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[Josiwe]

Understanding the military menu is difficult at first, especially for players low on patience.

I've found a fairly simple way to make sense of it, and thought I'd share.

The military screen is divided into three layers, which unfortunately are not spatially arranged on the screen in a way that makes this easy to understand.

Main Menu



Near the bottom of the Military screen is the Main Menu. This is the primary menu, which allows you to navigate broad topics of military-related sub-menus. No matter what sub-menu or sub-screen you are on, this menu remains active, and pressing one of the keys (p, a, e, n, u, f, s) will leave the current screen and take you to the first sub-screen for that topic.

p - Positions

The default starting screen when entering the military menu is the Positions menu. This is where you define the organizational hierarchy of your military - from the militia commander, to the militia captains underneath him, to the squads and which dwarves belong in which squads.

Here is an image of the Positions screen with the sub-menu highlighted as you would see it at embark, before doing anything:



Not too hard to understand at first. If you press 'c', you will create your first squad. You will be prompted to select a uniform for your new squad with a popup menu like this:



A uniform is is essentially a pre-designed set of equipment that you can quickly apply to any individual soldier or entire squad, much like a template. The game gives you three default uniforms to choose from, named "Leather armor", "Metal armor", and "Archer". You can also select "No uniform" and deal with that part later. This might be another source of confusion, so let me clarify - the uniform name "Leather armor" does not refer to the specific upper body armor, but to the general category. So the "Leather armor" uniform tells your dwarves to equip that upper body piece as well as leather headwear, leather handwear, leather legwear, leather footwear, leather shields/bucklers, and "individual choice melee", which just means whatever weapon is handy that your little alcoholic prefers to fight with. Note that uniforms can get much more specific, but if you don't specify they will get any piece that fits the description. If there's nothing available, they will just make do with nothing.

Notes:
1) On embark you may create one squad without appointing a militia commander - however you cannot add units to the AVAILABLE slots until the VACANT (leadership) slot is filled, and that dwarf will automatically become the militia commander.
2) The squad name no longer comes from the leader of the squad - it's randomly generated. So you can keep creating and deleting your new squad until it has a name you like.

Upon creating your first squad, we see the second part of the reason the military screens are difficult to navigate; specifically, the sub-menus are context-sensitive. This means they change not only depending on which main-menu topic you navigate to, but also depending on the state of your military AND which part of the interface you have highlighted.

HUH? Let me explain. Since we now have one squad, the Positions sub-menu changes. Right now, my cursor is highlighting my first squad, the Bronze Fliers:



If I press the right arrow, my cursor moves into the Squad Positions interface column, and the sub-menu changes again:



And again if I highlight one of my dwarves:



Now I assign my marksdwarf to the Bronze Fliers by pressing the enter key, and the context changes, so my sub-menus change again. In this case, by assigning my marksdwarf as the leader of my squad, he is automatically promoted to militia commander. This can be hard to notice if you're not aware of it. The result is that I can now appoint captains underneath him from the squad column:



By pressing the 'l' key, I did two things, one of which is not immediately apparent; first, I created my new squad, The Silvery Actions. Second, by creating that squad I also created a new noble position - the squad captain. If I go to the noble screen, I now see a vacant captain position. The key thing to understand here is that this noble position can be filled in two places - the nobles screen, or the VACANT leadership slot on my new squad.

You can see here that if I use my cursor to highlight my new squad, and then one of the AVAILABLE slots in the squad, and finally my miner, I cannot put him in the squad because the squad has no commander:



You can also see that my marksdwarf/militia commander Zefon Akurdodok seems to be available to join this squad; if you do assign a dwarf belonging to one squad into another, he will be removed from the first. A dwarf can only belong to one squad at a time.

So by examining the Positions menu, we can begin to understand how Toady designed this interface - it's highly context-sensitive. This means that as you learn the system, you should study each screen, and do things slowly - one step at a time, figuring out how the menus have changed as you make each choice and selection.

