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[assimilateur]

If you have a large amount of it, you can just crank out obsidian mugs and buy anything you want from traders.

Better to just "crank out" roasts and "buy anything you want from traders" with them. Not only are the logistics easier, but you can also save your valuable obsidian for furniture or macuahuitl broadswords, i.e. something useful. "Mwahaha".

[HammerHand]

On Military:

I actually could never stand my Marksdwarves.  Even when I set up a proper archery target for them, they would often either completely ignore it (perhaps due to their personality?  It was early in my DF days and I wasn't checking that sort of thing at the time) or decide it wasn't a proper archery target after all (despite my continuous double-checking to make sure).  This led to marksdwarves that would habitually miss, or simply aim at goblins that would run out of their field of fire.  Then I have all these annoying bolts everywhere, making little stacks of 1 that can't be stacked back to 10.  It's all very frustrating and somewhat unsightly.

So I don't make Marksdwarves.  My Dwarves go into combat the way Dwarves should:  In short, furious charges that end in glorious bloodshed.  Or, since I have a habit of not getting weapons production underway for a long, long time, short, furious charges that end in glorious knots, broken limbs, choke-holds, and brutal throws.

Point being:  Given a second soldier to spar with, and enough time to get good at what they're doing, ANY soldier Dwarf will make short work of Goblins.  ... It's whether or not he comes back unscathed that can take some work. 

But hey, if you can get Marksdwarves to work, it is my impression that they're considerably efficient, particularly in regards to coming back unscathed.  Maybe I'll give them another try in my next fortress.

[Ashery]

Regarding military:

The problem with marksdwarves is that they require a constant stream of wood or bone bolts that they use for training purposes. Even with massive goblin sieges (~75 dead goblins each siege, modded to size 7 (Normal is 6, iirc)) and ~120 female animals constantly breeding I wasn't able to keep up with the training demands of my eight marksdwarves (I had five bonecarvers running around the clock at one point). After the production peak, I managed to have 3-4k odd bone bolts stockpiled, possibly more, but when I checked a season later I was already down around 1.5k despite a steady stream still being made.

The problem with dwarves using melee weapons, however, is that they require an armor industry to be up and running if you have any intention of your dwarves to remain free of nerve wounds. Leather is easy to get up and running quickly (Caravans can bring obscene amounts of leather) and works well for early sparring sessions, but don't expect dwarves to do all that well in actual combat with only leather armor.

You also have the additional problem of weapons amplifying the damage potential to your sparring military. It is for this reason that many people train weaponless for varying periods of time before giving their military actual weapons to train with (I wait for my first wave of recruits, eight total, to all hit champion level before giving them weapons). Weapons choice also matters significantly in terms of what wounds you get while sparring. I consider blunt weapons to be the safest bet as a possible increase in nerve damage is better than a severed limb or mangled internal organs, but, again, this is a personal choice of mine. Lack of severed limbs also makes siege cleanup easier. That, and I love watching the goblins go flying across my currently dry moat and slamming into the wall.

Ultimately, however, it can all boil down to training dwarves with melee weapons and placing all/most of the dwarves that have nerve damage into marksdwarf squads. Or if a dwarf sparred enough to reach reasonable skill levels, putting him on permanent guard at your front gate.

As far as effectiveness goes, both are very effective. Wound potential is actually rather small once you're in exceptional steel plate, the problem is finishing the fight before your dwarf tires to the point where he is no longer able to defend himself. I remember watching one of my low level legendaries (Only reached the normal level with hammers) holding off six or seven goblins without taking much damage, but, over time, he became tired, over-exerted, and eventually he just flat out passed out, and only then did he start accumulating serious injuries and eventually die.