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[wuphonsreach]

Short answer - use some traps to soften them up before they get to your melee squads.  Yes, I know you said "no traps", but that's like trying to fight with one hand tied behind your back.

Alternately - use a series of bridges / hatches that lets you draw your enemies in a few at a time while locking the rest out until you take care of the first few enemies.  That puts the numbers on your side where you can have 10 dwarves ganging up on 1-2 goblins at a time.

[JmzLost]

So how the hell do you defend against the first ambushes without traps and how does training realy work nowadays?

I do use traps, a few cages and some weapon traps.  Thin their numbers, and damage the rest.

How does training work?  Very slowly.  With the 2/3 squad setup you described, 2 dwarves will be training, and the third will be a civilian.  If you set the squad to "Inactive" all 3 will do individual combat drill.  Either way, it takes 2-3 years or more to get high skills.  Placing at least 1 dwarf with high skill in a squad, and setting a preference for that dwarf, will help train the other 2 up to his level quickly.  High teacher and student skills are also helpful, they accelerate the process.  You can also make squads of 2 dwarfs, minimum 2, and set them to train every month.  They will get unhappy thoughts, but they will train faster without a third dwarf to split the training with.

Danger rooms, especially with 10 training spears per trap, can produce legendary warriors in a couple of months.  Some people think it's too cheap or an exploit, but it's much easier than training 20 dwarfs in squads of 2 for several years.

Combat offers much more experience than training.  Set up a squad, issue a kill order on the local wildlife, update the kill order every time the target dies.  Or make a burrow that covers the surface, set the squad to "defend burrow", and let them go.  It would probably be best to use a 2/3 squad for that, with the third dwarf covering eating/drinking/sleeping.  A 4/5 or 4/6 squad would also work, and give you more dwarves in any particular fight.

JMZ

[Uristocrat]

1. My stupid Dwarfes wont stay inside my fortress.

Seriously, I tried everything. I have no Fishing/Hunting/Plantgathering Dwarf, I forbid everything, I created an underground forrest, underground water zones, wells and got full food stockpiles but my dwarfes still go outside. What do they do there?

They're probably looting dead people or gathering refuse or something.  Anyhow, you need a "safe parts of the fortress" burrow to assign your civilians to during a siege alert.  That will force them inside.

[Naryar]

Wall yourself in.

Or simply lurk more on the wiki. I lurked for months before joining this forum.

[GC1CEO]

Best bet, your dwarves have a better chance of survival if they work together so if possible station them all together before heading into battle. Even a small group of goblins can pick apart a lone dwarf or two.

Likewise use a bait solution, have a bunch of marksdwarves behind a wall and moat, doesn't have to be a large one with fortifications and lure them with a lone dwarf, have plenty of bolts and you can do some decent damage to the goblins. If they are wounded they are easier to kill. Especially if they have grasping or standing problems.

[Qwernt]

So, what are you producing your first year that has sieges early?  If you focus on just military equipment and don't worry about making everything posh, you shouldn't get stuff too early (assuming no mod).  Of course, one thing I do is limit the max number of dwarves to 30, which probably limits my first year exposure.

[Kogut]

Why without traps? There are good for new player.

[Kogut]

"1. My stupid Dwarfes wont stay inside my fortress."
Try burrows: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Burrow

[Guedez]

military usefull Metal on the other hand is.

I feel your pain... 

Search for Shallow Metal(S) (The S is not optional, just making sure you notice that it means more tham one)

It means limesotone(Actualy the sedimentary layer, but you get the drill), what means Magmetite(or something) clusters

have fun

[ShinWalks]

As mentioned before, you can postpone the arrival of the ambushes by holding your wealth production down (what on earth are you doing to get ambushed the first year, anyway?). But, to answer your question, if an ambush arrives when you aren't prepared to deal with it, lock the door. AI invaders have no ability to overcome simple physical obstructions. (If ambushers are getting inside your gates before they get revealed, you need to be keeping watch-animals chained up somewhere outside your control point.) If you lock invaders out, they will eventually get bored and go home.

While you're weathering their ineffectual siege, the danger room does indeed seem to be the prime way of training soldiers at present. Rather than assign a dwarf to pull a lever forever, I built my last one by connecting all the spike traps to a river-water logic repeater, which seems more dwarfy to me. (Read the wiki article on fluid logic, it's fascinating!) Once your soldiers are legendary fighters, dodgers, and shield users, they will have nothing to fear from ambushes or invasions.

