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[Porpoisepower]

I want to try and have rotating militias

I'm used to standing armies.

Anyone got any tips?

[GavJ]

Sounds complicated, but not difficult. Just a lot of micromanaging fairly straightforward decisions, I imagine.

The trickiest part is going to be making sure that all of your random dwarves that do one thing better than anybody else have backups that can fill their job when they're training or on duty. Like if you have one BEST armorer, you want to make sure you have another damn good armorer, more so than you normally might worry about.

Either that, or be prepared to wait 3 months for your armor order to get filled.

[Porpoisepower]

Yeah that's the part that has me a little worried...  Even if with Dwarf Fortress it's going to be a nightmare to make sure I don't have both armorers on the same schedule.

I'm trying to figure out if there's a clever way to help deal with this.

[GavJ]

I suppose you could just excuse people like armorers from military duty.

Only enlist people who already come in multiples like masons, miners, carpenters, planters.

[MDFification]

Unless you're using danger rooms, the slow training rates of a militia system will result in a lot of casualties.
I'd go for running a crossbow militia alongside a standing army for melee. They can be useful with minimal skill, and actually giving them less training would make crossbows less OP. At the same time, you won't end up with half your dwarves dead or maimed by the end of their 3 month tour of duty.

[MrsStick]

I find that crossbow militias with minimal skill usually end up running into battle and beating enemies with their crossbows, instead of shooting them.

I do militias but use the schedule to set up how often they train. I have two squads of legit military, and they train every other month. One is melee, the other crossbowdwarves. I'm also in the process of setting up my "National Guard" and they train, right now, one month per year. I'm drafting everybody into the NG except for my legends (unless they're a useless legendary, like woodcrafting/stonecrafting/bonecrafting/whatever) and more useful skills (like metalworking).

When I add dwarves to my main squads, I spend the first few months checking DT to make sure that they haven't descended into the depths of rage because of long patrol duty. Once I see that they're happy with it, I don't bother. If someone gets pissy, I demote them to NG. It does get interesting when I have peasants who are annoyed by long patrol duty but also upset to be relieved from duty. Pick one!

[Nr12]

Yes, not having your best qualified dwarf devoting himself to his day job is not really something you can avoid. Excusing some professions from the rotating militia is one way to lessen the penalty - but isn't that quite boring? The whole idea is to have that dwarven society where every citizen do their service. If you start excusing professions.. well, how different is it from a regular standing army? I mean - You obviously wouldn't go for a militia out of effectiveness, you do it for more roleplay-ey reasons. If you fold because it's inconvenient, then what's the point?

In theory, you'll eventually reach a point where you'll have enough competent replacements in rotation that losing that special armorsmith won't be such a great tragedy.

If you go ahead with this.. Perhaps it would be beneficial to nickname the dwarves after their profession and to what rotation they belong? Ex: Miner 1, Mason 1, Miner 1, Carpenter 1, Hunter 2, Mason 2, Mason 2...

[GavJ]

Well in real life, when you have a militia system, or mandatory service, you still wouldn't send your most skilled specialist into the field as grunts, it's just common sense. Talented smiths in actual medieval society would NOT be handed pikes and told to go stand on the front line. They'd be expected to do military service sure, but it would be in the form of smithing swords instead of smithing horseshoes.  Still only smithing, though, protecting the invaluable talent in camp at all times.

Even in modern terms, if you have a guy with a doctorate in physics, you don't hand him a rifle and say "go hang out in that trench."  You assign him to experimental weapons research in a highly protected lab somewhere.

So purely realistically, I think you'd expect every citizen to put forth significant time and resources to the military effort, but make that take the form of whatever is most strategic for that dwarf.




All that being said, gameplay-wise, it is indeed more interesting and potentially fun to just be like "NNnnnnope! Gotta each actually take up arms. It's a dwarven ethics thing. The end" and give yourself the extra challenge.

But still, the "challenge" seems more like one of micromanagement skills than anything. Not sure how entertaining it would actually be.

