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[martinuzz]

Due to dying horribly to werewolves and ogres on my first 31.x attempt, on a terrifying map, I decided to tune down a bit, and pl;ay on a mirthful map.
Deer.. Unicorns.. Friendly enough.
Then, came the grizzly bear. At first, he arrived shortly after embark, so I decided to move my dwarves out of harm's way.
The bear proceeded to drink my booze, resulting in quite a few annoyed, sober dwarves.

Determined not to let that happen again, the next grizzly bear was charged the next time he showed up, by my fledgling military, consisting of 5 dwarves who happened to arrive with decent fighting skills, led by my woodcutter / militia commander.

The bear killed them all.. In one or 2 hits. I'm not sure why my woodcutter decided to drop his axe when I activated him, but I somehow doubt if even if he had had his axe, it would have done him any good.

I don't get the military equipment thing. If I designate him a specific weapon (steel war-axe), he will wield it as a soldier, but drop it on deactivation, losing his woodcutting job in the process. If I designate him 'personal choice, melee', he will drop the bloody axe he normally uses for woodcutting upon activation, and try to wrestle stuff instead. He does have axedwarf skill (gave him that at embark) though.

Bottom line: beware of Grizzly Bears, and equipment bugs.

Please Toady One, keep the first, fix the latter. The military system has a lot of potential, but as it is now, despite some bugfixes you already made, it is still pretty game-breaking for me. I want to be able to have my miners / woodcutters defend my fortress, as they have always done in previous versions. It seems impossible now.

[Vicomt]

this is my military strategy as well, and although I haven't really had time to play much, I've usually managed to work-round the axe-dropping bug. It takes a couple of tries at setting my woodcutter/military commander up properly, as the only route I've found to work is:

• set woodcutter as military commander, using metal armour uniform
• station the commander (military move) at a safe place
• change his equipment from personal choice to axe
• wait for him to go change his equipment
• if this hasn't worked (may take a couple of weeks), cancel his orders, then repeat 1-4
• when he's finally done, give him a kill order when you need him

I can't say that it works 100% of the time, but usually I've got him killing the wildlife and cutting trees within a month or so of embark.

[Eric Blank]

I've noticed that if you designate your squad to take up station before giving a kill order, and letting everyone get situated, they're more likely to pick up their equipment as they apparently don't feel the urge to bum-rush at anything yet. If your axeman really won't work properly, remove him from office and replace him with someone who actually uses his assigned equipment. axeman-woodcutters and mining-soldiers can be fickle sometimes, and will try to use a separate item for military and civilian duty.
I THINK you could trick them into using the right one if you remove their weapon-using labor, assign them the weapon or at least weapon type you want, draft them, and then turn their labor back on. There's an option somewhere(or there was in 31.10, I can't find it right now, it might be default though.) that makes them stay equipped after deactivation that might work with this plan.