[iyaerP]

Also, one very key thing to know about is proper fortress construction of your cutain walls so that your troops engage the enemy piecemeal rather than rushing out and chasing off a lone goblin into a bigger horde.


WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
W                                             W
W       (station dorfs in here)  W    W
                                         W    W
                                         W    W
W                                      W    W
W                                      W
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

With the Ws being walls, and the gap on the left being your fort's entrance to the cliff. Gap on right being entrance for gobbos.

By having a setup like this, you ensure that the goblins come in one or two at a time, and your dwarves gank them rather than the other way around. Also, I always make sure to start out with a military dorf on embark and have him as commander of the military from the first day. That way, by the time you have any enemies at all, he has trained himself to moderately awesome levels. Just assign meatshields recruits to him as migrants come in with worthless skills or weapon skills, and by the time you face serious threats from sieges and multi-ambushes, your original soldier should be able to murder his way through the whole enemy armies with ease.


Furthermore, if you have your barracks set to be in this entrance courtyard, all training time spent by your military will double as guard duty, and they will slaughter snatchers, kobolds or any other threat trying to sneak in without even breaking their training regimen.

[RTiger]

As for your dwarves not wanting to stay inside, as stated, use burrows.

Me, I make sure there is a way to lock down my fort as early as the first season. A siege/ambush eventually leaves on its own after a few seasons.

As for why your getting sieged so early, you could very well be in an embark that starts you at war with the goblins. If that is the case, expect to be attacked, a lot.

[Damien White]

I know how to use burrows, but unless you want to renew the burrows every 10 Minutes you have to deactivate the global alert. And once you did that your dwarfes will run outside. You cant define burrows for over 100 dwarfes and watch every time if the new migrants(childs got the right burrow etc. Also I like to change the labors of my dwarfes pretty often, cause most the time I get useless dwarfes like Soap Makers/Engraver as Migrants.

And if your dwarfes stay outside at least two will get killed by the next ambush or siege. This causes tantrums and your fortress is history.


Thats another problem, once one dwarf gets killed I loose my fortress during the folowing tantrum spiral. Its kinda strange, my dwarfes alls live in legendary bedrooms (8x1, engraved, statue, bed, chest, table, chair, armorstand, weaponrack) have tons of different food and at least 4 types of alcohol. All meeting halls (at least one dining room, one study room, one statue hall and one meeting area around 4 wells), stock piles etc are fully engraved, stone stairways and so on. On one map I was forced to produce nearly 50% of my furniture out of gold (I digged out some bedrooms and all I got was gold... why gold and no magnetite etc >.<"...) but I still lost my fortress to a tantrum.

The wiki says my fortress should be as luxury as possible to reduce the chance of a tantrum, but what if my fortress was to luxury? I mean my dwarfes live like kings (except my baron, who has a 10x10 bedroom) so they may get realy pissed if something happens what doesnt confirm with their snobbish charakter.


When do you start to engrave you walls? Do you think there is a maximum level of luxury for your fortress wich fires back if you overdo it?



Anyway, the tip with the lever - dangerroom was great, I got 5 axelords and 6 hammerlords within the first year (And also ~20 killed puppys/kittens and 4 killed babys). All 20 of my military dwarfes are at least proficient weaponusers, armorusers and dodgers. Now, in year 3, there was still no ambush, just one bronze golem and he is caged for "Fun purpose".

[wuphonsreach]

I know how to use burrows, but unless you want to renew the burrows every 10 Minutes you have to deactivate the global alert. And once you did that your dwarfes will run outside. You cant define burrows for over 100 dwarfes and watch every time if the new migrants(childs got the right burrow etc. Also I like to change the labors of my dwarfes pretty often, cause most the time I get useless dwarfes like Soap Makers/Engraver as Migrants.

You're entirely missing the point of how to use the Military alert screen.

1) Define burrows covering the safe portions of your fortress
2) Go to the alert screen, click <enter> on the left column so that the <CIV> tag moves down to the Active/Train (or create a new alert)
3) In the right-hand column for that alert level, turn on the burrows where civies are safe
4) Profit.

When a military alert is in force, your civies will not leave the areas covered by the activated burrows.  Which allows you to force them inside with a handful of keypresses, gets them away from bridges (so you can close them without losses), forces them to cancel any active tasks that would take them outside the burrow boundaries, etc.

[Damien White]

I know...

But unless you know there is an ambush the allert is offline. Otherwise you have to change the burrows everytime you expand your fortress. And if there is an ambush the goblins usually appear next to a dwarf or an animal next to a dwarf.