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[Xehon]

Alright, after repelling a few pathetic goblin sieges, I started thinking about the Future of my military, as I'm certain the goblin sieges are going to get tougher and I'm not only forgoing the use of traps, but gates and the like as well. This means that my only real defense is my military, who have to defend the fort without any slack.
Currently my fortress is 92 dorfs strong with 21 children, 6 nobles and 18 military dorfs. 15 marksdorfs and 3 melee dorfs. My plans are to create a larger melee division, but my military is starting to infringe on the civilian population, inhibiting production. So I'm thinking of starting a draft army, side by side my standing army. Draft army being a army in which my civilian population, or at least a part of it, receives military training, but remains inactive until needed. Has anyone experimented with draft armies here?
Since low skill drafted(can't train them as much because elite and champion dorfs can't be deactivated) melee dorfs are likely to be easy targets for the goblins, I'm thinking of moving my standing army from the marksdorf brigade into the melee division and making the marksdorf brigade predominantly a part of the draft army. How effective are draft army marksdorfs? Will their lower skill degrade their aim a lot and are they easy to manage? How quickly will a draft army respond to a threat? Any tips?

[Tormy]

If you are playing with the vanilla game, even your "draft" army should be able to kick the ass of the invaders. [If they have "mediocre" armors and weapons at least, so don't draft naked dwarves.. ] Anyway, just train 20-25 marksdwarvers [if you don't want to use traps/defense mechanisms etc], and the siegers won't stand a chance. 

[Shades]

A handful of marksdwarfs will be short work of practically any attacker. Your only worry is other ranged units. Playing without marksdwarfs can be fun too but very hard when they bring ranged troops in.

[betamax]

I figure that the best method for creating goblin-fodder (not quite what you want, I know), would be to just arm some dwarves with spears and maybe shields. The stabbing properties of spears means that even a weak attack can pierce vital organs, so even untrained dwarves should be able to kill or injure at least one thing before they die, rather than just the light bruising they'd give with a hammer or mace.

For a draft army, I'd recommend having a few dwarves trained in wrestling, use of a melee weapon, and the small amount of shield- and armour-use they'd pick up from this. Arm and armour them with iron weapons, shield, and a bit of armour (e.g. mail and helm). Your main army should just be crossbowdwarves. The point of the melee dwarves is to hold the enemy up before they get pincushioned, and thus, they can be a drafted militia.

[Martin]

Sounds like you have 30 dwarves supporting the entire fortress. That *should* be enough as the military really only needs food/booze.

I've got a rather large sprawling fortress with 72 dwarves, only 32 of which are productive (the rest military, nobles, or kids). They have no problem feeding everyone (I do a 30 lavish/30 booze run every year or two and keep a 4x4 farm going all the time), and I can't do everything at once, but I have no problem keeping 1-2 dwarves on skilling tasks (I'm currently skilling up my gem cutter and glass maker).

The worst problem is when the military does their thing and I have to haul all of the gobbo crap. Simply moving where I engage the enemy closer to my trade depot has helped considerably. But I've only got 2 marksdwarves in training and 4 melee (2 legendary wrestlers, 2 legendary wrestlers/hammer) and they have no problem at all holding off the 3-4 ambushes I get each season. I've yet to face a legendary ranged gobbo, though. Been lucky there.

I only have one set of traps as last resort (never been used) though I do have a pair of drawbridges I can close to control matters somewhat - but one of them is always open. I should think you would have no problem at all with the force you currently have if you deploy them well.

The problem with draft armies is that they will be unarmed/unprotected when you deploy them. By the time a dwarf gets his armor on and grabs a crossbow and a quiver and ammo, the siege will have crossed a 3x3 map. Since you have no drawbridge to raise while everyone gets dressed, I'd just give up on that as a useful option. Realistically, expect them to engage unarmored and possibly unarmed (keep woodcutting on as a skill and at least they'll always have an axe on them) and expect them all to die. You have the added concern that any good draftee will hit elite status before you know it and you won't be able to reincorporate them into your labor pool. Dwarves skill up very fast in actual combat.

