Bay 12 Games Forum

Cave-in trap is generally your best bet as a substantial number of them are inorganic, and thus currently unkillable by normal means.  Those that aren't are surprisingly easy to kill it seems, as you apparently found out.

Not good if you want to fuel a marksdwarf battalion

In other words it won't affect anyone playing DF2010. 

I also recommend equipping your dwarves with the best gear from the start, even if that means delaying military until you can produce steel.  The problem is that equipment upgrades dont work very well.

And avoid using active/training alert, it tends to lead to dorfs starving/going insane from lack of food.  Set the squad, assign them a barracks for training and sleeping, turn off most labors and theyll spend lots of time gaining skills from individual drills.  It's the safest, most bug-free way of doing it right now.

Random points that dont correlate directly to OP's:

1. Consider tweaking up the amount of embark points and bringing along some steel bars.  Due to military bugs it's essential that you give your dorfs the best gear from the start, as equipment upgrading is erratic at best.  DF has no real difficulty selection, which is unfortunate but a similar effect can be had with judicious init tweaks.

2. Keep in mind you can trade for things like wood and raw glass, as well as select it on embark.  Raw materials are really the main thing I use the dwarven caravan for.

3. I tend to dig an L-shaped cliff entrance that spans 2+ z-levels before getting to the fort proper.  That way I have a good selection of potential chokepoints, trap areas and ballista coverage and a minimum of "damn, if only I hadn't dug out that meeting hall right below here" moments.  Dont bother designing a missile-defensible fort though as marksdorfs are fubar and ballists are pretty weak.

4. Surface farms are your friend.  They work just fine, can be walled off for protection and are a lot easier to get started than underground as they do not require a potentially complicated irrigation procedure.

5. If you're new to DF you might want to think about disabling invaders until youre more skilled and/or the military bugs get ironed out.  You can turn them back on later for a challenge.  I did this and it helped a lot.  If you dont want to, lots of cage traps are your friend.

6. Skills wise I recommend bringing a proficient weapon/armorsmith as those skills are really hard to train up.  Maybe also a carpenter if you need to make sure your wood furniture-making is efficient.  Dont bother with masonry or mining beyond maybe +1 as you'll get lots of that just from digging and doing stuff with all the stone.

I can confirm that the above solution works.

I've had mixed results with swords, sometimes they work and sometimes not.  They are definitely better than blunt/wrestling though.

Re: equipping issues, I've not really had any problems with that but I always set up my military and get them indiv training long before doing any actual combat.  But from my early-game newbie mistakes it looks like the problem may be arsenal dwarf not always doing his job.

I recommend axes and spears as blunt weapons are also somewhat bugged.  And be sure to equip them with good armor, it counts for a lot.  May also want to slow down on the cavern crawling as there can be some nasty stuff there--get a decent upper fortress going first.  On a map I was using last night to test a new appointed-noble hierarchy I ran into a demonic fortress only 25 z-levels down and it was connected to what I guess was the first or second cavern layer--cue undead tigermen in my base killing my doodz.

Oh, and due to the equipment bugs I recommend not producing anything but bronze/steel unless you're okay with your first squad never getting better gear.

Also, once you get a few guys drafted you need to set up a barracks for them, and in q-menu options assign it to the squad in question and enable all 4 options.  This way they will do individual combat drills to raise their skill--unskilled dorfs are about as dangerous as a wet kleenex.  Do not set them to active training via alerts or schedule because it's way bugged.  They will spend lots of time doing this so you might want to be sure you don't select anybody whose civilian skillset will be missed.

Oh, and you might want to focus on pumping out steel equipment before assigning them any gear.  There are more bugs in how squad equipment is chosen (did I mention .31.x military is totally fubar?), and dorfs don't handle upgrading to new armor very well right now.

edit: Speaking as a relative DF newcomer myself, if you decide to restart your fort for some reason I suggest editing data\init\world_gen.txt to grant more embark points so you can afford to bring along some steel bars, and then regenerating a new world to make the changes go into effect.  If the bugs with appointed nobles behaving oddly get to be troublesome, this would be a good opportunity to fix that too.  Apparently the 40d version dates from around 2008, the new version adds lots of features but it's only been out a few weeks but there's a couple of potentially showstopping bugs to be aware of.