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[aradraugfea]

People might remember the 'Civilians stay indoors' command that used to save many a sieged fort.  Somewhere along the line, though, at least for the Mac version, this has gone missing, or at least is no longer in it's old place.

Just today, I had a siege that went spectacularly badly, not due to a lack of planning on my part, or anything else that I consider to fall into the same 'losing is fun' thing, but because, when my first military dwarf died, a handful of civilians ran out to gather his gear to take it to the stockpiles.  They saw the goblins (and their beastly companions) and did the normal job interrupted thing, but rather than actually go back in the fort, they ran around randomly on the surface, where the goblins picked them off, along with the repeating waves of dwarves coming to gather up the dead military dwarves' gear.  Before I successfully broke the siege, 3/4ths of my fort had run up onto the surface to be picked off.  The remaining 4th was primarily injured dwarves from previous raids, and mourning friends of the civilians that, if the command was still around would never have died in the first place.  As I speak, I have 5 functioning dwarves, where, pre-siege, I had 150 dwarves.  I have 30 in total, but most are children, berserk, insane, or injured.  All because 'stay indoors' disappeared.

I get that a lost fort is part of the game, but when it's some quirk of code that causes my loss, I feel a little cheated.  Similar to a abandoned world where my fort ran into a functionally immortal bronze colossus.  I gave up after the dwarves had been fighting him for 3 months to no effect.

[forsaken1111]

You have burrows for that now. Use them.

[aradraugfea]

So I'm ment to set every section of my fortress as different burrows, and then, when an invasion happens, pause and set every non-miltary dwarf to ignore all above ground burrows?  I wouldn't even call this a workaround, especially when the only thing I've managed so far with burrows is to set my military dwarves to defend a certain section of the fort at a certain time of year.  It's worth nothing that, thanks to certain practices, my dwarves actually spend some time above ground, dealing with the day star.

Even the wiki isn't exactly verbose on the application of burrows for anything other than setting choke points to station troops at during certain months.

[forsaken1111]

So I'm ment to set every section of my fortress as different burrows, and then, when an invasion happens, pause and set every non-miltary dwarf to ignore all above ground burrows?  I wouldn't even call this a workaround, especially when the only thing I've managed so far with burrows is to set my military dwarves to defend a certain section of the fort at a certain time of year.

Even the wiki isn't exactly verbose on the application of burrows for anything other than setting choke points to station troops at during certain months.

No... you're meant to set a safe zone within your fort and assign civilians to it so they go there in times of trouble and stay put while your military handles shit.

[Vercingetorix]

No... you're meant to set a safe zone within your fort and assign civilians to it so they go there in times of trouble and stay put while your military handles shit.

I'd rather just have a simple stay indoors order in addition to the burrows myself.  Burrows are better suited to defense zones and emergencies, but a simple order is easier and more useful if you're dealing with a minor threat or one where you don't want to have to designate the entire inside of the fortress as a burrow for that purpose.

[slothen]

Burrows are better.  I usually don't even mess with them until the first ambush comes, and then I just designate a gigantic underground cube that covers most of my fortress then assign all civilians to it by (m)-(a)  It takes like 10 seconds.  Besides, the outside/inside thing is absolutely useless for anyone that builds stuff outside, or even walls in a section of the surface for farming and storage.

[Draco18s]

The reason we ditched "stay inside" was because of the Entrance Dance.  Burrows actively restricts pathfinding and job creation so that that never happens.

[forsaken1111]

No... you're meant to set a safe zone within your fort and assign civilians to it so they go there in times of trouble and stay put while your military handles shit.

I'd rather just have a simple stay indoors order in addition to the burrows myself.  Burrows are better suited to defense zones and emergencies, but a simple order is easier and more useful if you're dealing with a minor threat or one where you don't want to have to designate the entire inside of the fortress as a burrow for that purpose.

I understand what you're saying, but Burrows are a much better and more customizable solution. Yes, if you want the exact functionality of the old 'stay indoors' option it does take a little time to set up in burrows. You must designate a burrow covering all fortress levels and assign the proper civilians to it, etc. The difference is that you have so much more control with a burrow. You can keep civilians out of defensive chokepoints or areas where you know there will be arrows flying, restricting them to the safer parts of the fort. With the old 'stay indoors' option, you would get silly entrance dancing which put your civilians in harm's way and civilians would have no qualms about pathing into a raging battle after that +pig tail sock+ because you forgot to make corpse items forbidden. With burrows you have neither of those problems, for the small cost of a slightly increased setup time.

[AngleWyrm]

Also, one burrow can cover multiple floors, so it's possible to set up one burrow with all the civilian work areas and living areas. Then create an alert (I call it General Alarm) that has the main indoor burrow active. Then when you set the General Alarm alert, all civilians move to indoors away from trouble.

[Bohandas]

We should have burrows AND stay indoors BOTH be available as options.

[Evil One]

We should have burrows AND stay indoors BOTH be available as options.

It might not be a bad idea (but it should work on everyone, or have different on activation options), just in case there's an attack of something that we'd like to keep even our military away from, like an indestructible FB.

[forsaken1111]

We should have burrows AND stay indoors BOTH be available as options.

It might not be a bad idea (but it should work on everyone, or have different on activation options), just in case there's an attack of something that we'd like to keep even our military away from, like an indestructible FB.

In that case one could simply station the squad away from the FB. And 'stay inside' isn't going to keep your dwarves away from a forgotten beast, they come from the caverns generally.

[Caesar]

You do know you can also set the civilian alert to restrict all civilians to the 'safe burrow', right?
Easy as pie and without the assigning.

[xellas84]

You can restrict all civilians to one burrow with the Alert screen in the Military menu.

Make a custom "Emergency" alert, make a "Safe Room" burrow, restrict civvies to it.  Then when said siege pops up, bring up the military screen, issue the "Emergency" alert, and all your non-military dorfs will drop everything and run screaming to the safe burrow.

[Bohandas]

We should have burrows AND stay indoors BOTH be available as options.

It might not be a bad idea (but it should work on everyone, or have different on activation options), just in case there's an attack of something that we'd like to keep even our military away from, like an indestructible FB.

In that case one could simply station the squad away from the FB. And 'stay inside' isn't going to keep your dwarves away from a forgotten beast, they come from the caverns generally.

A titan then. Whatever.