Bay 12 Games Forum

Cool, that was the main problem then.

Does my militia commander need to have special skills or can I appoint anyone?

Is your squad set to active, and have a armory with T I Q set for them to train? Have you given your dwaves enough time to equip everything? It can take up to an in game month go get all your dwarves to put on their armor.

My squad is active, and I assigned a barracks (it's the same as an armory, right?) to it for training, and they're training there.
'i' and 'q' shortcuts are for the 'indiv eq' and 'squad eq' options in the barracks menu, right? What are they for?
Anyway I activated both for this squad and waited one full month, and the dwarf is still wearing only high boots (note that he's wearing two of them, yay!) and no other clothing

greycat: apparently in 34.11 the dwarves are not unhappy anymore when they're not properly dressed. I read this in this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=114591.0

At least my dwarf wearing _just_ hight boots is ecstatic. Maybe he's an exhibitionist, duh.

They should be equipping their helms if the uniform is set to replace clothing, since it forces them to take off their caps. Caps of any sort can't be worn with helms, which is rather annoying since dwarves can turn up wearing caps as part of their regular clothing. If there are any dwarves who you've set to wear helms via general uniform and not by assigning a specific helm, what are they wearing on their heads?

If I understand correctly, they're wearing nothing at all except their metal clothing. This is an example of what I see when I zoom on a dwarf and look at his (i)ventory:
iron high boot    left foot
iron high boot    right foot
iron spear         left hand

Hello, I'm playing my first fort and having fun, except I can't for the life of me figure out how military equipment works, especially armor.
I've set up a metalsmith's forge and created a bunch of different iron armor pieces, but my dwarves seem mostly unwilling to equip them.
After doing some research I found that modifying the default metal uniform to make it 'replace clothing' rather than 'over clothing' helps to some degree. I applied this uniform to one squad and they all seem to be wearing greaves, breastplates/mail shirt and boots. None of them is wearing a helm, although there are plenty of helms available in my armor stockpile.
If I try to force them to use an iron helm by using the 'use specific helm' menu, I get a list of all the helms, printed in red. If I select one he will put it on but this seems very tiresome to have to check on them all one by one. Could I do something to have them equip all the armor they can automatically?

For weapons, I use equip specific weapon which seems to be working all right, except that I have the impression that when I select this option I get the list of _all_ weapons, including the ones used by other dwarves, which appear in red in the list. Is this correct?