Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Graebeard]

Howdy, all.  It's been, like, forever since I've fired up a real fort and built a legit military.  My question is this: what are current military design / training / equipping best practices?

I don't intend to use any exploits, so danger rooms and the like are out.

What size and kind of fighters do you use?  Do you prefer ranged, blunt trauma, sharp, or a mix in your squads?

Do you have a method for effectively training your noobs, or do you cherry pick migrants with existing skills?  Do you find that student / teacher or other misc. skills are worth paying attention to?

As for equipping, do you stick with a consistent uniform?  Do you try layering 37 cloaks on or do you find a more realistic outfit does the trick?

[kingubu]

One melee squad.  With swords. I use swords because they are the cheapest wooden training weapon, and although I don't use wooden training weapons anymore, it's a habit.

Melee squad is just for point defense and clean up.

After that the Zapp Brannigan defense, everyone secure a weapon and fire wildly into the air.  Everyone in the fort has a crossbow, no training.

[Panando]

It's a very good idea to make 2 of your starting seven career military. One should be a proficient Axedwarf, the other a proficient Hammerdwarf, this is because axes are great at slicing, and hammers at bashing. Swords and spears aren't too bad. Maces perform poorly again certain enemy types.

Skills are absolutely vital for military dwarves, this is largely because of bolts and other attacks which 'ignore' armour. Bolts slice through armour like it's not there (literally in the case of shaped armor like breastplate, mail armour offers a measure of protection). If your dwarves are legendary weapon and shield users they will parry and block and dodge bolts (and dragonfire) like crazy. If they aren't legendary, they'll almost instantly grow some new bolts and pass out from pain. A good bowgoblin can drop a whole squad of low-skilled dwarves in mere seconds, so can large enemies with mega-powerful blunt attacks that shatter skulls and spines right through armor. You're better off with 2 legendary dwarves then 20 low skilled ones.


Hence melee dwarves basically must be high skilled, and still the best non-exploitive way to accomplish that is sparring in squads of 2 or 3. Just put 2 or 3 dwarves in a squad together, at a barracks set that squad to train, and set the squad to active/training. Then just let them train forever until they are awesome (the barracks should be located at a strategic defensive point, so they can train and defend at the same time).

The other effective military setup is to make squads of 10 marksdwarves, leave them permanently inactive (i.e. they perform normal civilian duties), and train them up by shooting wildlife. When they are needed just station the squad or issue a kill order, the squad will automatically activate until you cancel the station or kill order (or they kill the target), at which point it automatically de-activates. As a bonus your 'civilians' will be armed and armoured (if you choose to include armour in the uniform).

[Blastbeard]

I start off with an angry mob defense force early on. I want as many people fighting as possible, and I want them ready to fight RIGHT NOW. Everyone who can stand fights, nobody gets armor. First ones to grab a weapon get to fight with those, everyone else is SOL. I tend not to include ranged weapons because that takes more time for them to gather ammunition, and time is critical in defense situations.

It works better than it sounds it would. Quantity far outstrips quality in this game, all it takes is one lucky hit from a single member of my horde and the rest can follow through. As long as I'm not going up against something serious like a late-game siege, or an enemy with a crowd-killing ability like a dragon or dust-spewing forgotten beast, it gets results.

[kingubu]

Oh, I forgot dogs. I keep a mob of them inside the barbican to detect thieves and snatchers and to tie up attackers until the melee squad can arrive.

[m-logik]

I like to do a spear squad, a hammer squad, and a mixed weapon squad. They usually aren't full until the fort is pretty mature, around year 5 or so. They'll be backed up by two marksdwarf squads (one of which will usually be the guard squad). The mixed weapon squad will generally be axes, swords and picks, as well as any artifact maces or non-native artifact weapons I might get. I've played around with some dual shield wielders in my current fort as part of the mixed weapons squad. They insist on wielding both shields in the same hand (which is fine since they're legendary wrestlers as well), and they take a little longer to pick up titles, but I've been happy with their performance.

