I've seen plenty of fights over my years of playing DF but one thing that I still can't intuit is how well a given squad fights. Sometimes 3 dwarves return from a mission right into a siege and take out over 50 goblins plus a few mounts (martial trance sure is something) and other times my conscripts with silver warhammers get completely decimated by undead.
I've pretty much dealt with every single combat-related problem so far through sheer excess because I just don't know how much manpower is enough manpower for a siege, FB, clowns, and so on; If I see I have 20 or so axedwarves of axing levels 3-6-ish, sporting rudimentary iron equipment, I don't know what I can expect from those because all of this information tells me absolutely nothing.
Are there benchmarks, explanations, or at least rules of thumb for this kind of stuff?