So my legendary gemsetter was out doing who knows what when an ambush occurred. He was right next to the fort entrance and there was a wall between him and the goblins. They had no line of sight to him and if he had gone down to the burrow like he was ordered to, they never would have seen him. They also would have been trapped if they followed him.
However, he ran directly away from the goblins he couldn't see, out into the open, and fled to the hills where my soldiers had no chance to reach him in time. He became a pincushion.
Then, I interrupted the kill order I had set so the one soldier ahead of everyone else could wait for the other eight to catch up. The guy in the lead stopped and waited, but the rest of the squad, 30 tiles behind him and closing, suddenly ran back to the fort entrance. I issued the kill order again. They kept heading back. Canceled it and made another move order. They kept heading back. I checked to see if they were drinking, eating, or sleeping. It said they were either moving to station or heading to kill the goblins they were running away from.
The guy who was actually following orders correctly was overrun and killed, and DF soldiers being the whiniest bunch of drama queens in all fiction, they are now pissed off that they let their friend die. 1) You're in the military. Things in the military die sometimes. Deal with it instead of injuring other soldiers or the people you're supposed to protect. Either of those actions is exactly in opposition to the job you're currently failing to do. 2) The reason he is dead is you. If you want to avenge him, there is an open magma pit very close to the barracks you're heading back to.
Thank god I spammed cage traps, because the military is still barely worth having.
Could one of the upcoming release cycles please be wholly devoted to fixing issues like these? The new abundance of sites is kinda nice, but I'd really rather have an army that does a better job of intercepting the enemy than cage traps. Ideally squad behavior would be something more like in a real-time strategy game, where units immediately follow orders and do not stop until told to do otherwise, and also head in a direction that is not the opposite of towards their current objective.
And if it's caused by something like "the soldiers need to go back to base to get new orders", considering that a day lasts a few seconds in this game, I'm pretty sure it's an acceptable break from reality to have soldiers immediately follow new orders.