Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[roundedge]

I have a squad set to patrol the countryside, to prevent goblin ambushes from piling up. Anyways, when I get a siege I tell the squad to move to a specific location. Now, instead of dropping their task and moving to that location, they complete the journey they are making to their patrol position and THEN move to the spot I designate. How do I keep them from doing this?

Also, currently I have them patrolling, but because they move at different speeds and they go in and out of rank when they need to attend to pressing needs, the patrol group begins to spread out until the patrol route is scattered with dwarves. Is Toady working on a way to keep your squad as a unit, so that dwarves path to their squad, rather than to the first patrol route, and dwarves slow down so that everyone can keep pace?

[CapnUrist]

The only idea I have for your first problem is to include more waypoints in your patrol routes. More points mean more spots where they will consider the current "job" completed and can get to doing what you want them to do.

[Hyndis]

Defend burrow is more useful if you want an active military on seek and destroy. Designate the entire surface of your fortress as a burrow. Order multiple squads to defend it. They will automatically seek all hostiles and rush over there to stab at things.

Patrol is more for marksdwarves patrolling the top of your battlements. Simple four point patrol route (assuming square tower) means that you will have dwarves roughly evenly spaced around the top of your tower, constantly moving around it to ensure 360 degrees of firing coverage from the top of the tower. Put an ammo stockpile in the tower so they don't need to run far for more ammo and they will rain pointy death upon anything that gets near.

To have dwarves guard your gatehouse all you need to do is make the gatehouse be a barracks and put dwarves on active and training at that barrcks. Alternatively, use defense burrow, and make a small burrow of the gatehouse.

If you're going search and destroy with an active military, you need to have all of your dwarves doing this. 40 soldiers or so should be enough. More are needed for a bigger map to ensure enough dwarves, as they will end up somewhat scattered. If you prefer a defensive military, put maybe 2 squads on defense duty in your gatehouse, with 3-4 squads on patrol on your battlements. The gatehouse guys are to finish off anything the marksdwarves miss.