I've found that the spear squad and mixed weapons squad are sufficient for my defense needs once a few reach legendary status. The rest are useful if I just need bodies on the front to keep invaders at a comfortable distance, or if one of the primary squads is tied up on cavern defense when a siege shows up. If I'm near a tower or in a reanimating biome I'll favor hammers over mixed weapons, but aside from that my military strategy has very little variation.

For uniforms, I usually make a metal armor uniform (which includes a cloak and hood) and assign it to every squad, and then manually assign weapons to each position. I don't include breastplates in the standard uniform, adding those manually as well. I only give them to melee units until the ranged squads have trained up their armor pretty high. The uniform includes wood or leather shields (depends on the embark) which will be replaced by steel or heavy metal artifact shields on units that get high miscellaneous object user skill.

I haven't used assigned war animals since a dead dog induced tantrum spiral imploded an otherwise successful fort. I've gotten a lot better at managing dwarf happiness since then, so it might be time to revisit that. Not that it's necessary. With enough steel and shiny blue stuff, the setup I've described is equal to nearly any aggressor a fort can face. But there is much to be said for winning harder.

[Urist McWangchuck]

I start with 2 military dwarfs with no weapon skills, since those level up very fast with sparring.  They usually get 5 points in Teacher and then one gets 5 in Armor User and the other gets 5 in Dodging.  I suppose Danger Room training makes this less useful.

I am still using full time military.  I like squad sizes of 3 or 4.  My original two military dwarfs become boot camp drill sergeants, each leading a handful of recruits through training and eventual promotion to active duty squads.

I usually draft migrants with military skills and any dwarf who has become more popular than the no-item-preferences dwarf I have chosen to be mayor.

Current fort is all melee.  It is not a great site for hunting.  When Crossbow squadding, I like to have a bunch of hunters providing fresh kills with their live target training before drafting them into full-time military service.

[k33n]

For equipment, use whatever metal / goblinite you can for as full a set, and then make sure you have leather or cloth over and under the armour with as many clothing options as possible.

For weapons, swords and axes only shine when attacking armour material equal or below their material. Spears are the only weapon that attack good enough against materials above them.

Crossbows are railguns.

[Burnup]

I've posted a bunch of versions of this, and it just keeps getting longer.. So forgive how long it has gotten, but it has helped quite a few people over the years.

One of my particularly favorite things to do in DF is to have a perfectly scheduled military. I usually have all dwarves in the military (except for a core skeleton crew of eight) And have a series of alerts that swivel my military into action. I also usually have a different alert for every direction the enemy might come. I have alerts from 0 people on duty to all ppl on duty and many stages inbetween.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Normal alert - each squad: 1/3rd train 1/3rd patrol 1/3rd civilian, with only 1/3rd of squad ever being on duty.
Medium alert - each squad: 1/3rd train 1/3rd patrol 1/3rd civilian, with only half of squad ever being on duty.
High alert - each squad: 1/3rd train 1/3rd patrol 1/3rd civilian, with only two members of squad ever being off duty.
High North alert - Northern walls/towers/choke points
High West alert - Western walls/towers/choke points
High South alert - Southern walls/towers/choke points
High East alert - Eastern walls/towers/choke points
All Hands On Deck alert - Everyone, at all times.
Fallback1 alert - First choke falls!
Fallback2 alert - Second choke falls!
Fallback3 alert - Third choke falls!

(Can also be Fallback1 North, Fallback1 West, Fallback1 South, Fallback1 East, etc..)

Civi1 alert - First of the civilian burrows (stay underground!)
Civi2 alert - second of the civilian burrows (Stay out of top two stories!)
Civi3 alert - third of the civilian burrows (Get near the "Final Bastion"!)
Haven Alert - I usually create a way of sectioning off food industry / living quarters into a "Final Bastion" This alert drops all defenses, except for the drawbridges that need to close for the "Final Bastion" to be sectioned off.

