The best approach with Fortress Defense, seems to be to embark with 4 or 6 military dwarves. There are two options for training, the first is to embark them with Proficient weapon skill, and put them in squads of 2 and have them train non-stop. The second is to make them all proficient teachers, combined with a proficient combat skill. The skills you want are Weapon Skills, Dodger, Shield User, Fighter, Armor User, Striker. Don't both with non-proficient skills. Put them all in one big squad and let them teach each other and develop their teacher and student skills. Sparring in squads of 2 is generally better, but the big teacher squad is not invariably bad. Initially have them train with a weapon+shield, but try to give them full metal body coverage before too long (helm+mail shirt+gauntlets+high boots), weighing dorfs down with a lot of armor seems to slow training if they're low level, but give the high level ones full chain and plate.
This embark squad of 4 or 6 military dwarves should form the melee core of your military, and the first couple of immigration waves will mainly be needed to fill civilian roles, but you can try and make a couple more melee sparring squads, but since they'll be noobs let them train deep underground and don't have them engage the enemy until they are properly trained.
With the later immigration waves, let dwarves with useful civilian skills, like High Master Armorsmith, join civilian life (ideally turn off any skills that would cause them to go outside). Recruit EVERYONE else into marksdwarf squads. It's unrealistic to except 20 marksdwarves to train on archery targets, although you can do this if you want to burn bolts (it does work if you fiddle with their bolt settings in the ammunition screen), mainly they should be trained by shooting at live targets, which if I remember correctly produces 3x the experience per bolt. Wild life is very good and puts food on the table, or you can shoot prisoners through fortifications. This will quickly get them up to at least proficient crossbow and archery skill.
These marksdwarves squads can be kept permanently inactive, with no place to train, so that they do hauling, farming tasks, medical tasks, etc. When you want them, just station them since inactive squads automatically become active while stationed (or while given a kill order). Releasing them from the order, causes them to return to inactive state - which can be useful to get them to run away.
When sieges come, have the core of 4 or 6 elite embark dwarves, immediately engage each enemy squad in turn, this relies on the two strategies of "divide and conquer" (killing each enemy squad individually) and "numerical superiority" (engaging each individual enemy squad with overwhelming melee power, routing them almost instantly).
Station the marksdwarves at the entrance to your fortress, and station any less-elite melee to protect them. While the elite squads destroy each enemy squad in turn, the marksdwarves and less-elite will protect the fortress entrance.
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Topic: how you get your military to work? (Read 4069 times)