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[billw]

Now that the military seems to be working correctly (?) I thought it might be good to try and gather together useful nuggets of info on military management, training etc.
I'll start with something I discovered last night, that spurred me to create this thread:
The default Train/Active schedule order is a Train order with minimum 10 dwarves. This means that ALL your squad will spend ALL their time training. They still take breaks for drink/eat/sleep, but NOTHING else. This is a problem as they have no chances to acquire happy thoughts from speaking with friends, admiring stuff, or even eating in legendary dining hall (as they carry their own food!). As soon as one of them dies your entire squad will hit a tantrum spiral. A well trained hammer dwarf is that last person you want going berserk. The fix is to change your Train order to a minimum of ~6 dwarves (this figure may need tweaking), so the others can go an relax. The seemly obvious alternative is to set them to only Train every second month, but at the end of a Train month the chances are that happy thoughts may have worn off.

[Darkmere]

Or you could make them decent weapon racks and armor stands, above avg bed quality for the barracks, smooth and engrave the room, put a statue in there, isolated waterfall for showers, high quality food and booze...

[billw]

Actually I have already done some of that. Its been fully engraved by my master engraver, and all my booze and food is of the highest quality. In fact that was one of the few happy thoughts I could find in my army guys: "enjoyed a masterpiece meal" or some such thing. They don't care about the engravings because they don't have time to look at them I guess.

[Daetrin]

If you mix weapons in a squad, they gain skill much more slowly.  Use squads of all the same weapon type.

[Cheese]

We really need a sticky full of tricks on managing military

[Vertigon]

If you mix weapons in a squad, they gain skill much more slowly.  Use squads of all the same weapon type.

I just had a mental image of a hammerdwarf trying to teach a swordsdwarf how to use some other guy's mace lol

[darkflagrance]

We really need a sticky full of tricks on managing military

And potentially healthcare.

[billw]

We really need a sticky full of tricks on managing military

Yeah I was hoping this would be it if it got decent responses, but didn't want to be presumptuous. The wiki is far out of date, and until we collate all the tid-bits that are lying around its difficult to write a guide, or even update the wiki in a comprehensive manner.

edit/ Thought I better add a tip to keep this on track:
For melee squads set them to an alert that has most of the squad Training, with an assigned barracks (obviously!) for best training results.
For archery squads assign them to Inactive, with lots of training ammo assigned, and at least enough separate archery ranges for 70% of the squad (I found that after creating 10 archery ranges for my xbow squad of 10, they only ever used 7 of them). Its helpful to put the ammo stockpile right next to the archery ranges for obvious reasons!

[Biag]

It's possible to get your axedwarves to also do woodcutting, with some micromanaging. When you need them to pick up the axe, you have to add it to their uniform in the military screen. When you activate them, they drop the axe because their woodcutting labor is disabled. What you need to do is:

Step 1. Remove the axe from their uniform.
Step 2. Turn off their woodcutting labor.
Step 3. Wait a few seconds for them to drop the axe.
Step 4. Add it back into their uniform.
Step 5. Activate.

It's a lot of work for a very small bonus, but it was quite literally a lifesaver in my recent fort (until the Axemeister was ripped apart by beak dogs, that is).

[JoRo]

"Individual choice" weapons don't seem to be a good idea; I had a dwarf who trained in 4 different weapons before finally settling on an axe.

[Lord Shonus]

Mixing ammo types within a squad seems to confuse the poor idiots. If you use multiple types of ranged weapon (or a ranged weapon that uses multiple kinds of ammo, possible with mods), put them in different squads.