You may ask "how do you keep up industries?"
A lot of scheduling.
because of each squad having civi duties 1/3rd of their year. between all the squads cycling throughout the year, Every month is a new "main" industry. The correct industry becoming the "main" Almost immediately when you begin thinking you need it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

MONTH       Squad1       Squad2         Squad3
1                Train!          Patrol!          Civilian!
2                Civilian!        Train!          Patrol!
3                Patrol!         Civilian!         Train!
4               Train!          Patrol!          Civilian!
5                Civilian!        Train!          Patrol!
6               Patrol!         Civilian!         Train!
7               Train!          Patrol!          Civilian!
8                Civilian!        Train!          Patrol!
9               Patrol!         Civilian!         Train!
10               Train!          Patrol!          Civilian!
11                Civilian!        Train!          Patrol!
12               Patrol!         Civilian!         Train!

Keep in mind that for any scheduled order, you need to specify how many units in the squad you want to follow it.
[If you order over the amount of units in the squad to follow an order, then no one will follow it.]

(rigorous trial and error isn't exactly necessary for this. Just have "jobs" be really loose (idle) until you find a need for that person that month [or if you have need of him a different month, then put him in one of the squads that has that month off.]. after a good 2 - 4 in game years everyone should be extremely busy.) (you shouldn't let it get to '0' idle. DON'T GO THERE. But it shouldn't be above 24 idle.[I usually maintain between 4 and 15.])

Ever since I've developed this system and gotten the hang of it, I haven't needed traps at all, I haven't needed danger rooms, nor elaborate defenses, and after I get up to at least 100 dwarves I don't even need gates (except for deadly dust and such..) Infact I have a fort with 250 dwarves, 242 being in the military, whose defensive strategy was built around getting as many people on the surface as possible without cluster %$&@ing. It ended up with 8 different "airlocks" to the surface in strategic positions each with a barracks in it. each barracks having 3 squads. The point was to open all "airlocks" at once. My worst battle losses were 12 deaths ^^ against 10 cave dragons, 10 trolls, 20 goblin spearmen, 10 goblin macemen and 10 goblin archers. (rough estimate) I believe there were 4 enemy leaders.

(because of the airlock positioning I was able to flank almost every enemy grouping effectively, at the correct times.)

One main drawback I've had in this build is when mass producing clothing/armor just to have all 250 dwarves drop their rotting clothing all over the place, leaving it to be cleaned by the poor skeleton crew of eight plus or minus a few off duty soldiers.
(It takes a good amount of time to clean up, plan everything to be gradual.)

You may ask about such a forts happiness level,

A little too much idle time and everyone becomes aquianted, especially if you only have one dinning hall or your dinning halls are close quartered.
Way too much idle time makes them all related. (this has happened to me with a populace of 120.) Great for end game, when tragedy is far and inbetween. But for a fledgling fort.. eh

parties are good.
But I personally keep my people on a rigorous schedule through military training / sentry / patrol duties / industrial direction as to control how many are attending parties and how many are idle at any one time.

I've noticed that happiness is like any resource in this game, Yes you can mass produce and flood yourself with it. But the trick is to create perfectly only what you need. This is what I believe is the essence of efficiency.
I use happiness as a combative measure against tragedy. I've noticed surrounding in general happiness makes them overreact to the bad.

a couple of my policies for example is:

complaining about long patrol duty? double patrol for you for a month! once back into his old schedule he will be happy (relieved).

You didn't enjoy the last slaughter? Have an awesome home for you and your family! And now you are part of a more front line squad!

You lost a loved one? Awesome home for you too!
Lost another loved one? Look, smooth walls in your home!
Another? Look, an engraving on your floor!
Another? What an amazing tomb you have!
etc..

In the end I keep there lives rigorous and barely-joyful unless their mentality is going downhill. everyone who has not been in battle or been effected by tragedy live in slums and are quite content.
Everyone else lives in luxury and are ecstatic about their tragedies. I've had some that enjoy slaughter, so I leave them in slums. Then one day they're pissed about something random, so I move them up. Keep the trump cards for when you need them.

