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[Kanddak]

Tin appears to be rarer than coal ...

Cassiterite is very common but appears only in granite layers.

[Lord Darkstar]

You can buy all the steel junk from dwarves, do top request for flux stone and steel bars, and that will get you some small amounts from the dwarf merchants. I've found that with all my other requests levels down to just one notch, I can get 5 flux stone (marble) per dwarf caravan. Man, that's when you miss the wagons.

You can buy bronze goods off the humans, and melt that down to get bronze armor or weapons. Bronze is better than iron for bladed weaponmaking, so that's something.

Silver is your BEST bludgeoning weapon material, so make all your war hammers and maces out of it. In fact, if you have galena, you should have lots of silver available. Just outfit your early melee dwarves with silver hammers and whatever armor you can muster. Outfit them in iron if you can get that going quickly, and then replace the iron with bronze and steel as soon as you can. Should do alright. But your first bronze should go into battle axes, so you can get some militia that can chop off arms, legs, and heads.

Personally, I prefer to defend my dwarves through architecture, and only have a melee squad for beserking dwarves or visitors. Melee squads can be useful to go slaughter bothersome animals that disrupt the civilians due to their location, so I will often employ them in that capacity as well.

Since I know how to get my crossbowdwarves to get bolts, I prefer to have a squad of those around to shoot goblins that are hanging around my goblin grinder, so my fort can hurry up and get back to normal day to day business.

[sambojin]

You'll probably find that you don't really need steel in the game. Steel armour is better than bronze, but not by a huge amount. Just order as much steel, flux, tin, copper and bronze as you can off the caravans and you should be ok. And buy everything that you can afford made out of these things to melt down. Wood/lignite/bit. coal doesn't matter, you should have enough for fuel.

Limestone sort of kicks arse as a flux layer. You get flux, copper and silver. Which is enough to take down just about everything that isn't gigantic/FB/HFS stuff.

Copper picks, silver hammers, copper crossbows/bolts and a few random axes (and bronze armour if you can get it) and you'll be fine. Silver hammer traps as the first row or two for bone breaking, slice-y traps for the rest of your defense (cages to taste). Wooden shields are pretty effective too. If you can get some giant axes/2H swords/halberds/whips then grab them. Just for some variety and reach (for lopping off the heads of tall things).

Quantity counts for almost as much as quality in this game. And is a lot easier to get as well. A dwarf with a pick, a shield and a season's worth of mining is worth so much more than people realise.

[brucemo]

Coal doesn't appear just anywhere.  It appears in sedimentary layers, and you don't always get those.  Use the wiki to look up the stones you see when are you embarking.

If you don't find coal it is not the end of the world.  You can burn enough wood to get fuel to make a decent steel industry.

Flux is easier to find than coal, but you may have to dig for it.  On my current map I had to dig down 15 or 20 layers to find marble.

Beware of Fun if you dig deep.

[FleshForge]

Actually I'd say it's a lot easier to get a ton of wood/charcoal than it is to get coal, especially since the coal on the map is finite - for trees, it's just a matter of how much underground tree farm you're willing to dig out and irrigate, and how bad you want to piss off the elves.  Once you crack any cavern layer, underground flora will start to grow on any underground irrigated surface (also some soil layers but not all).  Each cavern layer has a different set of flora, and when you open all three, then all three can start growing everywhere suitable.