Print

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

[thraxarious]

Apparently my squads are behaving like free spirits, taking to removing armor and going around half naked some times when I make new armor or try to get them to properly put on more than one boot or gauntlet.

Trying to tell them "Put on two pairs of gauntlets" or boots will sometimes get them clothed but it still shows up as not wearing all the requested items, and is kind of a bit hackish.

Changing their armor tends to require me to wait a long while as they drop their current armor on the ground, for other dwarves to pick up and put away and then they spend the next few weeks picking up new pieces of armor.

Do I need to make many times the number of boots and gauntlets for them to properly find matching sets and melt the lower quality ones?

It just seems that there are plenty of items in stockpikes, but they just ignore them half the time. Do we still have significant stockpile issues?

[Girlinhat]

Are you certain you have it to 'replace clothing' in the equipment screen, and in the squad screen 'off-duty = uniformed' AND that none of them are miners or fellers?

[Absentia]

One thing that can cause a lot of armor shuffling: Each soldier picks the best quality item available for each slot, starting with the squad leader and proceeding in order. If you're producing a lot of armor, this can create sort of a cascade effect where the leader equips a new helm and drops the old one, which is better than the one that number two is wearing so he drops HIS old helm, which number three now wants to wear, and so on. Multiple squads confuse the issue further, and then you have to factor in the delay from all the item hauling. You can try halting armor production for awhile and see if things settle into equilibrium.

Assuming you have everything set to replace clothing, because armor over clothing either doesn't work or is nigh-impossible to make work.

[khearn]

I see this a lot, too. It's pretty noticeable in dwarf therapist, since it highlights this sort of thing in the "Equipment" column. It seems to happen when I'm making new armor, so the dwarves at the top of the list grab the new, high quality shiny, and hand down their medium quality to the next one on the list, who hands down his stuff. So every soldier in your fort ends up with new armor assigned. But they don't actually change their armor until they go on duty.

So a dwarf in the middle of the list gets assigned a better helm and goes on duty. He takes off his old helm, but his new helm isn't available because it's former owner is off duty and is still wearing it, so now he has a bare head. Or maybe the new helm is still in the forge, unavailable because it is waiting to be picked up by the weakest dwarf in the fort, carrying a very full armor bin.
One.
Tile.
Every.
Two.
Seconds.

In fact, that bin probably holds half the armor in the fort, and most (if not all) of my soldiers are assigned stuff in that bin. So they're all standing around half naked waiting for a chance to get their armor.

Oh, and by the way, a vile force of darkness has arrived. Now it's a race to see if the armor bin gets down to the forge and back up to the stockpile before the goblins get into the fort to fight my half naked soldiers.

I think it's time to rearrange my standard fort design so the armor stockpile is next to the forges, not next to the barracks. Or maybe just make it a lot bigger and set bins to zero.

But that still won't solve the problem of off duty soldiers breaking the chain of hand-me-downs. The only way I know to deal with that is to periodically station the squad in the armor stockpile (while an armor bin isn't in transit) and set them each to have armor replace clothes, then set them back to wearing armor over clothes. Pain in the backside. Especially when you haven't done it in a while and an ambush uncloaks and you suddenly realize that half your soldiers don't have half their armor.

If you just have armor replace clothes and you're short on some armor bits (because you just expanded your military and are in the process of making more), then those who don't have greaves yet take off their trousers anyway. And if you just set it to wear over clothes, they won't put on their helmet because it doesn't fit over their pig tail fiber cap and sheep wool hood. But if you have them replace, then wear over, they'll wear all the armor they have, plus whatever other clothes will fit.

   Keith

[0x517A5D]

Or maybe the new helm is still in the forge, unavailable because it is waiting to be picked up by the weakest dwarf in the fort, carrying a very full armor bin.

[...]

I think it's time to rearrange my standard fort design so the armor stockpile is next to the forges, not next to the barracks. Or maybe just make it a lot bigger and set bins to zero.

I wonder if a variant of the current foodpile workaround would help.

Make two armor stockpiles right next to each other.  The first is for storage; set it to only take from the second.  The second takes from anywhere.  Forbid bins on the second one.

[thraxarious]

Yeah, I had my dwarves set to replace clothing, and fiddled with exact vs partial matches to try getting them to clothe faster.

The bad thing is there would be armor in the stock piles that they wouldn't touch because it was somehow "beneath their station" it seems. So I basically have to armor the dwarves and not make ANY squad changes or armor changes else I'd have weeks of squad dwarves wandering around half naked.

Not too effective in case of emergency.

I'll try that stockpile idea, though I've turned on wheelbarrows for my armor pile and a few times they take the wheelbarrow out to move things.

Maybe we need to have equip dwarves and return equipment a higher priority job for squad members? I know you can use a barracks to store equipment, not sure if this would help speed it up though.

[StagnantSoul]

Don't have them doing wood cutting, mining, or hunting when off duty. This will fix your problem if you have it set up to be off-duty in uniform and replace clothing.

[Borge]

This is why i don't assign clothing to my military, ONLY armor, because they will charge to the clothier workshop every time a slightly better pig tail fibre cloak is produced, then the other soldier will go to the piece of clothing the other soldier just discarded, meaning they will spend hardly any time training. Stop producing armor or lock away the armourer and don't assign clothing if you want them to stop doing this, either that or you can assign specific items, which is incredibly tedious.

Also MAKE SURE you don't use bins for your armor stockpile. I wish there was a stockpile option for items to be taken to the bin, not the bin taken to the item.

