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[Lord_Phoenix]

-how do I bury dead animals? They show up in the "u" menu, cluttering it.
-can I diagnose and heal wounded animals?
-four of my injured soldiers have infections (bloody golbins with silver whips). Will they survive?
-can I make a trap with a whip? It sounds really silly...
-I am finally making (copper...) plate armor for my dwarves. Do I need to individually forge both greaves/gauntlets/boots/ecc., or "build greaves" means that 2 will be made from the same lingot?

1.  They'll usually just go on the trash pit, they will never disappear from the units menu (along with all other dead creatures), but dead things do get shoved to the bottom.  You can build coffins for the pets and they will be put inside, but not strays.  You have to specify the coffin to be used for burial, and you can toggle whether they should be used for citizen or pet burial or both.
2.  Don't think so.  They'll just drag their crippled butts all over the place or lay there til they die.
3.  Possibly.  If you have soap then they'll try and limit the infections.
4.  Yes.  Weapon trap.  Should be able to use any weapon in a weapon trap.
5.  No, one gauntlet job produces 2 gauntlets, same for boots.  Greaves are like a pair of pants.

[Noir]

Thank you for your answers. Can anyone answer this?

"More complex question: can I define multiple burrows on alert? The idea is that a small room will have all the levers, and that one (better two) dwarf mechanics will be assigned to that room during sieges, attacks, ecc.
The room has food and a lockable floor hatch. If I manually assign the burrow coinciding with it during an alert, I guess it will overlap with the normale "emergency" burrow for everyone else. How will it work?"

[Lord_Phoenix]

Thank you for your answers. Can anyone answer this?

"More complex question: can I define multiple burrows on alert? The idea is that a small room will have all the levers, and that one (better two) dwarf mechanics will be assigned to that room during sieges, attacks, ecc.
The room has food and a lockable floor hatch. If I manually assign the burrow coinciding with it during an alert, I guess it will overlap with the normale "emergency" burrow for everyone else. How will it work?"

Oh yeah, I think you can define multiple burrows on alert, but I don't know if you can do it for specific dwarves, unless they're in a squad.  Could add the mechanics to a squad, leave it inactive, and assign it to the burrow on alert.

From what I understand, I don't do it myself, but lots of people apparently build a master control room which always has a dwarf locked inside, with a bed room and all that, and a place where dwarves can drop food and drink into the room.  I guess the food drop wouldn't be necessary with burrows now.

Oh, also, you can use any dwarf for the task, mechanists don't pull levers any faster than a peasant.

[Lord_Phoenix]

Also, if you have tetrahedrite or cassiterite around (both tin ore, tin/silver in the case of tetrahedrite), you can make bronze, which should be quite superior to copper as an armor material.

[Noir]

Tetrahedrite is copper/silver.

I am in serious trouble now, however; 4 ambush group have appeared together, and they are all very well coordinated.

I have the following situation: a human caravan made it inside my fort, and I managed to close the bridges in time.
Can I just wait it out? My military is just not well-equipped enough to take them on right now.
How long can I keep the caravan inside my fortress before they will turn on me?

As a matter of fact, I was thinking of building walls and traps (LOTS of traps) inside my fort just for the occasion, to force the enemies to fight in a straight line, weakened by the traps and forced to take on all my military at once - plus the 4 VERY strong warriors that the caravan brought with them.
Oh, and buying all the weapons and armors they have to sell me sounds useful as well.

Also, I have a wounded inside the fort and no water; I think I will construct an emergency well, hoping to not arrive too late...

[Marthnn]

The caravan can leave through the caverns, if you leave them a path.

As for the military, yes, equipment is important. Maximum steel coverage, the rest with leather, can help a lot.
But even more important is the training. Good soldiers will block and dodge most of the attacks while taking advantage of the goblin missing limbs pieces of armor. And since any shield blocks the same, a good shield-user has no problem using a wooden shield.

I'd say wait it out.

If you go for the military, danger room crash-training can do it.
If you go for the traps, the most efficient would be cage traps, 1 per ennemy, but if you don't have enough the remaining goblins will be intact.
You can replace walls with channels (ramps removed).

Yes, water is a must. Make sure there's 2 z-levels-high of water under the well, that way water will be cleaner.

[Noir]

I've done it - I waited it out and the caravan left without problems. I built a LOT of cage traps and got most of those this way, although I still lost two dwarves during the last fight of the THREE remaining goblins against my FOURTEEN soldiers. My militia sucks.

