Bay 12 Games Forum

I suggest to add a new military state for squads, which would be basically red alert. Dwarfs should drop everything they are doing, grab their gear and do whatever you're asking them to do. They should not try go get a random nap, go grab new drink, go check out new pair of boots or do whatever they are currently doing when you give them a station order. Basically, it should work like: "get your stuff, move there and sit there until you pass out from starvation/dehydration/exhaustion". It's hard to count the number of times when I had half of my squad just leave their post by the front gate during the onslaught of goblins. To be honest, I'd even make it default behavior for station/kill order. I don't care if they are hungry, when I give them order they should obey, and if they leave their post, I would like to have an option to use my captain of the guard and punish them, because they endanger everyone. They can get negative thoughts when they get hungry while on station order, or when they pass out, I don't care, but they should obey the orders instead of treating them like suggestions. This could be even controlled by militia commander's skills, the bigger the skill the better the control, I'm fine with that. But if those morons leave their post and their brothers get slaughtered, I want to be able to hold them accountable for that. At least I want them to _understand_ that they disobeyed an order and feel something about it. Like "He was ashamed to disobey an order". I could currently just drop them to lava, but it makes as much sense as yelling on cat. They don't know they did something wrong, so there's no reason to punish them because they won't get the message anyways.

On the same note, I would like to be able to force "sleep", "eat" and "drink" my military squad. Because there is no "per hour schedule", there's no way to make sure that all your military squads are ready for what you're planning to do. Let's say you're under siege, and you closed your fort and prepare to defend. You mobilize all your squads and tell them to station somewhere, but then some of them are hungry, some of them are tired, so you lose these as they go away doing whatever they want. So you wait for them to finally come back but by the time they do that, other group just goes away to eat, sleep or whatever. And it never ends. I would like to give my squads order to satisfy all their _essential_ needs, so that I can have them ready for whatever I want to do with them.

So currently adding stuff to workshops manually is a bit of a hassle, so until that's fixed by adding some keybindings and better field focus for search (move a cursor to the search field, make sure to click it then type exact name of searched object, repeat- takes a looooot of time and is annoying, but that's a separate topic), we mostly use the orders screen as it's much faster to build stuff that way. That being said, it works great when the fort is small and there aren't many orders, but once you get big enough it becomes a mess.

1. Move order to the top button - if you have crafting orders at the top of the list and you want to add something that has higher priority you have to click like 40 times to move your new order above the existing ones. And that's only if you added single order, too bad if you wanted to add like 10 of them : )
2. Make order groups - allow us to group orders, so that we could hide specific groups in order to make the whole list smaller and more manageable. It would be entirely visual change, doesn't need anything special. For now it could be just a button "create group" and "add to existing group", then the whole group is displayed in similar manner like the boxes are with their content. In the future groups could additional functionalities, like nesting groups in groups, suspending all orders in a whole group etc. but for now I would like to just have a way of organising my stuff so that I don't have to scroll through "forever" orders every time I want to add something new
3. Keybinding for adding new orders, or at least description update to tell me what the keybind is - it's a minor QoL improvement but nice to have
4. List all the necessary ingredients for the order to be properly done - this one is not obvious, but for example when I want to make some instrument, on every worldgen the recipe is different and it's really annoying to try to figure out how to build specific stuff, so I'd suggest to display the required materials for order to be correct when we're adding new order. "Add orders for required materials" would be great too

That's it. What do you think?