Bay 12 Games Forum

Constructed staris can be removed from the top.
Most of the time the shortest path will make the dwarf stand at the right place for deconstruction. Perhaps lock some doors or build a temporary wall to force it.
You will first have to designated the lowest part of the stair and after that is finished the top part. Never expect your dwarfs to get this right or there will be accidents.

War animals are assigned to individuals, not squads.
You could assign all war animals to one dwarf or divide them amongst the squad members.
Animals trained for war (or hunt) can be assigned in the preferences menu of a dwarf, then assign a work animal.

As far as I know, there is no way to assign animals to another dwarf once given to someone. The list of assignable animals consist only of trained and unassigned animals.

To order your military around, you have to use several menus. The most used are the military and squad menu.

After you set up the military with (m), you can manuallly order your squad around with (s). Often a movement command is preferred over a kill command. This because squads can become inactive after completing a kill, giving issues when there are more opponents. Set the squad to active before you relocate it for another engagement.

The next step is automate a movement order. To accomplish this, you need to adjust the schedule of an alert. Alerts and the accompanying schedule can be found in the military menu. You also need to set a location. You can set a location with points/routes or with a burrow. Burrows give more control where the dwarfs will stand and are the way to go for archers behind fortifications.

In the schedule menu (submenu of military alerts) you can order how many dwarfs will defend that specific location and in what months they should defend it. If you change the default schedule, changes will be effective immidiatly. If you added an alert with its own schedule, you need to set the squad to that alert in the squad or alerts menu.

The schedule menu isn't very userfriendly. Take your time to find out what alert/squad/month you are editing to avoid mistakes. Use the copy function to paste the orders of a specific month to another date or squad.

Instead of setting a point with the points/routes menu, you can also set a route. You can then choose the route instead of a location to make your dwarfs patrol. Patrols are effective for taking care of keas and the like. For sieges I like the burrow option.

To make one thing clear: do not assign military to burrows by the burrow menu. You ontrol civilians that way. If you really have to. Military is assigned to burrows in the schedule menu.

This is but a brief overview of what you can do and where you can find those options. I recommend Tekkud on YouTube if you need a more extensive explanation.

What you wil not find in the tutorials is a sane way to set up the alerts in a real fort. Often I will use alerts for inactivity, peace and war. In peacetime, military will train, patrol or have time off. During the months, those roles are rotated on an individual basis. The war alert sends the archers to the burrows next to the fortifications and the melee dwarfs to the staging area behind the main gates. If needed, you can add war alerts for defending other directions.

Direct fire almost never kills a dwarf. Shields are OP.
Things get different when things on the ground start to burn. Dwarfs often will get caught in the smoke and fire. Dwarfs are strong, but not very smart ;-)
You choose your battlegrounds wisely (or you had a lot of luck )

Mysteries. Sometimes it looks like everyone is playing a different version of DF.

Often I use burrows of 3x1 tile and a full squad moves onto those 3 tiles adjacent to a fortification. Some others say it will act similar as station?

Some say archers will path towards the enemy and not get new ammo? My archers often freak out as soon as their quiver is empty, because getting new ammo seems to be a civilian job? Eventually they will get the ammo.

I often have an open path towards the invaders, but it is a very long walk for the archers. So they rarely try that.

Dwarfs seem to favor their highest skill. Sometimes I do cross training with hammers, to get armor and other skills up. However this makes them much more likely to go into melee. The default armor for archers is bad. Just give them good armor, so they do not die instantly when in enemy contact.

Archers need to be trained well to shoot through fortifications they are not adjacent to. So double fortifications will only work for archers that had some prior training.

Castle like surface buildings will often fail in some way. I had much more luck with having my archers overlooking a long entrance hall. Archer towers are good to defend the surface, but no proper dwarf wants to be there anyway?

Another way to handle clothing is having a goods stockpile linked to your clothing and leather working shops and have it set to accept from links only and another stockpile for clothing that is combined with a refuse stockpile.

This way only new clothing will not rot away and used clothing will be discarded and rots away fast because of the refuse stockpile trait. Masterwork clothing that rots away does not seem to give bad thought.

Downside is you cannot buy clothes from caravans, as anything you do not make yourself will end up on the refuse stockpile. After a little dying and tailoring practice, non local made clothes are inferior anyway.

This might be not the best way for fps, but it can be set up in a way that requires very little attention.

By using an extra stockpile and overproduction of clothes, you can even set it up to only keep masterwork ones and have the others be transferred to the refuse stockpile (use one stockpile for the desired quality and another for low quality stuff that is linked to give goods to the refuse stockpile).

OP doesnt want to use fertilization, because that is too complex. Op is ok by changing the food chain into milling and pressing. This does not make any sense to me.
OP doesn't like how the current game is. None of the normal game mechanics are to his taste.
This post should go to suggestions or modding thread.