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[Joben]

My military dwarves keep sneaking out one by one and getting killed be siegers, without being given any sort of attack or defend burrows order.

On the other hand when I give a move order to station them somewhere to prepare to attack they never seem to show up.

Do you folks have tips for wrangling a military? What am I doing wrong?

[Starver]

Immediate reaction to title: "Yup, they all are..."

Micromanagement is my game, and... well, while there might be some slower members of the crossbow unit to turn up (handy, though, as they still have bolts left when they are arriving, shortly after the others have shot their lot and are just milling around), I don't tend to get complete no-shows, if I'm doing it right.

And I never use burrows in military (or civilian-alert) senses, only for civilian job-restriction purposes, so I'm not sure what you're doing wrong (if you're doing anything wrong, and it isn't a bug of some kind).


But I suppose my top tip would be to (except in really quite vital "oh dear, my legendary armoursmith is in the path of the siege"[1]) is to first Station a squad at a safe spot just prior to (of off to one side of) the encounter-point.  I'll have doors and drawbridges and whatnot between that and the battlefield the enemy are milling around on, or the archers are directed to a spot just prior to the overlook that they'd be firing down from.  And then, when they're mostly gathered (some may have gone and replaced a bit of armour or two, fill up their flasks, (rarely!) stock up on bolts after range-training, gone for a bite to eat, etc), re-Station them at the point you want them to actually fight on/from, whereupon they will mill around there are react accordingly.  Oh yeah, I'll probably have 'airlock' and long-way-round architecture, too, so that affects the way the enemy behaves, and thus lets me point my military at the hostiles in a much more rational manner.  (Including sealing them in from behind, once they've started to retreat in fear.)


Sending a unit (or an individual!) chasing after individual enemies is a chancier affair than keeping it geographically-defined, as to where you wish them to be (not that they'll always stick to that, of course), but when chasing a fleeing enemy it can be better than having to re-do the Station command every few ticks as the enemy falls back, and you're despearate to finish them off.


[1] In which case I've failed in some other aspect of my control-freak fortress design and control scheme...

[Graknorke]

If you're giving orders, the only thing you can really do is make sure they're not otherwise going to be busy when you need them, and keep them busy with training or something when you don't want them getting killed.

Also dwarvern stupidity is normal, don't worry about it. Just change around their jobs so you can make sure they're available most of the time, make more training time, change their civilian labours (if any) to something that they can easily be replaced for etc.

[XXSockXX]

My military dwarves keep sneaking out one by one and getting killed be siegers, without being given any sort of attack or defend burrows order.

They will attack anything they see. There should be no line of sight from inside the fort to the outside, otherwise a dwarf might spot a siege in passing by. Civilians will cancel jobs and flee (usually not in the direction they should), Soldiers will attack.

On the other hand when I give a move order to station them somewhere to prepare to attack they never seem to show up.

This works fine for me. Do none at all show up or just some?

[toomanysecrets]

Sounds like you need to station your military in a spot where they will not be able to see the gobbos until they come around a corner and are right next to your squad.  If a squad is stationed and spots an enemy, they will go for the kill even if they go solo.

Usually orders given in the sqaud menu are followed pretty well. If they are not being followed, it could be because your troops are busy with civilian jobs (if they are "inactive") or they may be busy getting equipment/eating/sleeping.  You may check your military dwarves' personality traits; some of them may be lazy whiners, "procrastinators" etc.

[Gukag]

Military Dwarves will always wander back to the last place they were stationed, in between eating/drinking, sleeping, and training. If you just stationed them outside after attacking a siege, it's wise to then station them somewhere safe inside of your fortress, then cancel the order.

[codyorr]

Magma never runs away or attacks one by one.

[Tripphippy]

I bet when they sneak out they have a [pick up equipment] job. It happens to me all the time when gobbos die my military runs out to claim the armor and wear it. Try to fully armor your squad and they should listen better.

[thegoatgod_pan]

Burrows. The answer is burrows.

Nobody mentioned the civilian alarm part of burrows.

Defend burrow orders are fine and good. What you want is to go into the military menu, shift into the alerts menu selelct the relevant safe burrow and hit enter. If a green A has appeared by the burrow name you did it right. That burrow is now activated and civilians will not leave it.

