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[chlorine]

Hello, I'm playing my first fort and having fun, except I can't for the life of me figure out how military equipment works, especially armor.
I've set up a metalsmith's forge and created a bunch of different iron armor pieces, but my dwarves seem mostly unwilling to equip them.
After doing some research I found that modifying the default metal uniform to make it 'replace clothing' rather than 'over clothing' helps to some degree. I applied this uniform to one squad and they all seem to be wearing greaves, breastplates/mail shirt and boots. None of them is wearing a helm, although there are plenty of helms available in my armor stockpile.
If I try to force them to use an iron helm by using the 'use specific helm' menu, I get a list of all the helms, printed in red. If I select one he will put it on but this seems very tiresome to have to check on them all one by one. Could I do something to have them equip all the armor they can automatically?

For weapons, I use equip specific weapon which seems to be working all right, except that I have the impression that when I select this option I get the list of _all_ weapons, including the ones used by other dwarves, which appear in red in the list. Is this correct?

[Sutremaine]

Yes, equipping a specific weapon causes them all to show up, with already-assigned ones in red. If you want to make sure your dwarves are picking up the best-quality weapons without having to assign an individual weapon, set the uniform to use weapons of a certain material. Dwarves will choose their weapons based on value, and while oddities such as diamond-encrusted weaponry can throw off the AI the most expensive weapons are usually the best quality ones.

They should be equipping their helms if the uniform is set to replace clothing, since it forces them to take off their caps. Caps of any sort can't be worn with helms, which is rather annoying since dwarves can turn up wearing caps as part of their regular clothing. If there are any dwarves who you've set to wear helms via general uniform and not by assigning a specific helm, what are they wearing on their heads?

[chlorine]

They should be equipping their helms if the uniform is set to replace clothing, since it forces them to take off their caps. Caps of any sort can't be worn with helms, which is rather annoying since dwarves can turn up wearing caps as part of their regular clothing. If there are any dwarves who you've set to wear helms via general uniform and not by assigning a specific helm, what are they wearing on their heads?

If I understand correctly, they're wearing nothing at all except their metal clothing. This is an example of what I see when I zoom on a dwarf and look at his (i)ventory:
iron high boot    left foot
iron high boot    right foot
iron spear         left hand

[Sutremaine]

I thought they were all wearing greaves and upper body armour as well? If that's all you can see, then the dwarf is equipped with only a pair of boots and a spear.

If you go to the equip screen (m, e) and examine the middle list dwarf by dwarf, how many items in the uniform have green ticks next to them?

[chlorine]

Yes, I thought they all picked up at least three types of armor item, but I was wrong apparently. If I go to this dwarf's equip screen, only the metal footwear has a green tick next to it.
Interestingly (or not?), if I try to have him equip another specific type of armor, say a helm or a body armor, all the metal armors that appear in the list are printed in red, and the wooden ones appear in white.

I'm playing 0.34.11 with the Phoebus tileset btw, I don't know if that's relevant.

[SnK-Arcbound]

Is your squad set to active, and have a armory with T I Q set for them to train? Have you given your dwaves enough time to equip everything? It can take up to an in game month go get all your dwarves to put on their armor.

[greycat]

I continually see two huge problems with armor in 0.34.11.  The first is caps.  Toady changed caps to be "shaped", which means they cannot coexist with a helm (which is also shaped).  All your immigrants show up with caps on their heads, and this prevents them from wearing helms.  Even if you never produce a cap yourself, and pray for all the imported caps to disintegrate to nothing, the invading goblins might still bring more.  The workaround for the cap issue is to change your soldiers' uniform designation from over clothing to replace clothing.  With that setting, soldiers will strip their civilian attire before beginning the Pickup Equipment process.  However, this workaround also means that your soldiers won't have any clothing on until they get armored -- and if you don't have, say, enough greaves for everyone, then your soldiers will get very bad thoughts from their exposure.  You may wish to throw in some clothing along with your armor in your uniforms, both to avoid these thoughts just in case you ran out of greaves, mail shirts, or whatever, and also for some slight additional padding.

