Bay 12 Games Forum

It also helps to think of Squad menu as the place to issue orders for immediate actions where you want the whole squad (or all squads) to either kill someone or move somewhere.

Whereas the military menu with all its sub-menus is meant for organizing and maintaining your squads in general instead of giving specific actions.

Thinking about it that way helped me at least to better grasp the difference.

That used to be my concern too but nowadays I use autolabor and autohauler all the time and they work fantastically well. For example, the script(s) keep 2 dwarves doing all my metal armour and different 2 dwarves doing all my metal weapons so that I get high level artisans. I haven't noticed any downsides to them and it has freed me from micromanaging labours via Dwarf Therapist.

I'm looking to make the caverns as interesting to live in as possible. Any ideas on what would be good settings? I know lava tubes are neat, and I'd like some source of water for projects, but otherwise I'm not really sure what settings even affect the caverns.

You probably want to increase the openness a lot unless you love tight little mazes, in which case you want to go the opposite way.

Turn TWBT off and see if it happens.

But you can't have your miners, hunters and wood cutters in squads because of the uniform bug. So armoring your civilians becomes a hassle once your fort grows big enough since you have to keep track of those three professions, especially if you want to babysit over their mental state and make sure they do crafting jobs and training occasionally without gimping fort production.

Hence why I don't bother with armoring civilians at all. Maybe in the Steam version civilians that aren't part of squads will wear leather armour and boots automatically if such things are available but until then, it's not worth the effort, IMHO.

Yeah, I've seen that before and I always end up digging channels to make the river "flow" properly into the lake/sea.

I had forgotten about the two-river requirement! Oh well.

Okay, thanks guys. Clearly, I underestimated how dangerous armoured undead are, especially with a bunch of intelligent undead leading them. They have left now so I'm rebuilding things and I'm now making a massive trap in which I can flush besiegers down into caverns.

So my fort had 3 military squads and thus 30 warriors. One was armed with spears, one with axes and one with hammers. All iron equipment, mostly good quality but not masterworks. The hammer squad wasn't trained very well but the other two were. I got invaded by about 60 undead, with roughly 50 walking corpses and 10 intelligent undead leading them. All in a mix of iron, bronze and copper equipment.

I figured that this should be a relatively even fight as the invaders were strung out in a stretched column from map edge to my drawbridge, so I gathered my dwarfs at the entrance, lowered the drawbridge and sent them out to kill.

Imagine my shock when ALL of my military dwarves got slaughtered and only little under 20 undead were killed. As far as I can tell, my dwarves didn't get swarmed and it was the intelligent undead that proved to be my undoing - one of them was fighting three of my dwarves and he slew all of them.

Is it because undead feel no pain and suffer no blood loss? Should I have re-trained my military as 30 hammer users? Should I have waited until I have steel and adamantium gear? Or are undead better dealt with traps instead of a straight-up fight?

Just as background info, these three squads have killed cyclops and giants with zero problems, as well as fought off a goblin invasion (3:1 odds) with only like two casualties. Which is why the undead prowess in battle really took me by surprise.