What if instead of saying "From this squad, two dwarves will train at minimum and another two will patrol the caverns at minimum ", I could say, "From this squad, half of the dwarves minimum must train and the other half of the dwarves will patrol the caverns"? I could also say, "1/4 of you patrol, another 1/4 of you guard this location, then 1/2 of you train".
It'd help for creating more flexible schedules that can accommodate active drafting of whatever poor sods I happen to press gang into service, especially with the new mercenaries which seem to come in a never-ending tide to my fort. It's a bit tedious to continually update all those orders to account for the increased squad strength. However, there's the issue of ensuring the mostly reasonable response of the program to numbers that are indivisible by the proportion you wish for. Having five dwarves in a squad and wishing for the two halves of the squad to do separate things would introduce some ambiguity - you can't have 2.5 dwarves doing something, so would you round the numbers up? That'd result in 3 dwarves doing something and another 3 doing something else - an incorrect response.
A simple way to handle this would be to restrict the proportions to those that cleanly divide the number of dwarves - you can only request 1/2 of the dwarves for 2 dwarves, 4 dwarves, 6 dwarves, etc. Yet that'd defeat the purpose entirely, since you'd still have to change the proportions if you changed from an odd number to an even number, for example. Perhaps a better way to do it would simply be dividing and allowing the remainder to be off-duty, though that trades efficiency for ease of use.
There's a great amount of issues with this, so feel free to bounce ideas around, if you are so inclined.
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Topic: Assigning Proportions of Troops to Orders, rather than Absolute Numbers (Read 593 times)