Bay 12 Games Forum

5) I brought training weapons from embark, but training is going painfully slowly at any rate, so I may just leave them behind next time. Just to be safe, is there any way to keep them from sparring at all? Also, how did the four shields happen?
Thanks all for the fix, I'll give that a shot.

so far I've never been able to correct a 'military gone wrong' situation. what I -have- been able to do is getting the military functioning from scratch reliably, in the following manner:

1. delete 'indiv choice melee' immediately, replace with training axes (and make some training axes). leave the rest of the armor alone
2. leave them on inactive forever
3. to turn training on and off, go to the barracks with (q) and hit (t) to toggle training. leave the rest of the settings alone.

the dwarves now behave as civilians (they'll do hauling (I'm not sure if they'll still other labor as well) and they will stop for food/drink/sleep), but will use all their free time for Individual Combat Drills, which will reliably boost their skills, except possibly dodging. they will also grab metal armor as it becomes available (in the correct fashion, no 3 shields per dwarf), and once they have a set I delete training axes and replace with battle axes, and they grab+use those. (you might be able to give them regular axes right off the bat, i was doing this as an anti-sparring-injury precaution but since they don't seem to spar this may not be necessary)

things I don't mess with in this setup:
uniforms (i just set each dorf's equipment manually, actually i don't know how to set up a uniform)
alerts/schedules (even on inactive they'll still obey move/kill orders)

things this setup doesn't appear to do:
the 'demonstrations' we all hate so much
sparring (i still have not seen sparring occur in the new version, ever)

It seems like once your military goes 'stupid', they're stuck like that forever, because even implementing the settings above, they continue with demonstrations and LOL 2 SWORD 1 HAND.

but in 3 forts running if I run my military like this from the start, they function properly. It could just be luck on my part, but I'd give it a shot in your next fort and see if it works out.

Okay! I've solved the problem. For now, at least.

First of all, you can avoid this issue entirely - never assign a uniform to a dwarf that already has a uniform assigned to him. That is what seems to cause this issue.

If you have this issue, you can solve it by:

1.) Disband all squads.
2.) Remove all Militia Captains and Commanders from the 'N'obles screen.
3.) Individually dump all items from all soldier dwarves.
4.) Claim all items from your garbage zone, then wait for them to all be fully moved back into your weapon and armor stockpiles.
5.) Re-create your squads, selecting the appropriate Uniform template.

This finally solved the issue for me. Note that you will probably need to do all of these steps in order to recover all equipment - you can't dump items from Nobles, and you can't go without Militia Nobles if there are any existing squads. If your items are not in the appropriate stockpiles when you assign uniforms, those items will not count as fulfilling that part of their uniform, resulting in more quad-wielding dwarves with eleventy-five chain shirts.

So, really, its best to avoid this problem entirely by getting your uniform right the first time. It's better to make a full uniform when you don't have all items stocked than it is to re-create and re-assign the uniform, as the latter will cause massive bugs. If you put items in the uniform that are not in stockpiles, though, dwarves will simply go and fetch them once available - I did this with shields and cloaks and it worked like a charm.

I hope this helps out some other people with this glitch, at least until the fix comes along!

A cage trap is one of the most effective ways to defeat powerful beasts, as even a glass cage (aquarium/terrarium) can imprison a Bronze Colossus.