my suggestion is to split the "overpowered" and "balanced" version into two separate mods- at the end of the day some people are going to enjoy the advantage while others are going to want the difficulty.

Honestly i don't think so. In the base game you can, with some gimmik, play a steel angel fort, so what's the deal? Or just pack you dwarven fort with elephant men from adevnture mod (not out yet on steam, but still, they are capable to literally smash everything).

natural armor OR natural weapons, not both
having their wings count as steel swords is extremely killy

To be clear, the steel sword wings is more like they use the same skill rather than any mechanical difference with how the wing strikes are treated. Like using punch skill for wings and sword skill for equipped weapons vs sword skill for both.

And yeah, I'll consider splitting the mod and do some testing to see if I can make them more dwarf-standard in combat for the balanced version.

[EDIT: I redacted my opinion that Roclets ought to be made of iron instead, having played a couple year fort I feel that their defensive capabilities are fair and I understand it's an important design decision. I'll still keep my suggestion about the limbs up.]

A suggestion to consider: If possible, perhaps have their joints and ligaments be easier to twist and tear. This way they still have massive cutting resistance but a heavy blow from a mace - while it might not shatter their metal hide - could easily cause them to twist their limbs and sustain nasty damage that way. This still makes them very tough customers, but with a unique weakness to be mindful of.

I made some changes to make their bones not steel (I forgot I had even done that) and make their hair no longer affect combat calcs, and now they are roughly matched in a 5v5 against dwarves if both sides wear full iron armor. If both sides are unarmored it's an easy roclet win, and if both sides are in steel the dwarves' larger size makes them better at wrestling, so they win more. (if the roclets are unarmored vs armored dwarves then the roclets get stomped)

I think that's a good compromise that I would be happy putting in the main mod because they're still tough, but not unbeatable against well equipped opponents.

I'll push the 1.3.0 update with it if y'all agree

That's a reasonable change in my eyes. I'm not that big on perfect balance anyway. The only complaint I have is that emon steel cloth's value seems to be a bit high at ~500 dwarfbucks. Given how easy it is to mass produce, it becomes incredibly easy to buy out entire wagon-based caravans with just steel cloth from a few emons.

True, but the value of the steel cloth is just the value of the steel that can be made from it. I guess I wouldn't feel bad about reducing it to 1/6 its current value ($5 per cloth vs GCS silk $4) because turning it into steel bars is written as refining it. I think that's still super valuable if you set up a few experienced textile workers but maybe a little more reasonable.

That sounds good.