Mass parties are more for if you've lost half your populace to zombies or something, and are trying to reccuperate mentality and populace in one darring swing. But even then, you'd just be trying to avoid a tantrum spiral by buying time for immigrants to arrive and make this depressed bunch of partyers the minority. (Or for vanity, if you think no tragedy can happen. Then by all means, party away)

I find I don't take it upon myself to kill any one of my dwarves. I just have them fight every battle with honor, no traps, no walls. Therefor my population keeps steady, I weed out the weak, and sometimes my veterans go down in a burst of glory like they should. Everyone but a skeleton crew of eight are in the military 2/3rds of the year. (1/3rd training, 1/3rd patrol/sentry 1/3 civilian work) I've taken mass losses, without a single dwarf tantruming. I've had a fortress that lived long enough to see the original embarkment dwarves die of old age, followed by 2 more generations. Still no tantrums. The trick? Keep the trump cards close to your chest for when you need them. No sooner, no later.

[Sutremaine]

I start with 2 military dwarfs with no weapon skills, since those level up very fast with sparring.  They usually get 5 points in Teacher and then one gets 5 in Armor User and the other gets 5 in Dodging.  I suppose Danger Room training makes this less useful.

I prefer to replace Dodging with one of the lesser-trained skills. Dwarves sparring with nothing but armour will level their Dodge skill quite quickly through lack of other options, but getting them to train at kicking and biting is always difficult. I'm not sure how effective biting is in its own right, but it can produce some neat results.

I like to bring numerous military dwarves and have them help out with fortress setup for the first month. In that time they can sometimes get a level in Herbalism or something, which gives them a civilian profession should they get deactivated before the fortress gets its mood-lifters going. Then the other two or three do the work until migrants come. At this point all the workshops are just plonked down in a cluster, so they can act as their own stockpiles.

Uniform tends to be a mixture of leather and steel, with one of everything except for footwear and handwear. Everyone gets a crossbow and shield and anti-nudity uniform.

I very rarely use schedules, preferring to place barracks at access points.

[Panando]

I prefer to replace Dodging with one of the lesser-trained skills. Dwarves sparring with nothing but armour will level their Dodge skill quite quickly through lack of other options, but getting them to train at kicking and biting is always difficult. I'm not sure how effective biting is in its own right, but it can produce some neat results.

Preliminary testing indicates a hierarchy of combat skills:
Weapon User > Fighter > (Shield User, Dodger, [Armor User]) > (Striker, Kicker, Biter, [Armor User])

Weapon user is better than every other skill combined, in other words if in arena you make a dwarf who is a proficient weapon user, and make another dwarf who is proficient everything else except weapon user, then the proficient weapon user will win more often than not. It would appear the game, when doing combat rolls, compares 'combat level', and if one combatant 'out skills' the other, the more skilled one basically wins, if he outskills by a lot, he thrashes the opponent. hence 'skill optimization' basically comes down to trying to make your dwarves weapon skill as high as possible as quickly as possible.
Fighter is better than all the lesser skills, but not hugely better. A proficient Fighter will tend to lose to a proficient Shield User and Dodger.
Skills like Biter and stuff are so bad, that if you make one dwarf is who proficient weapon user, and another who is proficient weapon user and biter, striker and kicker, then it is difficult to see a statistical difference in win/loss ratio. This is unlike the Fighter and Shield User / Dodger skills, which do have a discernible affect even if it's slight compared with the overpowering affect from weapon user.
Armor User sometimes appears to have a benefit, for dwarves who are very heavily armored. For dwarves who aren't loaded to the gills with armor, it doesn't seem to do much, and I don't know how much it does for very strong, very agile dwarves who shrug off the weight of even the heaviest full plate. In the best case it's about equal to dodger.
Regardless of how good skills like Biter are (and as testing indicates, they are so poor they barely register), there is another serious consideration: Whenever a dwarf has a skill, he might see fit to do demonstrations for that skill. Whenever a squad is doing demonstrations, they aren't sparring, whenever they aren't sparring, they aren't gaining weapon and fighter and shield user skill. In other words, your dwarves are spending time skilling up nearly totally useless skills, which prevents them skilling up very useful skills. Demonstrations for weapon user skills (only dwarves who have that weapon equipped will attend, others will spar or drill or hang out) may or may not be a better use of time than just sparring. Normally in small squads I cross-skill (one has axe, the other hammer) so they can't do demonstrations for their weapon skill. Unfortunately even if weapon user demonstrations are a good use of time (and I suspect they are decent), it's hard to get a high level weapon user instructor, who doesn't also have a bit of striker and kicker and stuff, and he'll waste a lot of time teaching those useless skills.

