So I'm sure plenty of you have already figured this out, but I thought I'd post it because I hadn't seen it mentioned here already and it might help someone since I spent a long time banging my head against the wall over it.
As everyone knows the new military equipment system with the Arsenal Dwarf looks like it's going to be awesome, but it's still buggy as hell even after you figure out how to work the crazy interface for it. I suspect a fair number of the "bugs" that people are reporting are actually just not knowing how the new interface works... it took me quite a while to figure it out.
One problem I still have, though, is that soldiers will NEVER drop a piece of equipment once they've picked it up. Even if you create a new uniform called "Naked" with no equipment assigned at all and set all your dwarves to use it, they'll still keep wearing everything they were before and continue carrying any weapons/shields they had.
If you had them carrying wooden training swords and then assigned a new uniform to tell them to pick up metal swords instead, they'll happily go pick up the new metal swords but will *keep* carrying the wooden training swords in the same hand, and will usually use the wooden weapon in a fight and die in the process.
I've even tried going through each dwarf and specifying the individual items (like training swords) to "forbid" and "dump" but nothing happens, they just keep carrying them.
... so here's what I've figured out: the only way I can get them to drop their previous equipment is to:
1. Disband the squad (m, d)
*and*
2. Free the Barracks to which they are assigned (q, f)
The instant you do BOTH of these things you should see all of your soldiers scurry off to place all of their non-civilian armor, weapons, and other equipment back in the appropriate stockpiles.
Once they're all completely back to civilian clothes you can re-create the squad, re-assign the Barracks, and re-assign your desired uniform... and they'll go pick up JUST the things in the uniform.
Hope that helps somebody... hopefully the bug will be fixed soon and the arsenal dwarf will be able to tell them to take off equipment no longer assigned to them, but until then this is better than nothing.
--nomad_delta
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Topic: Workaround to get soldiers to drop training weapons & other equipment (Read 413 times)