I hope executing the captured ones will yield some experience for them...

Oh, and some migrants arrived during the siege - they were all slaughtered, including an armorer whose skill level I will never know...

[Marthnn]

Important detail to train your military without danger room : 2-soldiers squads.

In my current fort, my initial military was 3 migrants in the same squad. The commander had skills "talented" in sword (my fav.), fighting, shield, observation, etc. I figured he would help train the other 2. Not very fast, and they ended up being slauthered.
New soldiers, 2 pure recruits, again fully equipped. They started sparring at "adequate" skill levels, and reached "master" in half the time. Right now, my 3-dwarves-military rip every single ambushes to shreds without any injury whatsoever. I could remove all my traps, in fact I did remove most of them.

Use 2-soldiers squads. Each squad will train in skills at the same rate, help each other, lose minimal time organising demos, and most importantly spar.

[Noir]

Wasnt'it three-men squads? I have all my squads (except my newly-drafted marksdwarves) in squads of three people. So should I make it of two?
They still grow slowly - mostly because, except my mayor and a specific immigrant who looks like Chuck Norris' twin brother, everyone has pretty much ZERO points. They are also poor in teaching - which adds to the slowness.
I guess I will danger room them a little.

And since we are talking military:

-can I have ALL my soldiers to train in the same barracks?
-if I put coffers, chests, ecc. in the barracks, will they store their weapons there, or is it better to leave a bunch of weapon stockpiles nearby?
-how many layers of armor should I wear? I have full copper plate - can I wear some degrees of leather underneath, or what...?

[Reelyanoob]

Linked thread with sample uniform. Sounds like you're guys are wearing way too little.

[Noir]

Thanks. Last thing: what skill do I need to make wooden and bone (training) bolts? I set up the task, but no one seem to be picking it up.

[wuphonsreach]

Wood bolts - craftshop + woodcrafting
Bone bolts - craftshop + bonecarving

I generally make the hunters do dual-purpose as bone/wood crafters so they can make their own darned bolts.

[Darkmere]

Thought I'd add a few cents on military/defense.

Civillain alert burrows don't have to be on the same Z-level, or (IIRC) even contiguous. You can define a panic room burrow over your main dining hall and expand it to food/booze stockpiles, as well as the control room for all bridges/spike rooms/flood traps. All the idle dwarves sitting around safely locked up during a siege will have nothing better to do than manage your trap levers while the military goes on a rampage.

Containers in a barracks (as well as armor/weapon racks) were supposed to be used to store squad gear, but my attempts at that got dodgy results at best. It would be a safe bet to place your weapon/armor stockpiles near all your training barracks, just in case.

Armor coverage is very important, you'll have a much better outcome with 4 dwarves in full kit than 15 wrestlers in dwarven spandex. Also, for some reason my military decided pairs of boots and gloves were for chumps, so I had to make sure boot and glove were listed twice in the uniform setup.

Smaller squads train much faster, especially if you choose, say, 3 squads of different weapon users (3 axemen, 3 swordsmen, 3 spearmen) and let them train to sparring level before reassigning them to mixed squads. Have minimum of 2 training per schedule so they can rotate out and not get irritable. Don't forget backpacks for food and flasks for booze, otherwise patrol makes them cranky, even if it's fortress life or death.

[Noir]

Thanks for all the tips. I have now realized about the whole multi-layering things, and my armorer will level-up quite a bit making all those mail shirts (the sheer amount of metal rings should be well in the hundreds of thousands).

Pity I used most of my copper making spears for weapon traps - I will have to mine more...

Also, I use the default "Active/Training" alert for training. Should I reduce the sparring schedules there?

No-one still is making my bolts...

[Darkmere]

The default active/training alert calls for all 10 potential squad members to train at once, all the time. This was causing major problems a few versions ago (Just came back and haven't gotten a new military up and running yet) so you'll probably want to go to the alert screen and change minimum training from 10 to something more sensible.

It's a safe bet to start with even numbers training at a time, that way everyone can pair off and spar instead of one guy doing  solo drills (almost useless, would be better off sleeping). Also don't mix different weapon users too much, otherwise your speardwarves will set up training sessions to teach everyone else how to use spears, and that just wastes time. I should have been more specific about this stuff earlier, but I wasn't thinking.

I'm not sure I understand the bold question?