Print

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

[Reinecker]

I personal am going to be on my fortress. I currently have 1 marksdwarves and 2 recruits which are training to be marksdwarves. I still have about 50 more dwarves until I am getting sieges so I should have time to grow and diversify my army.

Also I heard that a dwarf will continually get unhappier the longer they are in an army, is that true?

[Skanky]

They get unhappier the longer they are kept on duty. Being off-duty stops this bad thought.

The general way to build an army is to give recruits a shield and some armour, let them spar until they get a certain level of wrestling / shield / armour use. Then give them training weapons (low-quality low damage weapons) and hope their partners have learnt to stop attacks well enough.

It takes them a long time to learn enough to be effective fighters.

[tigger89]

If your dwarves are on active duty for too long, they get an unhappy thought.  If they stand down, I believe they don't get an unhappy thought though.  So you just need to set up a rotation schedule, for giving every unit sparring time and on-duty time.  Or maybe it's not that complicated, I always make things harder than they have to be.  Yay for a seasonal guard rotation schedule!

EDIT: Oops, someone else posted while I was typing. >_>

[Teeto_K]

Anyone know how long it takes for that thought to creep up?

A season? 2? A month? A day? Depends on some personality flag on the dorf? I keep my millitary VERY well accomodated, so it's not like duty time will cause a tantrum spiral, but I'd like to know if anyone knows.

[Glacies]

I usually have a mized group of dorfs with all manner of spiky implement laying around the fort and I let the little buggers stab each other with iron spears and no armor.

But when I'm feeling nicer I melt all that goblin crapand make everyone iron stuff.

[RPharazon]

I have a 15-dwarf army in my current fortress.

But the bad thing is that 13 of them are resting due to broken bones.

Maybe I shouldn't have given them those *Adamantine War Hammers*.

[Axe27]

I was actually thinking of producing my own standing army, but the only ore I've stumbled upon isn't really weapons useful. At 15 pop though, a 1-3 man army isn't really much, and they'd all have to be marksdwarves to accommodate for the lack of metal or anvil.

[LegacyCWAL]

I usually tend towards complete (and literal) overkill without really realizing it at the time.  My current fortress has almost two dozen Macedwarves (most of them Champions), three dozen Marksdwarves, and another half-dozen Marksdwarves-in-training


Of course, having found a few thousand ore worth of Magnetite deposits didn't hurt.

[Dorten]

My military is always off duty, cause I usually build aboveground forts, with ambush locators at the entrances, so that I don't have need for patrols. I make them on duty only when goblins really come.

[Jude]

I leave all my military off duty except when there's an attack..sometimes they take their precious time getting up to the scene of the invasion, but it usually works and they train lots and don't get unhappy.

I've taken to building watchtowers around my entrance and having dwarves train on top so they won't get cave adaptation.

[Skid]

I usually keep a 6 Marksdwarf army off duty from fairly early in my fort.  On a map with a fair amount of trees or a good butchery program at least half of them are legendary by the time the first Goblin invasion shows up.  I don't bother with melee units most of the time, that's what traps are for.

I suppose that it's more because my early forts had horribly bad luck in finding metal ores, so I usually now plan not to find any.

[Reinecker]

I have yet to have a fort that finds any ores 

It is always just those useless "other" section stones that have no special properties.

[Naero]

I keep a standing army because traps are no fun. Dwarves are fun.

Dwarves in plate armor weilding massive hammers that send Gobbos flying halfway across the map > a stone falling from the ceiling that insta-kills everything, ever.

[Muz]

I have a bunch of fortress guards with marksmanship and leather armor. They seem to be almost useless at stopping crime (i.e. kobolds) - they just blast some shots at the kobold and miss entirely.

I have a captain who has full steel plate armor and a battle axe. I also had an elite wrestler squad earlier on with steel shields and leather armor, but after one guy got killed during sparring with the captain, I've decided to give them all (i.e. the remaining elite wrestler) a chainmail, and an iron spear.

I like making armies

[Khain]

I currently have a small unit of 3 competant Marksdwarves with +Iron Crossbow+s and Chain mail, an assault group of 4 legendary Sworddwarves in Plate and a larger group of Speardwarves who do the mopping up.