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[Dantez]

Hello everyone,
I am new on this forum and at this wonderful piece of a game, but I tend to manage. Currently I am running 107 dwarf sized fortress, and there is really no problem for me except for one thing, and that is basic military defense.

I understand the simple ways of sending my soldiers to fight, yet since I am the kind of guy that loves building strategic fortifications I would like to understand the way alerts and scheduling work.

On the floor level I placed my Trade Depot, and I plan on building a large maze filled with traps before getting to the part which my post mainly concerns. If the invaders get through all of that, I have set up this trap room with fortifications and military stationed around.

My problem is that since I want to station my Marksdwarves in the green burrow (so they can shoot at the poor bastards in the trap field), and my heavily armored fighters in the red burrow (as a last ditch effort), yet whenever I attempt order them to take up their positions they immediately change to civilians and go on with their jobs.



Could anyone please explain to me how I can force my soldiers into burrows without them changing out of clothes? Also, I will gladly accept any ideas about further development of my fortress.

[Kirkegaard]

Have you set your military to be active? s-"army ABC" - t (Active/traning)?

[Dantez]

Yes, I did, they are training on the screen actually without a problem. I have even manageded to fight of goblin ambushers via S-K, but assigning them to a burrow is my main problem, I basically want to force them to stand in their respective spots

[Urist McVoyager]

How are you assigning them to this burrow? Through the Burrows menu or the Scheduling one? You should be using the Scheduling one.

Go into Military menu and go to Alerts. Create a new one named burrows or something. Go into Scheduling and set the full year as a Defend Burrow order and use the options there to set each squad to its proper burrow. I've never done this, so I don't know how precise it would be, but that's how the scheduling and assignment system works.

Whenever there's a siege, just set your three chosen squads on that Burrow alert instead of their training one, and they'll follow the new schedule.

[zetadin]

The way I'd do this is to skip burrows altogether. When you are under siege, order your troops to move to those 3 positions by s-m. An alternative is to just create a barracks at positions you want them to defend and assign the squads there. That way your soldier will not get unhappy thoughts from long deployments and you will not need to order them to move each time you get attacked. But keep in mind that they will train in barracks and if you don't want your dwarves turning their heads to mush by dodging into walls, you need to give them some room.

[Urist McVoyager]

I wouldn't go s-m. Stationing/moving is imprecise for sure, only getting your folks within three squares of the stationing spot. If he were going to go that way, he should stick his soldiers one Z-level up and only keep one square open behind the fortifications. Otherwise he's just as likely to have his archers standing in the path the enemies will be using, and taking hits left and right.

[Dantez]

Alright, after reading through your suggestions I have tried to assign my squads to defend their burrows. First I set up an alert for this, then I went into scheduling, chose the "WAR" alert and set up "Defend Burrow 1" and "Defend Burrow 2" respectively for both squads. Yet, after pressing S in game and scrolling to a different alert, my military dwarves immediately changed into their civilian attire, ran around for a while, then changed back and about half of them actually arrived to my desired destination; the other half either ran upstairs (which would be disasterous during an actual siege) or just sort of messed around in the base.

Well, it is most certainly better than just doing S-M, but still it isn't exactly what I imagined; all I want is basically for my marksdwarves to stand in a straight line and my fighters to stand in a block basically, just so they can take on the goblins one at a time.