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[Loud Whispers]

Someone recently taught me that you can give multiple orders to a squad for a single month

Holy grail of military micro

[Xen0n]

Someone recently taught me that you can give multiple orders to a squad for a single month

Holy grail of military micro

It is pretty awesome, but I'm still learning some things (e.g. if I give a Defend Burrow (3 minimum), Train (2 minimum), and Patrol Route (5 minimum) orders to the same squad for one month, but there's only 4 dwarves in the squad, how do they choose which order to follow? ).

One possible point is that, at least in my experience, combined with rumors, supposedly dwarves are more likely to spar if their comabt skills are roughly equal.  When I set up the new 10-dwarf squads, it seems that I get more demonstrations and less sparring than when I meticulously paired up evenly-skilled dwarves.  I'm assuming this is because the pairs don't always choose their partners of equal skill?

Who wants to deal with assigning training weapons either.

Edit the uniforms to use the weapon of choice.  I also create a Recruit uniform that includes nothing but a shied and training weapon.  Then the magic happens: m -> e -> select squad -> U -> select uniform to use -> Shift+Enter (sets the entire squad to use that uniform).  Whats that? You want to change your all dagger squad in leather armor to a metal wearing spear unit?  No problem -- edit the metal uniform (I renamed it to Regulars) so it has the weapon desired, then m -> e -> select squad -> U -> select Regulars -> Shift+Enter, and watch all ten dwarves drop their daggers and leather armor in the halls and rush to pick up spears and metal armor (assuming you have some available).

This gets even more awesome with macros.  I'd always used macros for digging diagonal tunnels, furnishing bedrooms etc., but someone mentioned macros for custom uniforms and I slapped myself.  No more redesigning 7 complete custom uniforms for each new fort!  I now have a macro for each melee weapon uniform, a Marksdwarf uniform, and a simple Civilian uniform.  A few keypresses each fort now and I'm done

[krenshala]

What I do is rename the starting armors: Leather becomes Reserves with no changes (individual choice melee), Metal becomes Regulars but I change the weapon designation based on the type of unit I am creating, Archers becomes Crossbows (specifying crossbows).  I then create the Recruits uniform that has only training weapon and shield.

So I make a new squad, edit the Regulars uniform to change the weapon to what I want that squad to use, then use the equipment screen to assign the new Regulars uniform to to everyone.  This means all my metal wearing squads have one thing different between them - the weapon they are assigned.

I could see a macro for the initial modifications (my first paragraph this post), but it isn't really worth it for actual squad creation in my opinion.  No reason not to use macros for this, however, so carry on!