After finally building a fort that can churn out Hammer Lords in two years flat, I ran into the all time annoying bug that elite military looses their elite status if they ever revert to civilian status. I did however find a way to partially migrate this bug (if you don't mind having your military always on duty). There are two bugs at play which make having a happy army difficult:
The Patrol Bug (this one is the most painful one.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=3190):
In theory, bad thoughts due to paroling should only happen when dwarfs are on patrol (as was the behavior in 40d). They shouldn't get this thought during training (note: this isn't the 'unhappy about the draft' thought; that occurs when a civilian becomes recruit. It can be avoided by drafting your military during a seige)
In addition, even setting your dwarfs to stand down on a regular basis should allow the patrol counter to cool down. It doesn't due to the check only being run when a squad is active.
Upshot: any time spent in the military will *always* cause long patrol bad thoughts. There are two ways around this: First: a binary patch to fix the behavior which fixes how patrol thoughts work (its in the attached bug report) or, second have your military become elite which causes them to properly cooldown and never complain again about). This leads into the elite bug:
The Elite Bug:
Military dwarfs become master/lords/elites when hitting level 12 with a weapon skill, complete with announcement (Urist McBadass has become a Hammer Lord). Due to the change in behaviors from 40d->DF2010, military dwarfs who become elite loose all job assignments (which is a separate bug in of all itself; in previous versions of DF, once the military became elite, they could never be deactivated).
This is annoying but mitigation is possible with Therapist. This however leads into the elite glitch. Because of the way DF determines eliteness, any time an elite dwarf is told to stand down when their Fighter skill is higher than there weapon skill (basically always until you have Legendary+5 Weapon/Fighter), the game miscalcuates the eliteness of the dwarf. Thus your hammerlords revert back to hammerdwarfs until they level up a skill and the elite upgrade thing happens again.
Unfortunately, even if you don't intend your military to standdown, issuing specific orders can and will cause your dwarfs to momentarily return to civilian status (specifically, the kill order will almost ALWAYS do this).
If you are willing to accept always on military (aka 40d behavior), there is a simple and straightforward way to make sure that your elites always stay elite.
The workaround:
Before giving a kill order or changing schedules, pause the game. Pull up the squad menu, and issue a station order. Make sure the word "Station" is flashing on the selected squad. You can unpause at this point but its unnecessary. Now, while the station order is flashing, change the squads schedule OR issue a kill order. The station order prevents your military from momentary flashing to civilian status and loosing their elite status. It also has the nice side effect that when a kill order is complete, they won't stand down and become civilians. With this method, I've managed to keep my four hammer lords as lords for over three in-game years. None of them have bad thoughts due to patrol either.
Obviously, if you set them to inactive and they become civilians, they will loose their elite status but I prefer to have my military drill 24/7 when not on patrol.
Note: This hasn't been testing with changing schedules (i.e., one that is part time patrol/part time train).
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If there is interest, I can detail my exact setup to generate badasses with squad training in ~1-1.5 years. With a properly working military, I find myself virtually never using traps and prefer to engage my enemies head-on.
(YMMV of course).
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Topic: How to keep your military elite, well elite ... (Read 4061 times)