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[Valdemar]

Currently, the behavior for soldiers with no orders is to revert to their civilian profession. From here, they engage in individual combat training if they have the hard-working and/or self-motivated traits, or resume their civilian duties if they are not.

This is sub-optimal for several reasons:

• There is no way to specify that you want all your off duty soldiers to resume their civilian duties even if they are very hard-working and want to train.
• The announcements are constantly flooded with notifications that so-and-so has changed their profession, and their icons constantly switch from civilian to military
• Soldiers often jump around in the units list and are often mixed in with the civilians; the only way to manage them is to give custom nicknames to each one, which is far from ideal.

I propose a new toggle on the military schedule screen next to the 'Inactive = [Uniformed/Civ clothes]' toggle that would work the same way for 'Inactive = [Soldiers/Civilians]'. It could even just be tied to that toggle, (Uniformed = Soldiers, Civ clothes = Civilians), though that would take away some of the control.

Dwarves in squads with the toggle set to 'Civilians' would turn into civilians the same as now when they have no orders or are the 'extra' dwarves when there are orders (i.e. when you have a squad of 5 and order 3 to station somewhere, I am referring to the 2 extras). They would resume their civilian jobs, and not perform individual combat drills no matter how motivated they are. A good use for this setting could be if you give some of your starting 7 dwarves some military skills, put them in a squad, and order one to always stand guard outside the fort and allow the others to work. The one on guard would rotate just like in the current system.

Dwarves in squads with the toggle set to 'Soldiers' would always remain military dwarves even when they have no orders, are the 'extra' dwarves, or are temporarily off duty to eat/drink/sleep. If they are self-motivated they will train in their off time, and if they are not they will just mill around in the barracks/meeting hall. Under no conditions will they ever switch professions to civilian, trigger an announcement, or change icons. This would be useful for more developed forts with a dedicated military which you want to always keep separated from the civilians.

Under both systems, giving a direct order through the squads menu will immediately force all dwarves to become military, take up arms, and execute your orders like in the current system.

[tfaal]

I support this idea. Of course, the military is so horrendously bugged right now that it's hard to tell what's an intended behavior and what's a glitch.

[Pilsu]

They could just do the occasional training on their break time. You'd still get announcements but fairly rarely and it accomplishes the goal of making them more reliable workers without undermining the new personality-based mechanic.

For added depth, sociability, mood and other traits could play a part in determining how often the dwarves train on their personal time.

[LucasUP]

I just came here to suggest something like this!

My concerns were more the labeling of dwarves in squads. There is no way to tell if dwarves are in a squad if they are inactive/training from the unit list. I like your suggestion, as long as dwarves are labeled something automatically to show they are part of a squad. Also along what Pilsu said, there could be a middle-ground option: motivated dwarves will occasionally join in the military/training activities, whereas unmotivated/un-required dwarves will just do their regular Civ jobs.