[thraxarious]

This is why i don't assign clothing to my military, ONLY armor, because they will charge to the clothier workshop every time a slightly better pig tail fibre cloak is produced, then the other soldier will go to the piece of clothing the other soldier just discarded, meaning they will spend hardly any time training. Stop producing armor or lock away the armourer and don't assign clothing if you want them to stop doing this, either that or you can assign specific items, which is incredibly tedious.

Also MAKE SURE you don't use bins for your armor stockpile. I wish there was a stockpile option for items to be taken to the bin, not the bin taken to the item.

I seem to recall a bug or two on the Mantis site about reworking hauling. It would be nice to have dwarves look for free wheelbarrows if the item is a bit heavy or their item to haul is a bit heavy. or just choose to do a path cost analysis of bin vs haul item to bin.

[ToadChild]

Reading this thread I also start to understand why people like to assign their military dwarves specific pieces of equipment instead of letting them choose automatically.

I'm also going to use the dual feeder/bin stockpile system extensively in the next fort I make.  Slow bin hauling is really frustrating.

[StagnantSoul]

Bins cause endless annoyance. I was trying to mico-manage my bone carver, metal crafter, and gem setter, to get a single platinum crown to buy out the entire human kingdom. Instead, I got a dwarf running away with the bin full of platinum, gold, and silver to pick up a four tin bars, another leaving with my rubies and sapphires to get a cut sardonyx, and the bone carver putting the roc bones on a wheelbarrow... If I could, I'd probably have stabbed so many dwarves for bringing bins to places. Bins should be stationary, not hauled around. Wheelbarrows with lots of items in them for hauling, bins for stationary storage.

[thraxarious]

Well, setting up a dual stockpile doesn't seem to work. Bins enter one, but almost nothing ends up in the second. It just... sits. might be how I am placing stockpiles.

Some of my workshops I put stockpiles around the shop in a 5x5 room. it was easy enough before to do. Every so often I'll end up with a workshop that contains a few dozen charcoal the wood furnace has been making, maybe a few hundred.

I am pondering going through and removing ALL stockpiles from my fort and re-creating them to see if anything resets or they start to act properly.  Some work fine, I have wood stockpiles, feeding a quick pile at the furnace for wood burners.. stone piles that do the same, but ammo... it just goes off into lala land and I still have dwarves that need ammo, yet never take any. or they might take part of one stack of 25.

Can Ammo be re-stacked?

[khearn]

Can Ammo be re-stacked?

No and yes. Not in the way you'd probably think. You can melt down the individual bolts and forge new stacks of 25. You even make a profit that way.

I'd only advise doing this is you have a magma smelter or heavy forests (and a desire to piss off the elves), since it will cost a bar of charcoal/coke for each bolt you melt.

    Keith

[Tanaman]

Yeah, I had my dwarves set to replace clothing, and fiddled with exact vs partial matches to try getting them to clothe faster.

The bad thing is there would be armor in the stock piles that they wouldn't touch because it was somehow "beneath their station" it seems. So I basically have to armor the dwarves and not make ANY squad changes or armor changes else I'd have weeks of squad dwarves wandering around half naked.

Not too effective in case of emergency.

I'll try that stockpile idea, though I've turned on wheelbarrows for my armor pile and a few times they take the wheelbarrow out to move things.

Maybe we need to have equip dwarves and return equipment a higher priority job for squad members? I know you can use a barracks to store equipment, not sure if this would help speed it up though.

Don't turn on wheelbarrows on any stockpile that also has bins. The'll grab a bin to go grab the item like usual. Then, once they grab it and load it into the bin, they'll just drop it right there generating a new job for somebody to go get the wheelbarrow to grab the bin.

Surprised to hear the dual stockpiles didn't work. They work really great, but can be a pain to set up and once you have a large fort it's a pain to tinker with settings and you'll have a cascade to go back and change settings for. I'd set the dual stockpiles for weapons up like this:

1st stockpile: near the barracks, set to zero bins and set to take from the forges, take from links only. Make it accept armor and weapons only. It doesn't need to be real big (the size determines maximum number of haulers, I'd probably make it like 3X3, so 9 max haulers).

2nd stockpile: right next to the first stockpile, accept goods from links only, set to take from the first stockpile. Maximum bins allowed. Also to accept weapons and armor only.

Keep in mind, you'll need to set your storage for other metalforge items to take from the forges as well, or else all of your aluminum doors won't get hauled to storage.

That's a basic setup. Things get more complicated if you want to set up a separate storage for masterful crafted items only for further decorating. Surely you aren't sending your warriors to battle in anything less then masterfully crafted and platinum studded steel armor? Then of course it's useful to have a goblinite storage near the surface as well collecting weapons, and then shunting it off down to the forge for melting...

[Max™]

Incidentally, I've noticed many times that freshly made gear won't show up in the specific equip lists.

Even worse is if you get lazy and just createitem it, you have to get them to dump the gear and then unforbid it apparently.

Normally this won't happen with crafted stuff, but if ANYONE gets it in their head to grab that item before you get a chance to assign it you'll have to find it and get it dumped first. Turning off all woodcutters and miners if you intend to use any battleaxes and/or picks for troops is necessary too, had someone crank out a couple masterwork candy picks and axes, went to assign them, the woodcutters (with no work because I already removed every tree on the same z-level as my entrance) and a miner jumped on them, dumping the copper/steel/whatever stuff they had.

Similar difficulties if you try to get cloaks assigned, gotta figure out who is wearing them and get it dumped, make sure they can find another one, THEN unforbid the one you were trying to assign to a squad.

Overall it's well worth the extra effort to assign specific equipment, had cases where dorfs got killed because I didn't notice they chose to wear a cave spider silk cap and shoes rather than the steel or candy helms/boots I told them to use.