Well - lets pretend I removed adamantine from the RAWs then
What might be a better approach, rather than a different metal, is different equipments. Heavy Mountain Plate with upsetp and downstep and upper body step max or what ever is appropriate.
Problem with any new metal is - ensuring its existance does not basically make existing metals neugatory. This may be because of rarity (like bue steel needing ilmenite) or specialisation (neutronium basically isnt good for anything but blunt weapons). But if the metal is too much of a pain to create relative to its use - then the metal may as well not be in the game - my titansteel may fall into this trap.
Different equipments open up the possibility of somewhat contrived assembly - maybe Heavy Mountain Plate is made from an assortment of 'stuff' which must be made seperately. You even then have the possibility of having the finished product use the properties of a material that is itself never made anywhere - in order to tweak the qualities.
it isnt so much that I cant have gear for my dwarves at the start of year two - I can generally manage a whole magma powered industry and 4-6 sets of steel armour - it is more that the 4-6 'lucky' dwarves that get picked for the job tend to be complete novices. Fine against the smaller races, but the large and strong tigermen will push them over - they simply lack the skills to face several enemies at once without being flanked and eventually having someone get lucky. Or the dwarf is a moron and only picked up 2 bits of equipment - heck it seems to take a year sometimes just for a new recruit to finally collect all his stuff and put it on properly
Anyway - you are probably spot on that I should embark with more animals or something, just to pad out the early squads and provide extra food afterwards.
And as I mentioned, when your meager military is out on the field, and a goblin ambush slips in to cause havoc - well - I can just blame the elves for leading them here and start anew.
It doesn't help that I am something of a perfectionist. Walls need to be made from blocks, food industry needs to be churning along self sufficiently, and of course i've got to set up a nice mist generator or 2. I know I could do things differently - focus on traps and crude walls (and i've relented in my current game and the initial wall is rough stone - I'll rebuild parts of it asap though) but I think my current fort will do OK - I hit year 2 with I think 18 dwarves - I now have 6 dwarves training military skills, and the first large migration wave is due to hit which should provide the labour I need to finish off a couple of big projects before I revert to serious military training. My plan calls for about 1/3 to half of all dwarves to be military, although at any time about half of those will be 'off duty' to provide labour.
Still - now I have this urge to design and implement dwarven heavy plate - sigh - maybe I'll control myself long enough to get this fort killed before I do that. Dwarvern powered armour, with added rail guns and gravity hammers - hmmmm - where was that chaos forces mod?