(If you wanted to armor up your civilians by putting them all into inactive squads and assigning them minimal uniforms with a helm, shield and crossbow -- which used to work great in 0.31 -- then you'll run into the same problem now.  Armored civilians would also need to replace clothing, so you'd need to assign a whole bunch of clothing to the uniform.)

The second huge problem with armor in 0.34.11 is boots.  It seems damned near impossible for a dwarf to figure out that he has two feet and therefore needs two boots.  A race that can engineer airtight doors and remote wirelessly-controlled mechanisms out of rocks but can't count to two boots... by Armok, it's a dwarf!  In any case, virtually all my soldiers run around with two socks and one boot, despite piles of steel high boots sitting in the armor stockpile and in the forge.  Assigning two pairs of high boots in your uniform seems to be the only workaround for this one.

[chlorine]

Is your squad set to active, and have a armory with T I Q set for them to train? Have you given your dwaves enough time to equip everything? It can take up to an in game month go get all your dwarves to put on their armor.

My squad is active, and I assigned a barracks (it's the same as an armory, right?) to it for training, and they're training there.
'i' and 'q' shortcuts are for the 'indiv eq' and 'squad eq' options in the barracks menu, right? What are they for?
Anyway I activated both for this squad and waited one full month, and the dwarf is still wearing only high boots (note that he's wearing two of them, yay!) and no other clothing

greycat: apparently in 34.11 the dwarves are not unhappy anymore when they're not properly dressed. I read this in this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=114591.0

At least my dwarf wearing _just_ hight boots is ecstatic. Maybe he's an exhibitionist, duh.

[greycat]

greycat: apparently in 34.11 the dwarves are not unhappy anymore when they're not properly dressed. I read this in this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=114591.0

At least my dwarf wearing _just_ hight boots is ecstatic. Maybe he's an exhibitionist, duh.

Armor counts as clothing in 0.34.11 for purposes of avoiding negative thoughts from exposed torso/crotch/feet.  But if you're missing any of those essentials, get ready for the tantrums.

If your dwarf with just boots is ecstatic, maybe he's still performing the Pickup Equipment job.  That can take a while, especially if the stuff he has selected is scattered all over the map.

[Sutremaine]

Tileset doesn't matter, it's only a display change. There might be some changes to the raws, but 1. they're only there to change which of the 256 tiles is used to display stuff, and 2. the aspects of the military you're having trouble with are the hard-coded ones.

If a piece of equipment doesn't have a green tick next to it, it hasn't been claimed by that dwarf. If you try to assign something manually and all of the items you'd want to assign are in red, it means that they're already been claimed. Look through all your squads to see who's got those items assigned, or find a red item with unique material / quality and use the stocks screen to home in on it.

The equipment options don't see much use. They're supposed to serve as storage for when a dwarf takes off their armour to do civilian stuff, but most players prefer their military dwarves armed and armoured at all times even if inactive. This keeps the dwarf always ready for station orders, and also stops them from getting pegged by random attacks while they don't have the equipment to be able to take full advantage of their combat skills. Armour stands and weapon racks themselves were also bugged in .31, as they didn't count as stockpiles and so any equipment that did end up being stored was immediately hauled to an appropriate stockpile. They're probably still bugged now; I haven't tried it.

I haven't had issues with boots so long as there are no socks in the uniform, though since I skipped straight from pre-clothing release to post-armour release I never had problems with booted soldiers complaining about their lack of shoes.

[chlorine]

Thank you everyone for your answers.

Things _seem_ to be getting better for the new dwarves I just assigned to the militia. Could the fact that I appointed a militia commander (I had none when I first posted) have something to do with it?

[greycat]

If your militia commander dies, then yeah, you'll need to put someone else in that slot before the military can return to what passes for normal.  Same with individual squad leaders (captains).

[chlorine]

Cool, that was the main problem then.

Does my militia commander need to have special skills or can I appoint anyone?

[Donuts]

I'm pretty sure that leadership means something, but the best guy is displayed at the top.