There's one more mindf*ck in another screen, which we will look at now.

e - Equip

The Equip menu is really nasty, because the sub-menu has ANOTHER SUB-MENU. And it's hard to recognize unless you're paying attention.

Here's the illustration. First I press the 'e' key on the main menu, and we see the default equip menu. The sub-menu is highlighted in red:



Now we'll look at the sub-sub menus:







On this screen, as you move the cursor around the mid-level menu does not change, but the sub-SUB-menus do.

I have not posted screenshots of every possible menu configuration because I'm tired and this post was not meant to be a comprehensive overview of the new military menu; rather it was meant to help you learn the fundamentals of its design, so that you could in turn teach it to yourself. Generate a trash embark, study each of the menus carefully, and hopefully with the hints in this post you will be able to decipher the new menus for yourself. Armok's curse upon you all.

[ProZocK]

I think i just might love you for this.
Military screen was my biggest WTF on the new version, this will surely help me a lot.
Thanks man!

[Dorf3000]

Bumping this back to the first page..

I've noticed that you have to be careful when making several changes to the military at once - it seems to reset the highlighted item in a confusing manner and I often find myself on the squad part of the screen rather than the unit list or the equip list of the dwarf I was editing.  It's also tricky when you add squad members, I can't count the number of times I've accidentally replaced the militia commander rather than filling the last empty slot in the squad.  It doesn't help that on my laptop screen, the highlighted entry is only barely brighter than the normal ones, and finding it usually requires moving it and watching for changes.

[Mirefrost00]

So, yeah.  I was one of the lucky few that found the new military screen, with its menus, submenus, and sub-submenus, somewhat intuitive.  Save for one thing:  the scheduling submenus, as well as the various orders and the practical difference between Active and Inactive.  I, and possibly others, would love to know what it is used for, how best to apply it, whether it is even to be messed with before one has three-plus squads milling about the fortress.

Scanning the first page of results of a search for "military schedule" I did not see useful info.  Would you be willing, if able, to illuminate this additional subject?  Is there an established resource for this already?

[Retro]

Scanning the first page of results of a search for "military schedule" I did not see useful info.  Would you be willing, if able, to illuminate this additional subject?  Is there an established resource for this already?

This link has the information you need, I believe: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Military_interface

[Mirefrost00]

Outstanding!  Thank you.  Guess I need to check the new wiki more often for further hole-filling and revamping.

[Josiwe]

Oh wow, I had not found that link. That's a far more comprehensive treatment, and should be bruited about so everyone finds it.

[Graygan]

Thank you for this.  Some of it I had figured out, but this helps even more.

I've found it easier for me to just rename all immigrants that have military skills... The first lucky drunk to come wandering in is renamed General or some version there of and is obviously turned into the militia leader.  The next 2 are named Captains 1 and 2(I know, right?  Totally imaginitive!)  After that, all drunks with military skills are named Soldier 1, 2, 3, etc.  When I've got 20 total military dwarves, the next batch to come in are given appropriate names for joining the eventual guard slots.

I've yet to bother with actually assigning training or anything like that.  Usually I just form up a squad or two whenever they are needed and send them with the direct orders to attack/kill whatever invader is coming in.  Then I disband the squad so they can get right back to work.  I've been afraid to set up training commands or barracks or anything else like that due to all the horror stories I've seen about non-stop training and useless military stuck in loops.

[Retro]

Well, it's slipped into the military-related-links box at the bottom of each military page under 'interface walkthrough,' but I never really linked to it anywhere else, so it's really not at all a surprise that nobody's found it Speaking of military matters, if there's anything anyone is confused about feel free to give me a shout; I wrote basically every 0.31 military page and can expand on any point if asked.

Actually, for that same interface guide, I never got around to adding anything on squads. If anyone wants to do that, please go ahead; it's highly unlikely I ever will.

[Hyperturtle]

anyone have a good method for assigning specific items?  I have trouble keeping track of exactly who got what steel this and bronze that... I sometimes overlap and get spammed with equipment mismatch messages.

[Bishop36]

I love you.