Instead, I'd add war dogs to your military in a major way - cage+lever at key points, that kind of thing. They can really tie up an attacking army while your regular soldiers do their thing. Rather than depend on a draft army to handle sieges, I'd look for ways to move the battle to your favor. If you don't want to be able to cut off attack altogether, create choke points that blunt the effectiveness of ranged units and force the enemy into a narrow area that spreads them into a long line but opens into a large area where you have freedom of movement and can overwhelm with force. Unless as part of your challenge you want to engage on an open plain, in which case my only advise is to breed more, because the first siege of 25 ranged units with a legendary ranged leader will cut your melee guys down in nothing flat unless they are all legendary shield users and very well equipped.

[sev]

I once put many of my haulers in a military squad and would deactivate them from the military when I needed a lot of hauling done.  This turned out to be not-so-clever, as they would all get sad when they were returned to civilian duty with only military skills. 

When I do that with dwarves who have little-used but easily-trained civilian skills, though, it works much better.  So I get an extra squad or two of marksdwarves or wrestlers or whatever when I'm not needing whatever their skill is, and I can pull them out of the military when I decide to do a batch of clothing, or supplement my food supply with fishing, or whatever.  This way they're armored and have weapon in-hand much of the time.

What skills are "little-used" for my forts tend to vary based on the resources at hand and the size of my fort.  So, sometimes I'll have a squad of formerly-little-used dwarves with basic military skills I can draft in a real emergency, plus another squad of dwarves that are most of the time in the military but I can un-draft them in a work-crunch.

In my current fort, everybody's in a  squad, and I activate their squad whenever a civilian dwarf encounters an ambush. But that's because I'm trying to incite some Fun.

(edit: grammar is hard!)

[Time Kitten]

I find that having my woodcutters and miners spar to adept wrestling tends to give me a stron and fast strike team (the miners) and a martial trance kill crazy outdoor patrol (my current woodcutter has quite a many kills of kobolds and monkeys so far.. waiting to pit him against an ambush.

[Cheshire Cat]

training miners and woodcutters a bit in wrestling sounds a great idea, especially very early game.

also, arming a whole horde of unskilled dwarves with spears is pretty good, but champions do worse with spears then other weapons, especially when facing large numbers. spears get stuck very easily, and unless the spears owner has chanced an instantly fatal organ pierce, then he just stands there twisting his weapon for round after round while everything around him beats him to death. i was horrified to have my little group of five champions, with over 100 kills each, go down to a standard group of goblin swordsmen after i trained and equipped them with spears.

vanilla df hand to hand combat champions with good wrestling, armor, shield and wearing plate will kill anything easily. you only need to set a tiny number of dwarves to train, start in wrestling with shields and armor before weapons to avoid injury, and stay away from picks and spears. to take on ranged just hide them around a corner inside your entrance and wait for the enemy to come in close.

[(name here)]

This reminds me of an old question: what weapons are best for the various enemies?

IIRC, swords and axes beat orcs best because they can chop off limbs for the kill often, but i don't know about anything else.

[Time Kitten]

I mix my weapons.  Swords and axes make up the main killing force of my military.  In-training wrestlers pile and distract larger and less numerous enemies.  Spear or pick recruits hope for insta-death criticals, or slow opponents with pain. Finally, hammerers patrol near cliffs, and rush anything that severs on break.  And, of course, my fortress menaces with spikes of sniper towers.

[numerobis]

I've never really needed more than 5 soldiers.  In fact, 2 is usually enough for battle; 5 just means I'm sure I have two in battle, two drinking, and one sleeping.  Decked out in full suits of masterwork steel armor, champions are almost impossible to hit.  I only need 2 so that if a goblin gets in behind the first champion, the second one can keep it from running into the fortress.  I keep a few extra champions around just in case a goblin should someday be able to touch my dwarf's heart.

One thing that helps is to make sure that enemy archers have to go around a corner and then find themselves face to face with your soldiers.  No point making them waste their bolts that you could put to more productive use.

