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[greycat]

The squad was active and training was their only order. Had a min of 4 out of 9 squad members.

I don't think this point got covered yet.  When you change the minimum dwarf requirement on a scheduled order, what that means is only that many dwarves have to be soldiers at a given time.  The others will be civilians.  So your squad of 9 has 4 soldiers and 5 civilians. The civilians might choose to do individual weapon drills, or they might go make socks or haul crap around.

If you want all your dwarves to train, leave the minimum at 10.  Always.

[Hyndis]

In my experience the default settings are actually the best settings to use.

Just throw 10 dwarves into a squad. Put them on active/training. Assign them to a barracks. Ensure that the barracks is someplace useful so the soldiers will defend the fortress.

Thats it.

Of course more dwarves are better, and more squads are better. Just throw more and more squads at that barracks. If you have a blob of 60+ dwarves all sparring together, you will get a huge number of champions, at which point they will ruin anything. Likewise 60+ marksdwarves packed together in the same barracks will destroy anything through the principle of more dakka.

[Trif]

So another question. I've got about 25 goblins trapped in cages from a siege/ambush. I'm trying to get the items off them. I've tried d-b-c, d-b-d, then going individually through each one in k, enter-d to unselect the cages themselves, but my dwarves never get the items from them. The cages are in an animal stockpile, and I have a garbage disposal set up. If I hide the cages, I can see hidden items in my stock, so they must have them. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

I remember having to build the cages, but the wiki doesn't mention it. So, try building them with (b)-(j), I guess. Maybe it helps.

If you want all your dwarves to train, leave the minimum at 10.  Always.

Warning: Dwarves who are permanently on-duty with no downtime have been observed to begin to starve themselves keeping to the rigorous schedule, and thus grow unhappy. Do you really want to find out how much damage that practice spear can do? To allow some of your dwarves to go sleeping when they need, and also eat and drink (even from carried rations!), you need to lower the minimum number of dwarves of the squad that need to follow the current order at any time in the order criteria as listed above. You want the criteria to be at least one or two dwarves less than the current number of dwarves in your squad.

[Tirion]

IIRC there is no significant difference between dabbling and legendary marksdwarves. Just make 60 wooden crossbows, 60 leather quivers, 456 bazillion bone bolts*, and make 6 inactive, barrack-less squads of 10 marksdwarves each. Find a rally point where they have no line of sight to the invaders, so they don't go on one-man kamikaze missions.

Typical goblin armor offers total protection to the upper body, lower body, upper arms, and partial protection of the head- meaning that a hail of bone bolts will plink off those parts, but can and will cause crippling and (through bleeding) eventually lethal wounds on limbs, and can score lucky headshots. One dwarf in no armor but a shield, and a crossbow with bone bolts is a joke. 60 of them is not.

*masterwork bolts stuck in retreating invaders leaving the map, or atom-smashed, or left outside and stolen by kobold thieves cause a bad thought for the dwarf who made them. IIRC it's -1000/(the total number of masterworks the dwarf has made) meaning if it's 1 of his only stack [5] masterwork bone bolts, you're screwed, but if he is your dedicated bonecrafter spending all his worktime make bone bolts [/R] he'll have made so many, you won't notice any difference in happiness.

[PainRack]

Trained marksdwarves seem to fire more often than untrained marksdwarves, not really a problem in combat though since its the numbers that count. Even a macelord can fail to the rain of bolts you shower on him.

[Hyndis]

A well trained marksdwarf does have a noticeably faster fire rate and higher accuracy than a recruit, but even 60 recruits together in a blob will be able to lay down a hail of bolts nothing can get through.

Eventually those 60 recruits will turn into 60 elite marksdwarves, and all that means is that they murder things faster and more efficiently, with less wasted bolts.

[Sutremaine]

If you want all your dwarves to train, leave the minimum at 10.  Always.

Warning: Dwarves who are permanently on-duty with no downtime have been observed to begin to starve themselves keeping to the rigorous schedule, and thus grow unhappy. Do you really want to find out how much damage that practice spear can do? To allow some of your dwarves to go sleeping when they need, and also eat and drink (even from carried rations!), you need to lower the minimum number of dwarves of the squad that need to follow the current order at any time in the order criteria as listed above. You want the criteria to be at least one or two dwarves less than the current number of dwarves in your squad.

The 'Train' order is exempt from that.

[agentanorexia]

Building the cages doesn't seem to help, in fact I appear to lose the ability to do the enter-d on the cages. Also one or two of the places I saw it specifically mentioned while they were in the stockpile. Also, going through z-weapons I can see them marked as dump, my guys just won't go get them.

[agentanorexia]

Got it! Dwarves weren't set to gather refuse from outside (animal stockpile was outside).

[billw]

I don't think it was claiming, I went level by level and claimed from corner to corner. No caverns/underground rivers to speak of.

So another question. I've got about 25 goblins trapped in cages from a siege/ambush. I'm trying to get the items off them. I've tried d-b-c, d-b-d, then going individually through each one in k, enter-d to unselect the cages themselves, but my dwarves never get the items from them. The cages are in an animal stockpile, and I have a garbage disposal set up. If I hide the cages, I can see hidden items in my stock, so they must have them. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

FYI If you are on the latest version (not sure what version this was introduced) you can designate across multiple Z levels, thereby reclaim your entire fortress in a single operation from top-left-upper to bottom-right-lower corner of entire map. Works for any kind of designation AFAIK, including digging  up/down stair cases, making exploratory mining about 100 times less painful.

[Pyro627]

Getting a 'safe' danger room up is a fair task for a new player though.

I built my first danger room with virtually no experience at all - I barely even looked it up - and it worked perfectly. Withing thirty seconds I was asking myself, "When did I get an axelord?"

[GreatWyrmGold]

One dwarf in no armor but a shield, and a crossbow with bone bolts is a joke. 60 of them is not.

60 can be an even bigger joke, if they rush in alternating crossbow and shield bashes. Or if the enemy gets to them before getting crippled and slaughters them. Use fortifications and understand how to use marksdwarves!

[VerdantSF]

In my experience the default settings are actually the best settings to use.

Just throw 10 dwarves into a squad. Put them on active/training. Assign them to a barracks. Ensure that the barracks is someplace useful so the soldiers will defend the fortress.

Thats it.

I've had large squads and small squads before (split into same-weapon groups), and the smaller squads have always been better trained because they sparred far more often.  The 2-man squad was nearly double the levels in their weapon skill and shield skill than the 8-man squad.  For non-danger room melee-based armies, small squads are still the best way to go.  The difference in shield skill due to sparring is especially important when taking on enemy ranged troops. 

[agentanorexia]

So semi-relevant question to thread topic. I couldn't seem to get my squad to go on top of my fortifications. I put a warren, put them as active, and they just stayed under ground training. I tried a move order on top of the walls, no dice. Finally out of desperation I just put out a kill order, that worked, but I lost most of them in the process. So am I just doing fortifications wrong? Do they even need to be on top of the fortifications or can they just be on ground level like in my monster cage room?

They won't go on top of this (ground)

^FFFF
  FFFF
  FFFF

Or on one level higher.

[greycat]

Fortifications are like walls with holes in them.  Creatures can't be on the same tile as a fortification (unless they are in freefall, maybe).  You want to station your marksdwarves on a floor tile behind the fortifications, but directly adjacent.  My traditional design is castle-like, with a solid wall on the ground level, fortifications on top of the wall, and constructed floor tiles just inside the fortifications:

Code: [Select]

FFFFFFFFFF
F>++++++++
F+
F+
F+
F+