapons, clothing assigned to uniforms will be chosen in squad and rank order. First squad, position one will get the first choice. Last squad, last position is the one to check what the actual state of your armor/weapons/clothing is.
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Topic: weapon choices? (Read 6287 times)