[kefkakrazy]

In my modded version (I keep one vanilla and one modded version), I've added orcs and gimped the striking power of ranged weapons (it's 30 slash damage, I think). Added to the fact that I consciously avoid the overuse of traps (having a single row of weapon traps is fine, that's just Dwarfy, even if it's steel buzzsaws that sling orc bits twenty tiles). Having an entryway lined with 50-deep cage traps is not fine at all.

Thus, my defense is mainly three things. Static traps (which still deal enough damage to bloody an invading force), machine traps (which I consider fair game and use unrestrictedly, since the complexity of setting them up balances out the fact that they are potentially far more destructive than basic traps), and defenders. I've found that hammerdwarves (and macedwarves?) are less likely to murder each other while sparring, so I usually have a good-sized squad of those. In my last fort, I started with axedwarves, but two of the three got nervous injuries from sparring, and the third one WOULDN'T STOP POPPING OUT BABIES. Yeah, they may be great armor, but the LAST thing you want is a champion axedwarf berserking in the middle of your fort because her baby took a bolt in the face.

This reminds me of an old question: what weapons are best for the various enemies?

IIRC, swords and axes beat orcs best because they can chop off limbs for the kill often, but i don't know about anything else.

I believe blunt weapons were supposed to be better for SEVERONBREAKS NOPAIN enemies like skeletal creatures and bronze colossi. For squishies, piercing is the win-spears and bolts tend to penetrate and destroy internal organs. As a tradeoff, spears have the highest chance of all of getting stuck in the wound, if I'm not mistaken. Swords and axes less so, and blunt weapons never get stuck in the wound.

Really, I guess they all have benefits. An axedwarf will leave PIECES strewn everywhere. A speardwarf is more likely to quickly take down a powerful monster, including a megabeast. A hammerdwarf will send a goblin flying twenty hexes, at which point they will slam into a wall and explode.

[Martin]

One last problem with hammerdwarves has to do with tactics and cleanup.

I try to draw the enemy close to the entrance - one, to minimize hauling all the crap away, and two, to get them in range of my ranged units. The problem with hammerdwarves is they'll sit close to the entrance, whallop some guy 20 tiles away, chase the flying body, spot the next guy in line, go another 10 tiles, hit him 20 tiles, spot the next lagger, and next thing I know, my champion is on the other side of the map taking on an entire ambush on his own, the ranged units are whistling in the wind, and my haulers now have a 150 tile walk to grab all the junk from the edge of the map. I'd just as soon had him cut the guy in half and stay by the entrance, though it's wicked fun watching the gobbo explode after getting launched by a hammer blow.

[Cheshire Cat]

hah, yeah, i do hope that thing where they chase flying enimies around the place gets fixed up sometime soon. ive had champions get into random fights with fish in the middle of a siege from trying to chase flying victims across the river. and they tend to run off and get isolated, not that it really matters with champions unless there are a lot of ranged enimies running around.

also, i have to reassert after kefkakrazy's comment, spear wielding champions are not a great idea. i decided to crosstrain my tiny military of champions in spears, thinking they would be better against megabeasts, only when i unleashed my newly legendary spear champions against a horde of goblins they were nearly all killed by a standard group with swords. unless they chance an instantly fatal blow against their target, they nearlly allways get the spear stuck, wherapon they stand there twisting it and ignoring the rest of existance while the goblin horde around them beats them to death. in my case i only saved the one last champion by setting her to wrestling, wherapon she took out the entire goblin siege. all my champions get legendary wrestling standard.

i can well imagine spears would be great against single big foes, or in the hands of a mass of untrained recruits, as they each would be more likely to get a kill, but champions do better with any other weapon including their bare hands.

[(name here)]

Yeah, spears aren't an army weapon. They're good for a draft army, i'd think, because it takes minimal training to get a lucky heart crit, but for every lucky crit there is an unlucky getting stuck in an arm and then some.

As for the overall debate, i think a standing army is far far better. I've seen single weaponmasters just SHRED low-training guys. In deathquest, for instance, i lost nearly the entire half-trained melee division and fort/royal guard taking out a seige, an excessive number of them to a mounted spearmaster who delivered killing blows and rode off laughing.

Don't take that as a ringing endorsement of spears, since i think that was a local leader and he mostly stabbed once and ran.