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[Baro]

I'm sure many people are a little unsure on how to get a good fighting force, and I still am!  But I managed to get a pretty good little army together to fight.. well.. nothing.  But at least they look smart and are trained well.

I'm going to share my thoughts and experiance making an army in the hopes it will help others, and in the hopes others will comment and correct me/answer my questions.

The last fortress I made was slowly killed off by snake men.  Every season or so 4-5 snake men would jump out of the river and kill my poor fishers and such.  Then once I blocked that off, I had snake men jumping out of my well and killing dwarves.  So I vowed the next fortress I played would be defended.

I made a fortified front and back door to my fortress with lovely arrow slits and lots of traps.  But i still needed some dwarves behind the arrow slits!  Luckly for me I had tin and copper right off the bat, so I made 3 bronze cross bows.  Shortly after I received some modest immigration of 9 dwarves, 5 of which being peasants, blank slates for my army!

I went into the military screen and activated 3 peasants, then I pressed w and assigned them all to carry cross bows and chainmail.  It's my assumption that armour encumbers dwarves, so I went with the middle-ground of chain armour, rather than leather of plate.  Can someone tell me the disadvantages of armour?  I also assumed a crossbow user could not have a shield.

I put the 3 dwarves into a squad together, then from the squad screen I made them inactive.  They all went to my ammo stockpile and grabbed bone arrows and wood arrows and started to train on the 3 targets I provided.  In no time they were all novice marksdwarves.

I then made them each a chainmail armour, leggings, and a cap.  They seemed happy with that armour and it seemed 'right' for crossbow users.

I repeated this process every time I revceived immigration, turning the peasants into crossbow users.  I now have 4 squads of 3 dwarves which I cycle inactive/active to allow my front and back door to always be guarded, and some dwarves always training.  As long as you continue to provide them wood or bone arrows, they will keep training and getting better.

Oddly enough, on this map I've only seen one monster attack.  The terrain stats are exactly the same as my last map, and I've only seen 2 frog men, which were instantly killed by my traps.  No idea why this map is so much calmer.

Military Observations:
Don't tell your dwarves to carry water.  I thought water skins would be a great addition for my troops, but it was a huge mistake.  For some reason either due to a bug or the game being mean, waterskins take almost a half season to fill.  My dwarves were almost never at their posts as they were constantly all stuck around the well filling their skins.  Once I turned off 'carry water" the dwarves only occasionaly (and quickly) visited the well to drink.  Toady!  Why is filling a water skin such a time intensive activity??

Squads
Squads are a mixed blessing.  On one hand it makes management easier, but on the other hand it prevents you from exactly stationing dwarves behind fortifications, as they tend to 'spill' out in silly formations.  It's also bad because if the squad leader wants to go sleep or get a drink, everyone else in the squad wil abandon their post.  BUT if you don't use squads, management is almost imposible.  There is no way to just cycle though your dwarf troops, you have to hunt them down on screen and give them orders, extremely poor troop management.

So, my questions.

Armour: Leather, chain, plate.  How exactly do they differ, or is each step simply better than the previous?

Weapons: How much does material effect a weapon?  Is a bronze crossbow only slightly better than a copper one, or WAY better?  Also, are all mele weapons more or less the same, or are some weapon types better than others?

Management: Are there any plans to make military/squad management a little less ridiculously cumbersom?  Perhaps the ability to have squads that don't have any particular leader, everyone in the group is equal and they simply go to where they are ordered, they don't wait for their leader to finish drinking or eating or sleeping.  I'd love to just make a group of 10 dwarves, station them at a gate, and not worry.  Rather than see those 10 dwarves crowded in and around a bedroom because ONE of the dwarves wants to sleep!

Another idea would be rally points for dwarves not in squads.  It would be like a sentry point, but all dwarves without orders or squads would simply go there.  This would be excelent for when trouble breaks out and you don't want to spend 20 min hunting down every single soldier and issuing them seperate orders.

[gimlet]

Thanks! That was a great summary.  Here's what Toady posted about weapon/armor materials:
"I think metal dam/block modifiers are something like:
133% steel,
100% iron,
75% bronze,
66% copper.
Other stuff like wood/whatever are 50%.
The obsidian swords are also something ridiculous like 133, but they were supposed to wear down very quickly (and don't), so that's exploitable if you like."

And from the raw files:
Head:
Cap  wt 10, Blockpower 20
Helm wt 20, Blockpower 60, Armorlevel 1
Body:
Coat    wt 50, mainblock 15, secondblock 15
Leather wt 50, Mainblock 20, secondblock 20, armorlevel 1
Chain    wt 75, Mainblock 50, secondblock 30, armorlevel 2
Plate   wt 150, Mainblock 70, Secondblock 50, Armorlevel 3
Legs:
pants wt 20, blockpower 20
leggings wt 40, blockpower 50, armorlevel 1
greaves wt 60, blockpower 70, armorlevel 3

I don't know what any of that means (except wt=weight), but there it is  

[ August 20, 2006: Message edited by: gimlet ]

[Bobberroo]

You can use bucklers with crossbows, don't know about shields though.

[Stromko]

I think it'd also be nice to be able to toggle on/off duty from the main military screen, rather than having to View the squad to toggle that. To keep the military screen newbie-friendly, onr could have the on/off-duty option grayed out when the squad isn't activated.

[JT]

Another thing I'd like is to be able to switch to the squad of a given dwarf when using the [v] key.  At present, all you can do with [v] is [A]ctivate or de[A]ctivate a squad, which means you have to use the [v] key to look at the dwarf to figure out who's who, then switch to the [m] key to find that dwarf on the list again and press several keys just to zoom right back to the dwarf you had selected before and issue him a new station.

[Aquillion]

It'd also be nice to be able to see a dwarf's details and zoom to them from the military view...

[LordNagash]

I've started having at least one, but usually more like 3, military dwarves start coming every migration, so I have quite an army now.

Would have been more useful when the mayor turned up and wanted a dozen fortress guards though : /