At two-three ambushes and sieges per year, nevermind beasts, your supply of mechanics and masons will quickly dry up without dedicated military.
Untrained civilians do a great job in an emergency, but they are definitely not the same as military.
I meant to use them in building traps. I.e. They do thier work and when its done they can leave it behind and its likely to do much more harm than any military. I still dont agree that a trained military is that much better than civilians though. Especially considering you have to dedicate 40 dwarves to training only for 3-4 years before you see decent results, if they go into battle before then they are as good as dead which means the time spent training is wasted. Only the first single squad of 5-7 goblins are easily going down on untrained dwarves and by the point more goblins arrive then those you probably have just reached a fort with a size capable of starting training those 40 dwarves.
I have built sucessful trap free forts that have been protected only by dwarven might(pop cap 100 only 10 in active military). Military can be effective if you know how to use it.
How do you fight off that last wave with cave dragons, rutherers aso. My military alone can never cope with that. Last fort I had with military alone lost 50 dwarves that had trained using the bronze I had on the massive vile force of darkness.
Not really. I find Dwarves are cheaper than metal at times.
Thats fair enough, you can easily do traps on just stone and wood, or just stone if its a hard embark. Nothing stops those harder beasts like a cagetrap or my prefered method of dropping them off a bridge into a deep hole.
Necromancer sieges are something that require overwhelming Dwarf power and ingenuity.
Indeed, although a military doesnt do anything to change that. The most effective way of stopping the zombies and necromancers might well be to drop them inside a hole without any exits or perhaps another cage trap. The simple dwarven military is often just fuel to the fire.
Oh and don't forget, I like having something called fun. Because traps suck. Too impersonal. And they get overwhelmed much more easily than Dwarves.
Unless you're talking about end-game traps. But then, an old military is much more fearsome.
Dwarves. Use them.
The
amazing variety of diffrent traps you can make and diffrent setups is def not something not personal. Indeed how someone setups thier own traps can be extremely varied if you so choose. The addition of minecarts has just added to the fun. Nothing says goblin pâté like a lead minecart racing through the entrance.
While traps generally dont lead to as much !FUN! we arent really talking about !FUN! forts here are we. We are talking about tackling the enemy force in a decent way. Ive done several forts with just military just for fun but its obvious that sooner or later a bigger army pops up you couldnt face even if you had 120 dwarves in the military, which would be in itself a good feat. Getting equipment and support for all of those. Also the massive losses are often not filled with the arriving dwarves. While I do use a military in all forts (except the forts where I specifically arent using one) a military behind traps is just the best way to do things because the dwarves are weak and the traps (even the worst of traps) are sure to land a hit and often a kill. You also need a year minimum to get the barest hint of a good dwarven squad and by then the first goblins are almost sure to have arrived, better equipped and better trained. It just takes loads of effort to make a military fort only and there is always a point where the losses are much bigger than the dwarves arriving, its more about how many dwarves will be arriving next season vs the losses. Not the military skill the dwarves actually have, only legendary dwarves are the ones likely to survive and as Ive said Ive yet to get one through training. If someone can show me how then please, I would like to know.
The only traps Ive stopped using are cage traps, they are just too op. If you get a long enough corridor only trapavoids get through. Its not even hard to get that many cages on a map with loads of trees and they are set up pretty quickly. Its also silly how building destroyers 2 are caught by a mere wooden cage.
