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[Zorromorph]

Background:  I've had low-level working military before.  I haven't played DF in years, but I want to refamiliarize myself with it before the Steam version comes out.  So here I am. 

I add a couple dwarves to a squad, and make my way to the schedule screen.  Looking at the instructions on the wiki, I need to change the orders and hit Shift-Enter to leave the orders screen and not Escape which doesn't save changes.  Ok, fine. 

I start small.  I go to edit orders and change it from Train to Station.  Shift-Enter.  Everything says Train for all months on the schedule screen. 
Ok, I'll try Give Orders.  This time I can select, or not, the members of my squad.  Cool.  If I select them, change it to station, and Shift-Enter .... I still have Train all the way down on the schedule screen. 
If I don't select the squad members and change the order to station, then Shift-Enter .... I still have Train all the way down. 

I hope it's clear what's happening here by now.  I've read enough posts by other people on the forums to indicate military is currently working on some level, but I haven't the foggiest notion how.  I'm not trying to do anything super-complicated.  I want to figure out how to have one, very small squad, obey a basic order instead of constantly being inactive and set to Train for all months regardless of what other instructions I try to give them.  And I can't figure out any way to do that. 

Thanks in advance for any help. 

[Schmaven]

It's a little unclear to me what you're trying to accomplish.  What sort of basic order do you want the squad to do?  The most basic of orders are station/move <m> and kill <k>, which are both done from the squad menu s> and override whatever training they have going on in the schedule.

It sounds like you've been trying to set up a recurring patrol that picks a specific subset of squad members to perform, in which case, I don't know how you would do that.

[anewaname]

So, a basic set of orders for a small squad...

I'm going to make the example for 6 dwarfs in the squad, so you can use the order for all 12 months, with 2 dwarfs stationed at your trade depot, 2 dwarfs training, and 2 off-duty for that month.
- pause the game
- Make a new squad, move all the dwarfs into it so the orders are all default.
- go to your trade depot on the map, make a note using 'N'ote, 'p'lace, and 'n'ame it "watchpost".
- Construct a barracks somewhere and 'q' it to set that squad to 't'rain there. (Use wiki for how to construct a barracks).
- Go to the 'm'ilitary, 'a'lerts screen, down arrow to the Active/Training alert, cursor to that squad and hit Enter so the 'A' appears, indicating that squad is now active. At this point, if you unpaused, the dwarfs should follow the default orders of "Train, 10 minimum".
- hit 's' to jump to the Schedules screen, cursor to the first month for that squad.
- Hit Tab to jump to the "Train, 10 minimum" order, hit 'e'dit, modify the 10 dwarfs down to 2 and shift+enter.
- Read but don't press keys.... In that last step, you could have selected a preference for a dwarf, and if you did that, the game would always try to use that dwarf in that order. It is the equivalent of telling a bunch of guys, "each month, some of you may be rotated from guarding the depot to training or be off-duty, except you Urist and Tosid.... you two will be training every minute of every day of this month."
- While you still have "Train, 2 minimum" highlighted, you are going to add the second order (in the set of orders for that squad and for that month) by hitting 'o' three times so it shows "o: Station" and you should see "watchpost" (the name of the Note placed near your depot)
- if you have added more than one Note on your map, use the keys to scroll to the "watchpost" note, otherwise skip to the next step.
-  Modify the 10 dwarfs down to 2 and shift+enter. Your orders should now look like this:
, but there is more to do...
- hit Tab so the highlight jumps to the order.
- hit 'n'ame' and enter "Train2Station2".
- hit 'c'opy, down arrow, hit 'p'aste, and continue 'p'asting until the 12 months are the same.

So, when you unpause, the game will attempt to station 2 dwarfs at the depot and send 2 for training at the barracks. To see who has what jobs, go the 'm'ilitary screen, scroll to the members of the squad and their current job will be visible in the top (but they may actually be doing something else, eating, sleeping, getting a new sock). Because this set of orders only needs 4 of the 6 dwarfs, each month you will notice one guy might go off-duty and another comes on-duty, or one changes from Train to Station, etc, because it is not selecting the same guys each time unless you selected preferred dwarfs when you were setting up one of the orders.

