Ok I have some ideas for military to make it more effective and to allow for some eleberate defense plans:
1.An option to rally all standing down troops this is however a priority command which overides all other jobs, thus leaving this on could potentially starve your dwarves to death. This would be for if you need all your soldiers and cant afford to wait for them to finnsh eating/sleeping etc.
2.An option to mobilise all dwarves, you could pre-set a point for them to gather or if you dont they will stay where they are, this is effectively for when you need a brave last stand because your soldiers are overwhelmed. I thought that maybe dwarves would grab anything lying around to use a weapon (smaller items could be thrown at the enemy) so you could end up with a goblin taking an oak barrel to the head for example.
3. The ability to set multiple rally points for individual troops then the ability to order all troops to their rally points. thus you may have say a marksdwarf patrolling in a fortified room and 2 axedwarfs stationed in the corrider adjacent but if you need them to retreat you would activate this command and they would run back with the axedwarves say taking up postion on the opposite side of a bridge with the marksdwarf behind them. you would also be-able to set a commonual rally point which dwarves with no other rally point head to, thus rather than telling each individual axe dwarf to go to the bridge you would set it as a communal one and they would both go there (usefull when you have larger numbers of dwarves). You could of course set multiple points for each dwarf which would correspond with those for other dwarves so if you set your your marksdwarf 2 and your axedwarf 2 activating rally point one would cause them both to head to rally point one whilst activating 2 would cause them to run to rally point 2, possibly an option to name these so you know what each one does, e.g: Pits rally point, and Seige rally point.
Edit: To be clear dwarves would prioritise heading to rally points over starting a new fight so upon activating it your dwarves would finnish off the enemy they are on then turn and run, thus traps would probably be needed to slow enemy persuit
This would all come in handy with my fourth suggestion:
Dwarfort assault.
This would be some service which allows you to upload you fort online as defender and wait for someone to join your game as an attacker, the attacker is given an army based on your forts wealth which they must then use to try to destroy your fort, of course if you lose it wont affect your fort when you play it normally offline
So, comments? Suggestions? Complaints at the many grammatical errors I probably made?
[ November 03, 2007: Message edited by: thatguyyaknow ]