Bay 12 Games Forum

I just posted this on another thread:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64617.msg1512954#msg1512954

I am going to guess that with two dwarves, you still have the "minimum number" required to train set at 10.  That means nobody will bother to go train unless there are 10 available dwarves.  Your squad captain is being responsible and training on his own.  His squadmate is a lazy layabout who doesn't have the wherewithal to drag his sorry ass up and practice.

3-dwarf squads with 2 required to be on duty seems to be ideal.  Go read that ridiculously long essay I just put on that other thread for more detail...

I've followed Darkmere's advice from that post when setting up my military and it's the most effective way I've used so far.  I haven't embarked with any military dwarves, but I often get migrants with good military skills. 

Set them up as a leader of a three-dwarf squad, making sure to put the ones with the highest skills as a squad leader along with two complete amateurs.  Set up a minimum of two training at a time in the schedule.  Mine are virtually always sparring with the off-duty member doing individual combat training.  Squads of three with 2 required on duty seems to be the ideal setup for the best training. 

Make sure you set your squads to "Active/Training" (or whatever you call it) rather than Inactive.  In earlier 2010 releases dwarves wouldn't always train when set to train, but would practice on their own when left Inactive.  This is no longer true, and they will actually follow your orders when you tell them to Train.

When my squads started to get too large from adding more dwarves (being lazy and just adding new dwarves instead of taking the time to define specific uniforms and look at everyone's skills to see how to divide them up the best) they stopped sparring and did more demonstrations, which isn't entirely bad since it means that the more knowledgeable dwarf is teaching the other ones skills, but they don't seem to skill up as quickly as sparring.  In three-dwarf squads there are still demonstrations anyway.

You don't need to worry about training weapons - give them real weapons and they will do just fine.  During sparring you can see in the combat reports that they will "Tap" each other with their weapons.  You don't get sparring injuries (or deaths) like you used to.

Enlarge your military by periodically breaking up your squads once everyone gets leveled. Take the two non-squad leaders and make them squad leaders with two more noobs.  They will then teach the noobs up to similar levels.  Rinse and repeat and you can build a fairly large military training up very effectively.  (It's like Amway!)

Once you get the first few dwarves in the military just because of their skills, you can pick the noobs by their physical attributes.  I now have an awesome Hammerdwarf who came in as a migrant Peasant with no military skills at all, but she was "Virtually indestructible, mighty, indefatigable and incredibly agile."  Now she's pretty much the best dwarf I have.

I very strongly recommend taking the time up front to define all your uniforms.  Instead of just saying "Metal" make a specific "Hammerdwarf" uniform with exactly everything your hammerdwarf will use, including what materials.  Also "Speardwarf", "Axedwarf", "Archer" etc.  Yes it's a pain because you can't copy uniforms the way you can with orders in the schedule screen so it has to be done by hand.  But it's more than worth it in the long term as you start splitting up and building new squads. 

I went so far as to build uniforms like "Leather Archers", "Mail Archers", "Cheap Axedwarf", "Good Axedwarf", "Steel Axedwarf" etc. Use the cheap armor & Iron/Copper/etc weapons for noobs.  As you make better gear, give them the better uniforms.  I don't know if this has any effect on anything other than aesthetically since they still will try to grab the next-best piece of kit if you don't have exactly what you've assigned them.  But it does prevent your Dabbling Axedwarf from being kitted out in all-steel while your High Master Axedwarf is wearing copper and using a wooden axe without having to go through the even bigger headache of assigning specific equipment to each dwarf.

Catching invaders and letting them loose in your barracks is A Good Thing.  Dwarves seem to level up a little faster from actual combat versus sparring.  Deploy lots and lots of cage traps.  Use the hide/dump trick to relieve them of their weapons, but keep their armor so they will live (slightly) longer during "training" with less chance of injury to your squads.

Archers will grind through an assload of ammo while training.  The good news is that they get a little bit of XP with each shot so will skill up quickly.  Hide them behind fortifications and shoot wooden bolts at invaders and kill two birds with one stone.  First you're killing invaders, which is always good.  Second, wooden bolts do less damage, letting your archers take more shots at real targets, giving them more experience, leveling them faster. 

Although at a certain point it doesn't seem to matter what you give them.  I have a champion marksdwarf who regularly headshots enemies with a single bolt of any material.  Seriously, he's got like 24 kills that are all single-shot kills through the brain out of like 100 total kills.  I thought the game was bugged when I would position him and see enemies "disappear" from sieges.  But I would look at the combat log and see things like "the wooden bolt pierces the skull and hits the brain. it severs an artery in the brain.  it severs a tendon in the brain.  The (...) has lost consciousness."  He's just that awesome I guess.

