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[Frogwarrior]

So I got a zombie siege a couple years into my first 40.05 fort, and of course the two necromancer leaders walked right off the map and the zombies have been milling around the edge for a year or so. Hope that gets fixed up sometime. But until then, business has been normal until recently, when the fringes of the zombie cloud have spread out enough to be mildly annoying. So I decided to try to send my smallish military to try to do something about that.

In the next dozen savescums, I learned that even attacking the fringes head-on is deadly, since after clearing out a zombie or two off by themselves, all it takes is one dwarf seeing the next nearest zombie a couple dozen tiles away to spell doom, as he races towards his foe and the dozen or more in sight range behind them. It really is an ugly sight, seeing what was picking off three stragglers outnumbered five-to-one rapidly turn into a frontal assault on the whole almost-as-many-as-my-entire-fort horde.

But then, I found out that military dwarves with no orders and no active alert will flee like civilians.

So what I do, is I move my guys out to pick off stragglers... overwhelm a clump of three to five with superior numbers... then, when the next nearest zombies start to get too numerous for comfort... all squads are now Inactive. Everyone runs away, no casualties. Rinse and Repeat.

I mean, so far I've only offed ten of the horde of sixty, and the main clump is wayyyyy too tight to hope of exterminating them completely anytime soon with my 10 meleedwarves. But it's progress, and now I can regain ground they've subsumed with their random walks.

[klefenz]

While lacking tactical commands for the military, this method can be very useful to make retreats. Still I want actual tactical orders.

[Melting Sky]

In the next dozen savescums

 

I mean, so far I've only offed ten of the horde of sixty, and the main clump is wayyyyy too tight to hope of exterminating them completely anytime soon with my 10 meleedwarves. But it's progress, and now I can regain ground they've subsumed with their random walks.

That's actually one of the largest undead sieges I've heard of in the new version. How big and rich was your fortress when they began the seige? I've been asking around for a while if we can get truly huge undead seiges like in DF2012 and yours is now the largest I've heard of. Personally mine have never exceeded more than maybe two dozen undead.

This is an effective and clever use of toggling between military and civilian rolls. I've used this same trick in the old version in a slightly different context to keep troublesome and isolated squad members from trying to take on the whole siege by themselves instead of running for the fort to regroup at the entrance.

[Baffler]

I still currently do this to break marksdwarves off from supporting a melee engagement that isn't going well, but I never thought to organize a hit-and-run system with it. Do the dwarves run to safety reliably? Can they run fast enough to escape even if they're currently engaged, or can I expect to lose a dwarf or two in a retreat?

[Hans Lemurson]

Are there any happiness effects from repeatedly deactivating and re-activating your soldiers?

[Bki]

If they don't have military skills, they get an unhappy thought on being drafted.

If they don't have a civilian skills, they get an unhappy thought on being relieved from duty (and an unhappy thought on being kept too long on duty).

The first is corrected quite quickly by training, and for the second, I find that I always need more engraver to smooth everything, so my soldiers quickly pick a level or two in the skill.

[Frogwarrior]

I don't know how wealthy my fort was in comparison to others when they showed up. I had 60 dudes and one or two artifacts. I still haven't found any weapon/armor metals around, so I haven't boosted my value by making and equipping high-quality armor and weapons, but I did turn a lot of silver into crafts, not to mention lots of silver furniture and statues to satisfy my Queen. (Embarked with an otherwise-dead civilization, so my expedition leader got promoted after the first caravan left.)

Are there any happiness effects from repeatedly deactivating and re-activating your soldiers?

I haven't noticed, because I didn't check, because I didn't really care that much - if the stupid dorfs want to get upset about killing zombies and surviving, they're dumb. However, I think all of my dwarves also have at least one civilian skill, so if I know the mechanics right, they shouldn't care.

I still currently do this to break marksdwarves off from supporting a melee engagement that isn't going well, but I never thought to organize a hit-and-run system with it. Do the dwarves run to safety reliably? Can they run fast enough to escape even if they're currently engaged, or can I expect to lose a dwarf or two in a retreat?

My well-equipped, constantly-sparring-for-a-year dwarves were able to outrun zombies, for what it's worth. They can block while retreating, so if they're well-equipped they should be as safe running away as up close. Also, it does seem that they don't just stupidly run away from the nearest foe or whatever - they seemed to always run in a vague "away from the zombies" and "towards safety" direction, but if there was a zombie or two between them and the fort, they'd go around or past and right on to home. They do tend to spread out a bit though, especially since some are faster than others, so I've had an accident savescum learning experience or two where I let them run away for a short time, then re-activated them hoping they'd just pick off the conga line chasing them - but the ones that had run off in a diagonal direction saw other zombies instead, and I ended up with most of them attacking the conga line and one or two charging boldly into the main horde from the sides. Solution is to let them run away a tad longer so they head for home after spreading out and are thus more collinear with the stragglers and their fellow soldiers.

[Torrenal]

I've had trouble with this in the past.

Should you disable the military dwarf, he may

  *SOCK*

Must..

pick...

up...

Being military, they won't respect burrows, and with canceled orders may try to gear up using any nearby unforbid stuff.  Once they see that sock, there is no getting them to forget it.

//Torrenal