Bay 12 Games Forum

You could probably replace the marine body sprites with images like those and make it work, if you rearranged the overlay sprites (for the weapons) so they they match up with the hands. Maybe the in-game sprites could have a highlight/shading layer added to make them look a bit more more like that, while retaining the colour customization. But I don't know if that's possible or how to go about doing it right now.

Sorry if this has been suggested, I've looked around but only found a 3-year old thread with one reply.

A good idea would be to to recruit your armed citizens into an ad-hoc militia, so that if you were really desperate you could gather together all your pick-armed miner dorfs and have them fight the foe. 

You could recruit your dwarves into citizen militia squads.  Their standard behaviour would be to carry on with their normal day-to-day activities until the squad is activated, at which point you could control them like squads of soldiers.  The main difference between them and soldiers is they will not head to the barracks to train.  In fact they wouldn't do anything soldierly except be capable of heading into combat (if you are desperate enought to deploy them).

It's for those situations when your soldiers have been killed (or you don't have any), the goblins have breached the fort and you need to mount a counter-attack before things get out of hand and your important dorfs get massacred.  It would be convenient to just hit the military screen, activate your militia squad containing your miners and wood cutters and have them attempt to kill the invaders with a couple of commands.  The idea would be fairly straightforward in my mind, it's an effort to save hassle organizing your civilians for combat, but really hoping it doesn't come to that so their options should be limited.  Basically "grab whatever you can and get ready to fight for your lives, like right now!"

Equipment:
*The dwarves could either show up with only what they have to hand, representing them not having the time or expertise to properly kit themselves out en masse in the event of a raid, and the ad-hoc nature of their organization. 
*Or they could pick up equipment from the stockpile (perhaps a stockpile designated as an "armoury" for the militia) and put the equipment back once they are finished and return to their civilian duties.  I prefer the previous option.

Training:
*You could have them train for a short period once every now and then, which would be realistic, but I don't prefer this option since I don't want my civilians wasting their time training. 
*An idea I like better would be that you could add a single "sergeant" to the squad who will be a soldier and the only member of the squad to engage in training at the barracks.  He will act as the leadership figure organizing and leading the rabble.  All of the militia members will have to rally to the sergeant before you can do anything with them and his loss will be a major morale blow, possibly dispersing the squad entirely.

OK, so the soldiers don't appear to be using their cabionets and the items can't be dumped.  I think they may be interrupting their trianing, I occasionally get a message saying something like "training cancelled: dangerous terrain".

My soldiers are leaving crap lying around the barracks.  How do I get them to store things, do they need their own bedrooms in addition to the barracks? 

My soldiers spend all their time in the barracks sparring so i wonder whether they will get happiness problems.  Do soldiers always behave themselves, or am I going to have a heavily armed nutcase on my hands if they throw a tantrum? 

The carpenter is just moving a plump helmet to the food stockpile.  He's showing up as no job now.  The still is made of Limestone anyway, so I'm wondering why the mason who built the other workshops just fine isn't building this still.