With regards to my previous question:
"I've just learned that it's possible to assign multiple <o>rders to a single squad each month in the Military Schedule screen. I'm planning to combine all my 2-dwarf squads into 10-dwarf squads, each with five "Train (2 minimum)" orders each month.
Question: in the above situation, what happens if the squad has less than 10 dwarves? Say, just 4 dwarves? Do they freak out that 3 of the orders can't be fulfilled that month? Furthermore, if I had a bunch of different orders set for that month (4 dwarves defend this burrow, 2 dwarves train, 4 dwarves patrol this route), but not enough dwarves, how do they decide which orders to follow?"
I can report that at least few months in using schedules of 5x Train (2 minimum) with squads of 2 or 3 dwarves doesn't appear to have any adverse effects, that I've noticed.
Moving on to more fun military things, I'm assuming that my squads deciding to go to "No job" and civilian mode whenever I shift them directly from one alert schedule to another is just some of the existing bugs.
E.G. I had a marksdwarf squad set to do a patrol route around the perimeter, with a stop by an ammo bin. When they instead just marched in a circle around the ammo bin, I set them to a different alert schedule I already set up, that told them to defend a burrow which was just a thin strip at my south wall, but instead they all revert to civilians. I gave up and tried to muse the (m)ove command to position them close to my fortifications and hope they get some shots in.
I assume using Active Commands with the (s)quad menu is still the only effective way to get the military to do things? Too bad it doesn't let you defend burrows or patrol routes from that menu...
Anyway my real question is about the longstanding bug that war-trained animals act like civilians with respect to civilian alert burrows. This is silly because any time I set my military out to kill stuff, I want to keep my civilians inside (but still send all the war-dogs out with the soldiers). I was wondering if in the months that I've been away any good workarounds have been thought up for this? I just got Zombie + Human sieges overlapping now and it's hard enough to fight only using (m)ove commands; it'd be nice if the war Giant Leopard I trained up could actually help out instead of stay inside.