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[Eric Blank]

Yes.  Just remember that military and mining don't mix, so they need to be assigned as one or the other.  Unless you WANT them to take off all their clothes, throw away their picks, and run into battle naked 

JMZ

Same with woodcutters and hunters.

The trick here is to station your part-time squads well behind your initial defenses to form up before actually sending them to attack. This involves having some other form of defense to hold back the enemy until the military is ready, but you should already know better than to rely on these dolts to actually do their jobs properly no matter how experienced. Their mining/cutting/hunting weapon is NOT the one assigned for combat, so you have to let them prepare themselves first. They always drop unnecessary gear(in their little minds) and run out to their station first, then, if not fully prepared and not yet engaged, run back inside and arm themselves. I see a lot of complaints about that, but I can only ever complain when I don't actually have the equipment made. This will also prevent them from charging into battle one at a time and being overwhelmed individually.

[Jake]

I've actually noticed that miners, when in squads set to "inactive = civilian clothes", will put picks back in the stockpile when they're not actually digging. This could potentially at least mitigate the problem, as long as you keep a few spare picks around.

[morikal]

So in more testing, it really does appear that picks are superior, so... how do I prevent regular miners from grabbing the picks I intend to use for military service? (Is there a way that doesn't have me manually forbidding & unforbidding things?)

I don't suppose I can make a "practice" pick eh? I don't like danger rooms...

Maybe I'll stick with swords, spears, and hammers for a bit.

[Lagslayer]

So in more testing, it really does appear that picks are superior, so... how do I prevent regular miners from grabbing the picks I intend to use for military service? (Is there a way that doesn't have me manually forbidding & unforbidding things?)

I don't suppose I can make a "practice" pick eh? I don't like danger rooms...

Maybe I'll stick with swords, spears, and hammers for a bit.

Disable mining on your civilians and make sure you military chooses first. Also, it's a good idea to train your military in another weapon skill first to prevent bad thoughts like "Urist has complained about the draft" or "Urist has been enraged by long patrol duty" (I had a military dwarf who liked picks, so I trained him up to spearlord first, then gave him an adamantine pick afterwords). Mining doesn't count as a military skill, unfortunately. The only drawback is that the dwarf might become attached to the temporary weapon before you give him back his pick.

[Alastar]

Whips are strange in the game. They are far too effective - normally, they should wound and bleed unarmored foes, but should have serious difficulties to cause major injuries (unless eyes, throat, etc are hit). Against armored foes should be near worthless.

Agreed, and here's why: the game doesn't acknowledge that whips are flexible and erroneously puts the weight of the entire weapon behind the tip moving at supersonic speeds. A crude fix would be to reduce size to 1-5... too easy to lug around but combat performance would be more reasonable. Whips would still be very good at incapacitating via pain, but not very deadly and stopped effectively by armour.

[Carrock]

It's going back to page one, but I've just had an artefact gold crossbow made. Now I just need some way of trying out its bashing effectiveness, using my single marksdwarf. He's usually just there to snipe at goblins as they come around the walls to the entrance straight into my axedwarf squad - which unfortunately at the moment only consists of two who are any good, two recruits to replace forgotten beast victims, and one hopping around with a crutch. I look forward to seeing if that'll get used as an improvised weapon; he's holding a shield in the same hand as it.

I suppose he should be safe trying it out in the execution arena. It's got some goblin bone decoration to really make the point (this could be one of my favourite ever artefacts).