Soldiers, incidentally ignore burrows except to defend them by stationing in random spots around it under a deendse burrow order.

[dash27]

My military dwarves keep sneaking out one by one and getting killed be siegers, without being given any sort of attack or defend burrows order.

To me, this sounds like they are trying to pick up equipment that's on the battlefield. Dwarfs like good loot, and given the chance, they will drop their perfectly acceptable war hammer for a higher quality one that is right in front of the advancing army.

One way to handle this is to block all exits of your fort.  Lock your doors and raise your bridges.  Then order your military to Station someplace.  Since the stuff on the battlefield is inaccessible, the dwarfs will ignore it and only equip from items they can access.  Then, once stationed, they shouldn't wander off to get more equipment unless they go off duty.

[krenshala]

Oh, they will indeed wander out to get more stuff even after they have been stationed for a few minutes real-time.

Urist McWants-a-Gobbo-Shield went out to pick up equipment, one shotted a snatcher in the face with her spear, then continued  on her merry way to the jabberer and alligator riding goblin mace squad (lead by a lasher, of course).  She didn't last long once she got to the siege.

Shortly after that Capt Urist McWell-Since-You-Dropped-That then started out the front on his own to get something that Urist McWants-a-Gobbo-Shield dropped. I tried to send the other dwarves after them, but they spread out too much and were killed piecemeal by the surviving 8 goblins (some had been wounded by my marksdwarves firing across the river, and took out 3 to 5 of the enemy).

After that, the goblins suddenly discovered my fort entrance was open and crossed the bridge and the jabberers proceeded to do rude and unspeakable things to my horde of war dogs and puppies.  It went downhill from there.

[mordrax]

I used to think that ppl recommending forbidding dropped stuff was weird being the hoarder that i am.

Well with the new hauling system, it would easily take my army of 50 haulers a good year to get all the crap they dropped into the right stockpiles and until i worked out what was going on, my marksdwarf would constantly try to run straight through the bunch of gobos he was shooting at to pick up the bolt that missed!

Well, now I forbid all dropped items and all surface items and only after a siege or ambush go into the Stock panel and unforbid corpses. Learned this the hard way when 50 of my haulers (used to be a 100 strong hauling force) went out to gather dropped equipment at the start of a siege and all got slaughtered

[Sutremaine]

Forbid orders are your friends. The advice about stationing soldiers somewhere safe before cancelling the active order is good -- it takes a really long time for them to stop randomly wandering off to their last station point.

The new hauling system works great for clothing, since it's light and you can cram huge numbers of items in a single bin. Armour, weapons, and corpses... somewhat trickier. Best thing to do here is try and get all those items into a safe part of the fortress using stockpiles that don't accept bins, and then from there you can take your time with hauling near-full bins of copper and silver items.

[Starver]

Nobody mentioned the civilian alarm part of burrows.

(Technically, I did.  As in "I never use burrows in military (or civilian-alert) senses".   However, YMMV.  Like I've explained in various places, I go for overkill territory-control.  I can generally arrange for my slaughters[1] to take part in specific parts of my map and then make that virtually inaccessible to the next wave of attackers while it's being plundered.  This takes effort to arrange, but is very rewarding.)

[1] Of the enemy, most of the time.

[krenshala]

I've seen a few people mention this in other threads, but hadn't actually tried it until last night and it does indeed help much with the new hauling.

Set up one (or more) stockpiles that don't use bins or barrels and take the items you want collected, but have that stockpile give to the "real" stockpile, which does use barrels/bins.  If you set the second (real) stockpile to only take from links, then your haulers will go out and bring stuff back to the non-barrel/bin stockpile, then immediatley move them to the linked stockpile, possibly fetching a bin or barrel to do so.  If the two are close together,  you get the benefit of multi-pickup bin/barrel jobs, without the hassle of the idiot wandering half the map with the bin/barrel in hand.

I was using this for bolt storage.  It made the recovery of fired bolts very much less of a hassel, as the haulers would bring one bolt back without depriving the hunters/marksdwarves of the bins of new bolts at the same time.  I also used it for seeds so the farmers could plant without worrying about someone running off with the seed bag to pick up stuff in the dinning hall.