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[birdman]

My most recently doomed fort was conquered by a sudden siege of 1 necro + 60 undead after no enemies for 2 years (maybe i created too much wealth, only had 50 dwarves). I honestly think I would've had it, with 12 iron-clad recruits and 4 iron-clad veterans, but I quickly ran into an issue:

I was actively crafting steel armor, they were all intermittently replacing their pieces before the siege started. AFTER giving station and kill orders, some of them still changed their job to pickup equipment as the siege progressed.  The main offenders were, of course, the veteran dwarves, and so all the recruits were left to get massacred. This doesn't seem entirely unreasonable with the way their brains work, they seem to treat pickup equipment as a job with equal priority to other military "jobs", but I'm just trying to find a workaround.

I guess one easy way to fix this is to simply forbid the new equipment so they won't pick it up, which is easy in the case of the armor/weapon stockpiles but not so easy in the case of the smithies, i'd have to go in individually for any that aren't yet picked up. Any easier way to disallow your dwarves from doing pickup equipment jobs while they're supposed to be charging in?

[PatrikLundell]

No, I don't think there are any good ways to avoid the issue. You can refraining from giving them better equipment until everything is masterworks by using precise equipment allocation. You can also disable the forges during critical periods (or set them to produce something else).

[anewaname]

'd' 'b' 'f' on the forges will forbid the forges and all items inside. Also set the 'o' 'F' so when your dwarfs die, their stuff is auto-forbidden. It is still a work-around and dwarfs picking up equipment is exactly why some players use specific equipment when assigning uniforms (I do not do this, because I avoid micromanagement, so I have this problem also).

I typically use the Move order to position dwarfs before combat, but suspect that there is a difference between using a Move order and a Kill order to start combat. If dwarfs have a Kill order and are able to path to the target, they have an active job, so my suspicion is that they will not switch to a Pick up Equipment job when they have a kill order on a rectangle of enemies. I also suspect they will not get vengeful "this is my fight too" thoughts using the Kill instead of Move orders.

[birdman]

When it comes to sudden defense I mostly get frustrated with the delay in defend burrow orders, for some reason defend orders take sometimes hundreds of ticks to even hit the dwarves, whereas station and kill seem rather instant, and i'm unsure why this happens. I like to set up two simple alerts to start with, a normal one with patrols/training, and another which has a civilian lockdown (of course) and which causes all dwarves to immediately defend a few key choke points that i've assigned burrows to. But USUALLY they take so long to receive the order that the enemy is almost upon us (this has led to the death of 2 forts, last week).

[KevinM]

You may want to also specify the equipment materials of the weapon/armor.  They'll still upgrade based on quality but won't upgrade based on material, then once you have a squad's worth of something, then set the material again so that they switch. 

Instead of assigning "Mail Shirt"  set it to "Bronze Mail Shirt"  This way all of your squads could be using bronze. Once you make 10 sets of steel chain shirts, then you can set your first squad's equipment to "Steel Mail Shirt" which lets the first squad to go change while the rest of the squads are doing their thing.

But as you've said, there's not another way to stop them from switching unless you forbid the armors as well as pause your forging.  Or have some ways to turtle up for a while while they do go change.

[knutor]

Go back to overclothing and exact uniforms, my friend. They may not have the best gear, but their hairy lil asses will be covered.

[anewaname]

When it comes to sudden defense I mostly get frustrated with the delay in defend burrow orders, for some reason defend orders take sometimes hundreds of ticks to even hit the dwarves, whereas station and kill seem rather instant, and i'm unsure why this happens.

I believe the difference is that one type of order interrupts the dwarf's current job and the other type of order allows the dwarf's current job to finish. I am not certain of this.

[Sarmatian123]

This is exactly my issue with lottery armor and weapon equipping!

The lottery works by ranks. Captains (champions too I guess), as nobles, go before soldiers. They get their auto pickings of weapons and armor, but as soon as in stockpile appears higher quality or more valuable item, they run to pick it up and dropping their current item on the ground where they stand. The item has to be usually hauled back into stockpile before another Dwarf of lower rank repeats the nonsense.

How did I solve this "new armor/weapon in the stockpile noticed!" Dwarven nonsense?

By manually assigning particular armor pieces and weapons to particular positions in a squad in military equipment menu. Even to empty positions in squad (as those can be filled later by new recruits). Tedious like hell, but every Dwarf prioritizes picking all assigned to him tools. Dwarves then keep those tools with them all time, even in civilian, unless they are hunters, miners or woodcutters. Usually I wait for master quality items, before assigning those for obvious (alarm: Urist grows attached to item!) reasons.

[Urist9876]

Lock doors behind them.
Design defenses with lockable doors.
If a dwarf decides to drop some clothing or even the book he was reading next to some fortifications or another place where enemy is visible, civilians will get stressed when hauling items. Locking doors helps with that too.