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[farfromhome]

The first goblin siege on Usithkel, "Grimmetal" dealt a serious blow to the fortress.

When the ambushers first arrived, I quickly set standing orders to 'only soldiers go outside' and stationed my squad of elite wrestlers just outside the doors.

First problem: the squad refused to deploy to where I had stationed them. They sat about 'soldiering' in my workshop area. This allowed the goblins to hang around my front door without any opposition. I tried deactivating and reactivating the squad, and I tried setting the squad up with a new leader (since it seemed that the one I had initially picked preferred to stare at craftsdwarfs instead of doing his dwarfly duty of doing away with the goblin menace). None of this helped: the dwarfs refused to go fight.

How do I make squads go to their stations?

Second problem: when the ambushers first arrived, they killed a hunter and a fisher. Now, no dwarf likes to see their dead friends outside a coffin, so two dwarfs rushed out to help, despite my order that no dwarf should go outside. Damn dwarfs!

Unfortunately, they would go to step just outside before they realized that outside was forbidden - and there were the goblins waiting for them. Which generated more corpses, which led to more corpse retrieval, which led to...

After killing 15 dwarfs, the goblins finally decided that at the rate they were burning through victims, there would soon be no fun left to have at fortress Grimmetal. And they left - obviously they couldn't wait to tell their friends about the easy victims here.

So: how do I get my military dwarfs to actually go outside where I need them? And how do I keep my dwarfs from really going outside, instead of having to walk outside before they remember that I've forbidden them to leave their mountainhomes?

[ March 22, 2008: Message edited by: farfromhome ]

[Sagabal]

1: Were they on duty?
2: This just seems to be a general problem; it happens to me all the time, and it did in the 2-D version for me as well.

[farfromhome]

They were definitely on duty. They still are. They've gone back to parading around the fortress: right now, they're soldiering outside my farm plots.

Meanwhile, the deaths of these disobedient dwarfs have started Grimmetal on what  I believe is an inevitable slide to doom. With the tantruming, the berserk rages, and the justice meted out by my soldiers (who are definitely soldiering, as they think nothing of beating a berserking weaver to death), my poor dwarfs are filling coffins faster than my melancholy masons can build them.

[ March 22, 2008: Message edited by: farfromhome ]

[Derakon]

"On duty" specifically means that if you go m->view squad, it'll say "on duty" on the resulting page. Soldiers who aren't on duty will still show the "Soldier" status; that just indicates that they don't take part in ordinary labor duties.

As for dealing with entrance-hopping, you'll have to extend your defenses out beyond the entrance to your fortress, so that dwarves that pop outside for a moment are still protected (and more importantly, can't see the goblins).

[farfromhome]

Oh, I double-checked them, and even un-on-dutied them, and then re-on-dutied them. They were just miscreants. Is there some other reason they wouldn't go to their stations?

[numerobis]

Perhaps you had a patrol set up for that squad?  Hit 'x' in the 'x' view for that squad.

There's a bug (fixed in the next version) about dwarves continuing to train after being put on duty, but your symptoms don't match.

[Hyperturtle]

Is their leader busy doing something, like healing is mangled arm, or eating and drinking?

Try promoting someone else to the leader of your group and attempt to set a new location for them, and see how that goes.

[farfromhome]

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Unfortunately, it seems like this dwarf mystery is going to go unsolved.

There were no patrol points, so that wasn't the problem.    

A few months later, the goblins came back. They had twice my numbers this time. The only dwarfs left after repulsing this second siege are those who are lying mangled where they fell outside or in their bedrooms. I hate to abandon the fortress, but there's really nothing I can do: there are no dwarfs capable of working anymore.

[ March 22, 2008: Message edited by: farfromhome ]

[toast]

i have loads of trouble with my military, it takes forever for my marksdwarves to do anything. I rely on a moat, surrounding a walled in area that contains my stairs down into the fort. i then trap the hell out of the inside of the moat, so that the goblins go running across the bridge to the traps. i then raise the bridge that goes inside the walls, and the bridge that leads across the moat. The goblins are now in an area with more than 500 stone traps, and when the bridge goes up they stop dead. Then my marksdwarves finish them off from above, in half an hour or so when they get around to doing some work.

[Dkarrde]

Soldiers in a squad always follow the squad leader.  Only the leader goes to a stationed point; that means if the leader is off doing something else, like Pickup Equipment (why the god do you need a new cave spider silk sock to fight) or Eat (food... or goblins.  food... goblins.  hmmmmmmmmm.), the soldiers under his command will be in the workshops or the dining room or whatever.

To combat this, create a squad, tell them to station somewhere, and then promote all the underlings out of the squad.  They'll keep the squad orders and all station where you want them to be, and because they're all their own leader, each will go to the station if they are not doing something else.

[Frelock]

Do you have a meeting place?  If so, did the soldiers go there?  If they did, then there is something wrong with the orders you gave them (aka, they can't get through the locked door to their station)  If they didn't, then I have no idea what they were doing.

Oh, and as to the "Dwarves stay indoors" order, it doesn't cancel all the tasks outside, it just makes it so when the stupid dwarves walk into the light, they say "oops, I shouldn't be here" and then they go away.  Best solution is to build walls outside your entrance so they can't get attacked before they go back inside.  If you're quick, you can also forbid the bodies of the fallen dwarves and all the goblin's stuff so they won't want to go outside.

[ March 22, 2008: Message edited by: Frelock ]

[Khosan]

I have discovered a solution to the dwarves running outside.

Forbid everything.  Crack open the (d)esignation menu and (f)orbid everything you can see that's not underground.  Dwarves won't go outdoors any more until you re(c)laim everything.  Otherwise, I would've had a similar problem earlier today when the human caravan got ambushed by goblin bowmen and slaughtered everything except the Baroness who came with them, and I would've lost about 20 haulers out of 60 dwarves to the whole debacle.

As for the other problem: It does take some time for all the recruits to get rounded up and for the leader to give orders.  Once that's done they will scramble toward the station or patrol points.

I did have one weird occurrence with the human caravan situation I mentioned earlier.  I make it a habit of preparing my military whenever the merchants show up, since goblins are never far behind and will tend to screw with me, so the humans show up and station them just outside my main gate.  So all the minions head there, while the two Champions I'm training in the ways of hammering head off to pick up their crossbows.

But the champions didn't stop there.  They apparently decided that they had to pick up something from the destroyed human caravan that the goblins were camping, even though every last item was forbidden.  I tried reforbidding, resetting the station point and even random leader-switching.  Didn't work.  They ran into the horde of bowmen, with no ammo and crossbows in hand.

They still won, but, y'know, my finger was hovering over the keys for a save scum.

[Lightman]

I think I'm having the same problem. I checked everything multiple times. The military squads are set to active, yet only some of them go to their posts - 3/5. Two of them are "soldiering" about in the barracks or some other pointless location that has nothing to do with their station.

This has got to be a bug, right? Why would they just ignore their station? There is definitely a path.

[numerobis]

There is another issue with ancestral patrol routes, that seems to clear up when you create a patrol route, then 'x' it out.

[Untelligent]

I think this was mentioned before, but I'm not sure if you did it right or not.

Go to the (m)ilitary menu. Go to any dwarf in that squad and (v)iew that squad. At the bottom, under the options of where to sleep and how much food to carry, the last option will either say "Squad is on duty" or "Squad is standing down." If it says "squad is standing down," change it to "squad is on duty." THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING ACTIVE OR NOT.