[Sadrice]

But surely the weaponsmith at least is already doing his service, probably in a much more meaningful way than as cannon fodder.

 Edit: ninjad by GavJ saying the same thing but better.

[pisskop]

I think, and do, rotate out my civilian squads.  I have three four ranks of service.


-The full-timers, who are either always on or on for 5 off for one.

-Those training for full-time service without danger rooms.  Four on, two off with liberal pumping duty/their one adept skill turned on.

-Standard militamen.  Or guardsmen.  They do three on and three off, staggered so that one weekend warrior squad is always on duty.

-Civilians who spend two months on and ten months off.  They also occasionally get pumping, engraving, or told to stand in locations.


Your weaponsmiths should either get pump duty or crossbow training.  No reason to actually risk their life without cause.  Their skill gains will be nice too.

---
The issues I have with militias is they dont become lord soon enough.  four months on duty and they seem to complain.  too short of a time on duty and it takes them to long to get organized.  So my solution is to stagger them for as long as possible.

Oh.  I try to group my civilians by industry.  So an entire industry shuts down for two months out of the year if I put them all in the military.  That way I know who is on when and can predict when an industry will suffer.

[Urist Da Vinci]

I've toyed with a fort where I have one squad of dedicated, highly trained, armored melee troops as well as many squads of marksdwarves set up as follows:

- Not a miner or woodcutter (due to uniform conflicts)
- 10 dwarves per squad, OK to include armorers and other valuables (it's not like I will field deploy them!)
- Assigned just a crossbow to wear with regular clothing
- Given only combat metal bolts
- Never assigned training or patrol, only activated in emergencies where I need more dakka

Funniest moment ever was when a goblin ran into the great hall and almost everyone shot at him (as opposed to uselessly running away).

[tussock]

One thing to watch if everyone's a crossbow user: dorfs going topside for any reason at all will not run from ambushes they find if they're a military dorf. They'll just stand there, get off one or two bolts, and then die horribly. Or actually win against a lone Kobold and then die of thirst in the hospital as the sutured stomach turns out to be a bit of an issue.

So add all your militia to your safety burrow on a permanent basis, and remember that they'll still ignore it when on duty and rush off to do battle with any invaders near the entry they happen to be passing, rushing out past the traps and drawbridge all on their lonesome to beat at the hammerers with a featherwood crossbow they never got around to picking up bolts for.

[KingBacon]

Here's some technical suggestions.

Step one, go into therapist and cntrl click the dorfs you want to draft into service (I usually do this with useless males,) and then right click/give them a special profession like conscript or slag. This makes mass drafts much easier to manage. Use shift N to place notes on the map if you want to create patrol routes. When I fill out a militia squad, I like to have two to four dorfs training and two stationed somewhere in a given month, usually a rear gatehouse to catch stray snachers/kobs.

Drafting women as marksdorfs is a preferred profession. Having them stationed in a watch tower using burrows is an effective spotting strategy and since you have a mass draft you don't have to worry about wearing out "professionals." Two to four peoples out of ten just hanging in a spot, with regular rotations. And all you need to do in the event of an emergency is to up the "troop requirement" or copy and paste a burrow command in the military manager.

[MrsStick]

If you go ahead with this.. Perhaps it would be beneficial to nickname the dwarves after their profession and to what rotation they belong? Ex: Miner 1, Mason 1, Miner 1, Carpenter 1, Hunter 2, Mason 2, Mason 2...

I've only just started renaming dwarves (mostly so I remember at a glance which kids are native and which people are legendaries at what), so this is a brilliant idea. Seriously brilliant (okay, maybe I'm a bit of a n00b? Nah, I've been playing for a while, just never bothered with names).

[Melting Sky]

One of the things I do is I create a militia squad consisting of my most important and highly skilled dwarves which I then armor decently, give them masterwork steel picks and send them to go mining for a month strait to get some basic skill with it. (This is after I have my real military up and running.) I then never train or use them again for combat but if they ever get unlucky and caught up in an unexpected fight or the fortress's real military and other defenses fall it ensures that my core dwarves will have a fighting chance.