Marksdwarves don't seem to need as much micromanagement as melee training, since they get their experience from "shooting at stuff."  I add new marksdwarves to the same squad and they all sort of hang out at the range and shoot at targets and they are all skilling up just fine.

Assign them quarters near the barracks so they don't travel far to sleep.  Also put some food and booze stockpiles near the barracks so they don't have to travel so far to eat.  That way they will spend more time in the barrakcs sparring and training.  I like to give them slightly larger rooms with a couple of cabinets and nice beds that my legendary carpenter makes, but that really is mostly for aesthetics although they do occasionally get a happy thought from looking at stuff in their own bedroom. 

I've got one big barracks room with a bunch of armor stands & weapon racks in it.  I define the whole room as a barracks for each stand/rack and assign only one squad to train at each one.  I have no idea if this has any bearing on anything at all and I haven't really done any testing to find out.  I also put some statues and an animal or two in there so they get good thoughts from seeing a sublimely arranged statue garden or a favorite animal while they train.  I also smooth the whole thing and engrave the walls for the same reason.  As many happy things you can put in the room will help for the dwarves who will inevitably get ticked off for being left on duty too long or get ticked off for being released from duty.  (You got pissed off for being on duty too long, so I sent you on leave.  Now you're pissed you're not on duty.  Go say hi to mister magma lever...)

The biggest problem I've run into:  If you don't embark with a dwarf with any specific military skills, you might never see a recruit with a good rating in that skill.  For instance, I have had Skilled Hammer/Mace/Spear/Sword, Armor User, Dodger and Fighter dwarves show up, but so far nobody has had good Shield skills.  So none of my squads have very good shield skills, even with sparring.  I have Professional/Accomplished weapons users who still have lousy shield skills. 

Similarly it can be bothersome if you only ever get, for example, skilled Speardwarves migrating in.  I don't know if I've been lucky or if it's just more common in 2010 to get a range of weapon skills the way I have.

I felt like Darkmere's original post was a lot more "theoretical" than a HOWTO and I've spent time fiddling with military setup to really "get" the things he worked out in that post.  It really does work.  Hopefully this is a more practical "do it like this" description.

If only it were a cloth artifact. 

Or if I could rename one of my military squads to "The Rags of Slapping."

I think there's a very simple solution to goblins that happen to fall down through the hatches; simply have a tunnel leading from the bottom of the pit back up into the middle of the grinder. A goblin that falls down there will pathfind his way back up into the grinder, but no goblins will deliberately pathfind their way down into the pit via this tunnel since it's just a dead end as far as they're concerned.

No escape.

Yea, up to my current fort I wasn't taking into account grinder setup until much later, where I would run out of effective spaces to set it up.  On this one, I took that into account right away so it's got plenty of room for underground tunnels to catch and cage or kill anyone unlucky enough to fall through the pit.  I've placed more space between the entrance and the first set of traps to hopefully catch an entire siege before the stragglers panic at the first group getting slaughtered and run away.  The latest version is a long hallway that leads into a large room with another hatch holding them in the room and scattered traps on the floor rather than a channel right into a deathtrap.  It's funnier to see the goblins start to panic and run around the room, unable to escape, while randomly tripping into traps and getting churned into goblinburger.

 

Well I never got a siege for the rest of the evening yesterday (how boring) so I still haven't been able to assign my marksdwarves to a station immediately next to the fortifications but I'm sure that's it since I have everything else.  Hopefully some goblin warlord will get a bug up his butt and send in the troops tonight when I get home to test.  Ironic since I've been under siege for like the last two years, and the goblins have killed Elf and Human diplomats and slaughtered the caravans in the meanwhile.

I have other traps set up in case of a huge influx of goblin archers, and the "shooting gallery" can be locked to keep anyone out in case archers do get to that point.  Then I let the numerous metal discs do their job while the marksdwarves can go plink at their archery targets.

yep, latest release, they have ammo etc.  I don't have them standing immediately next to the fortifications. 

I will try that and see what happens.  I have to wait for another siege now.  It's been a quiet year.  Dangit.

No, sorry Gnauga, I like BCPowers' explanation better.

* goes to look for a second armorsmith with two left hands....

Actually I've tried doing it both ways with one or two entires.  Some dwarves have been wearing two boots, but a lot still aren't.  They all have two gauntlets though, which is what's so confusing because I have hands and feet assigned the same way.  It's possible that since I have leather shoes and boots assigned, maybe they can't find another leather shoe they like so they won't put another boot on until they get a new shoe?

Regardless, I don't take any of this too seriously.  It's Dwarf Fortress after all, and they're all gonna die one way or another.

ironically the trees are invincible to magma.

You see? YOU SEE?!  It's all part of their master plan!