[Zorromorph]

It's a little unclear to me what you're trying to accomplish.

To get the military schedule screen to accept an order I am giving it.  Any order.  I chose station just for simplicity's sake, but I could have chosen any of them.  When I experiment with this kind of thing (or stockpiles, or designations, or whatever) I try to do something very basic first and then if that works, move on to other ways of using the feature.  I guess I have to ask if you're not supposed to use that screen to give station orders, then why is it even there as an option when you cycle through orders?

[Schmaven]

It's a little unclear to me what you're trying to accomplish.

To get the military schedule screen to accept an order I am giving it.  Any order.  I chose station just for simplicity's sake, but I could have chosen any of them.  When I experiment with this kind of thing (or stockpiles, or designations, or whatever) I try to do something very basic first and then if that works, move on to other ways of using the feature.  I guess I have to ask if you're not supposed to use that screen to give station orders, then why is it even there as an option when you cycle through orders?

Having the station order in the scheduling screen would be more for if you wanted recurring station orders, like to send a melee squad to the main entrance courtyard every 7th month of the year for when the dwarven caravan is expected.  For just the randomly occurring surprises and various other unpredictable fun that inevitably arises, that can still work, but the more appropriate way would be to just use the squad menu to directly give the squads singular, non-repeating station orders.

[Zorromorph]

Hit Tab to jump to the "Train, 10 minimum" order, hit 'e'dit, modify the 10 dwarfs down to 2 and shift+enter.

This ended up being the key part it appears.  I was trying to give/edit orders by highlighting the month.  I didn't know the step of tabbing to highlight the order itself was necessary (and I'm left wondering what does the game think I'm trying to edit if it isn't selected .... apparently nothing?). 

But thank you both, I now have a fighting chance of doing something useful with the military.  Hurdle cleared. 

[Salmeuk]

yeah the military order screen is kind of the final boss of DF u.i. . grats on finally beating it.

Hopefully, steam release will be sufficiently playable, and we can finally put to rest these kinds of confusions.

[Garfunkel]

It also helps to think of Squad menu as the place to issue orders for immediate actions where you want the whole squad (or all squads) to either kill someone or move somewhere.

Whereas the military menu with all its sub-menus is meant for organizing and maintaining your squads in general instead of giving specific actions.

Thinking about it that way helped me at least to better grasp the difference.

[Urist9876]

To order your military around, you have to use several menus. The most used are the military and squad menu.

After you set up the military with (m), you can manuallly order your squad around with (s). Often a movement command is preferred over a kill command. This because squads can become inactive after completing a kill, giving issues when there are more opponents. Set the squad to active before you relocate it for another engagement.

The next step is automate a movement order. To accomplish this, you need to adjust the schedule of an alert. Alerts and the accompanying schedule can be found in the military menu. You also need to set a location. You can set a location with points/routes or with a burrow. Burrows give more control where the dwarfs will stand and are the way to go for archers behind fortifications.

In the schedule menu (submenu of military alerts) you can order how many dwarfs will defend that specific location and in what months they should defend it. If you change the default schedule, changes will be effective immidiatly. If you added an alert with its own schedule, you need to set the squad to that alert in the squad or alerts menu.

The schedule menu isn't very userfriendly. Take your time to find out what alert/squad/month you are editing to avoid mistakes. Use the copy function to paste the orders of a specific month to another date or squad.

Instead of setting a point with the points/routes menu, you can also set a route. You can then choose the route instead of a location to make your dwarfs patrol. Patrols are effective for taking care of keas and the like. For sieges I like the burrow option.

To make one thing clear: do not assign military to burrows by the burrow menu. You ontrol civilians that way. If you really have to. Military is assigned to burrows in the schedule menu.

This is but a brief overview of what you can do and where you can find those options. I recommend Tekkud on YouTube if you need a more extensive explanation.

What you wil not find in the tutorials is a sane way to set up the alerts in a real fort. Often I will use alerts for inactivity, peace and war. In peacetime, military will train, patrol or have time off. During the months, those roles are rotated on an individual basis. The war alert sends the archers to the burrows next to the fortifications and the melee dwarfs to the staging area behind the main gates. If needed, you can add war alerts for defending other directions.