There is a DFHack command which will boost the skill gain rate by larger squads, this makes it possible to use large meelee squads and while they still waste lots of time teaching learning completely useless sh*t (hey, just like real life education), the hack increases the experience gain for large squads, so when they are doing useful stuff, it counts for a lot more.

The basic conclusion is that what really matters is becoming a legendary +5 weapon user ASAP. As noted above, additional skills on top of weapon user, barely matter, basically the only thing which matters is how high your weapon user skill is. Fighter is also a good skill, but it always skills up faster than weapon user when sparring, so you can't micromanage anything to make fighter improve faster. Shield User skills up pretty quickly, at about half the rate of weapon user. It's a decent skill but probably not worth micromanaging the squad to try and improve it faster because it wont be far behind weapon user anyway. Dodger is a decent skill too which skills up quite slowly, however once a dwarf is legendary +5 Weapon User, Fighter and Shield User, then adding every other skill under the sun wont make a discernible difference to his combat performance, hence rather than messing around un-equipping his weapon and shield or whatever, it's probably better to have him always combat-ready. Of course if you're the kind of player who likes to make full masterwork armor, then you might anyway, but that is perfectionism for the sake of perfectionism, not for practical effectiveness.

[Larix]

I prefer to replace Dodging with one of the lesser-trained skills. Dwarves sparring with nothing but armour will level their Dodge skill quite quickly through lack of other options, but getting them to train at kicking and biting is always difficult. I'm not sure how effective biting is in its own right, but it can produce some neat results.

Preliminary testing indicates a hierarchy of combat skills:
Weapon User > Fighter > (Shield User, Dodger, [Armor User]) > (Striker, Kicker, Biter, [Armor User])
[...]
The basic conclusion is that what really matters is becoming a legendary +5 weapon user ASAP.

No, what matters is becoming legendary +xx. Legendary +5 is no relevant cutoff in military skills.

This still doesn't adress which military skills to take on embark - taking a _few_ points in a chosen weapon skill helps getting the sparring train going, but two or three are generally enough: almost all military skill an undefeatable fort militia has is gained on-site, typically through sparring, and almost all experience earned sparring goes towards weapon and fighter. They don't really need an extra boost from embark points. When "buying" skills at embark, i find it more useful to take important, slow to train skills, and those are dodging, armour and shield. Particularly shield skill is very valuable in melee and _the_ best defence against ranged attacks (extremely high weapon skill is also quite impressive, but you can't buy enough weapon skill for successful bolt parries, while you can buy enough for reliable shield blocking).

There's also to consider that combat in fort mode is generally somewhat asymmetric. A typical constellation would be few high-skilled dwarfs in full armour versus many low-skilled goblins and trolls in incomplete inferior-material (goblin) or no (troll) armour. When outnumbered, material quality and defensive skills become much more important, and the crucial parameter for your military success becomes your soldiers' ability to stay alive and in the fight until they manage to land the disabling hit on their opponent(s). I find i can't usefully model actual fort-mode combat in the arena, there's no decent substitute for the real thing.

[Darchitect]

Consider using Modest Mod, as it changes the learning skill to actually be useful to your army, along with a slew of other bug fixes.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=105871.0

The only other thing I would add is to check out the thread on how to get your marksdwarves to reload. It's great, and it rarely fails to work for me.
There's a link in Girlinhat's thread:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=86248.0

[Sutremaine]

When "buying" skills at embark, i find it more useful to take important, slow to train skills, and those are dodging, armour and shield.

Shield use trains fairly quickly if you have dwarves dual-wielding them.

[Panando]

No, what matters is becoming legendary +xx. Legendary +5 is no relevant cutoff in military skills.

DFhack's labor view shows military skills as maxing out at Legendary +5. I can't find any reference to military skills not maxing out. Reference?