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[Gezol]

So, I just won my first full scale battle in fortress mode. A pack of frogmen burst out of the river and launched an ambush at a particularly inoppurtune moment- just as the village representative was crossing the bridge. One stepped on a stone-fall trap and quickly died in a pool of his own blood and vomit, but the rest of them jumped onto the bridge and proceeded to attack the representive and the couple of pet cats nearby. The representative was hit over the head and dragged into the water, and one cat was killed and the other injured, but the frogmen found the cats to be surprisingly tough foes. The cats bought enough time for the nearest soldiers to rush in and make short work out of the frogmen. The representative, meanwhile, crawled back onto the bridge and went to his meeting.

Have I mentioned lately that this game rules?

Anyway, the whole thing gave me a few ideas for the military:

-Escort orders: Soldiers could be ordered to serve as bodyguards for certain dwarves. A dwarf given this order would closely follow whoever he or she was ordered to guard. Certain nobles might demand bodyguards, and it could be useful when you had dwarves in dangerous areas. You could also assign them to guard children when they start getting kidnapped.

-Keep track of kills: Self explanatory, really. Every major roguelike has a screen listing everything you've killed- obviously adventurers would have one, but dwarves could as well. Enough of one kind of kill could lead to some kind of title, eventually- "Death of Goblins", "Bane of Frogmen", "Bearslayer", etc.

-Military decorations: Another thing for metalsmiths to make. There could be all kinds of different medals for various things- killing a certain number of enemies, being injured in the line of duty, serving as a soldier long enough, or reaching a high skill level in a weapon(there could be one for the transition from Swordsdwarf to Swordsmaster, for example.) Medal construction would be mandated by certain nobles when a soldier met the requirements for one, and receiving one would give the soldier a happy thought.

-Some way of commemorating heroic animals: Animals that get a kill or are killed by certain enemies could end up in the legends and recieve a coffin burial, if it's available. This idea was brought on by the fact that the pet cat's body ended up in the refuse pile, which felt somewhat disrespectful since he'd torn a few chunks out of the frogmen and bought enough time to for the village representative to be saved.

[Toady One]

I think the pet cat might be an exception due to the way cat adoption is handled.  They aren't formally pets, so they get the rubbish heap.  That's kind of off...  Right now I think all the pets get legend entries only if they kill something.  A notion of heroism beyond slaughter would be nice in general.

An escort...  system (not service) could also be a useful way to get the royal/castle guards into play...  perhaps the noble sounding nobles like the baron could have a guard, like you suggest, but it could be an escort specifically from the royal guard.

Medals would be a lot of fun.  I went kind of nuts with that in the robot game, dunno why I never thought doing something like that.  It would kind of fit in with the uniform type things we were planning to add relatively early to the human town guards in adventure mode.

[Gezol]

One thing that might help with expanding the notion of heroism would be to mark certain intelligent species like frogmen and kobolds as being active enemies of dwarfkind, unlike, say, raccoons. Killing or injuring them would give more glory than doing the same to things like bears and raccoons, and just wounding an enemy species might be enough to earn an animal a place in the legends.

What's happening with the robot game, by the way? I know it was almost done, but I imagine Dwarf Fortress is taking up pretty much all of your programming time these days...

[Toady One]

Robots is sorta almost done.  There are a few balance problems, and a little new part that needs to be tied off more cleanly, and it needs documentation.  And yeah, it's just a matter of finding the time for it...  I had been meaning to get a look at it the past many weekends, and I even did look at it once, but I haven't yet got my mind wrapped back around it.  Worst case is probably finishing it over christmas break, though I'm never gonna set a release date again.