simple scenerio, life in your fortress, and a megabeast comes along and slaughters your entire military and busts through your traps ready to devour all your civilians leaving you to the desperate tactic of . . . RECRUIT EVERYBODY!!! I put this scenerio forward partly because it's a problem I just faced, but also because I think it does a good job of illustrating how much more insanely time consuming it really is to assign dwarves to a squad in the new system.
in 40d, this is a fairly rapid process. units menu, a down a down a down . . . repeat and quickly assign every dwarf to the military. in a few more quick steps you can make them into one massive squad, or a few smaller squads if you so desire.... recruiting 10 dwarves, is an easy 21 keystrokes. setting a leader for all 10 dwarves, is another 21 keystrokes. for 20 dwarves, simple progression, 41, and another 41, easy mindless done.
the same process now? TAKES FOREVER!!!!!
First, you must disband your existing squad. What? but they're dead you say. Yes, they are, but courtesy of a bug, they're still in the squad. Here is the fastest process for removing 10 dead dwarves from a squad.
m, right, up, enter, up, up, enter, up, up, up, enter, up, up, up, up, enter, up, up, up, up, up, enter, down, enter, down, down, enter, down, down, down, down, enter, down, down, down, down, down, enter, enter
This is being smart and going both up and down to reduce the number of keystrokes necessary by simply scrolling down to 2, down to 3, down to 4, etc.... even with this smart method, it's 40 keystrokes simply to remove 10 corpses from a squad. And we haven't even started assigning dwarves yet. It gets better.
Assuming you are on the recruit everybody with no exceptions policy, the first squad to select is relatively straight forward...
m,right,right,enter,enter,enter,enter....
13 quick keystrokes and the first squad is formed. That doesn't seem so bad, but if you have more squads to form it gets bad very very quickly.... If all we were doing is recruiting 10 dwarves, 53 vs 41 is more, but not terribly so. However if we're really panic recruiting an army in a desperate last bid to stop an invading horde or a megabeast or something than we're dead already and we should just kick back and watch the screaming. So moving on the recruiting the second squad of 10.
Now things get complicated by two bugs. One is the fact that every time you select a dwarf from the list on the right, it resets you back up to the top of the list. The second is the fact that dwarves that are already in squads are still on the list on the right, and if selected will be removed from the squad they are already in. Because of this, the process for selecting the next 10 dwarves is...
left, left, l, (select uniform), right, right, down(x10), enter, down(x11), enter, down(x12), enter down(x13), enter . . .
The total for this rather insane process is a massive 159 keystrokes plus whatever you spend on uniform selection. Now our grand total is 212 keystrokes to recruit 20 dwarves vs 81 in the old system.
Following this progression, things just go from bad to worse. Scaling this up to 30 dwarves the numbers become 471 in the new system, vs 121 in the old system.
Of course, if you're not simply mindlessly panic recruiting every able bodied dwarf left alive and are actually trying to make rational decisions about who gets drafted and who doesn't, you can anticipate several HUNDRED keystrokes spent for each squad formed. Since this becomes more of a rational process it is also much more time spent between keystrokes as you decide who to recruit and who not to, and since you will be accidentally recruiting people that are already recruited in other squads you will be forced to go back many times to make sure all of your desired squads are actually full.
Think about it.
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Topic: Assigning squads takes FOREVER!!!! (Read 841 times)