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[simonthedwarf]

Ugh. Ok so I'm being very careful with my first functioning fort. 

But now Im guessing !!FUN!! is coming for my cowardly frame.

I sent out a squad I had been training for like 4 years to fight a saltwater crocodile. They had some copper armor (I think) and silver hammers.

The crocodile ate them!

Btw, Is there a way to use Dwarf therapist to place idle dwarfs in a squad?? Im finding it hard to know which dwarfs to assign to military duty.

[NecroRebel]

...Is there a question besides the one about Therapist, or are you just venting? 

Wild animals, especially predators, especially large predators, can be fairly dangerous. You pretty much need armor on every body part, including hands, feet, and head. Full copper armor should be enough to survive. Also, shields are the most important piece of defensive equipment; a shield will block between 1/4 and 1/2 of all attacks on a skilled shield user, so they're better than armor. Finally, hammers and blunt weapons are meant for armored targets. Blunt attacks are comparatively ineffective compared to edged attacks, mostly bruising or at worst breaking bones, but when armor comes into play edged attacks can be treated as blunt attacks and due to their physics edged weapons don't make good blunt weapons.

Depending on how large the squad was and how many of them attacked the crocodile at once, they shouldn't have had too much trouble if their skills were decent. Have your soldiers actually been on a training schedule, and have they actually had a barracks set up to train in? Those are important. Also, the fastest way to train if your military is entirely unskilled is in 2-3 dwarf squads, as the low numbers encourage sparring.



I don't think you can assign dwarves to the military with Dwarf Therapist directly. However, there is a workaround. Give dwarves that you want to be soldiers in a particular squad a custom profession name, something like "Warrior 1," and then go into the military screen and put all dwarves whose profession is Warrior 1 in one squad, all "Warrior 2"s in a second squad, and so on. This will let you fill squads relatively easily, as you can quickly identify who is supposed to be in what squad and you won't accidentally try to assign someone to 2 squads.

[dwarfhoplite]

I name all my soldiers "S" to make it easier

[EBannion]

I usually keep my dwarves sorted by number of assigned labors in Therapist, and I've started giving all the dwarves in squad 1 only one labor that I never use (like alchemy) and then squad 2 gets alchemy and wax working, for example, and then squad 3 gets... I dunno... milling or something, etc.

[Werdna]

Btw, Is there a way to use Dwarf therapist to place idle dwarfs in a squad?? Im finding it hard to know which dwarfs to assign to military duty.

I don't think Therapist can place them in squads, but what I do is scan Therapist for dwarves that are consistently idle, then nickname them with a single letter tag - say, "1" for squad 1, "2" for squad 2, etc.  Apply.

Then go back to the game, military squad selection, go to the squad 1 to start filling holes in the roster.  On the full dwarf list, you can now easily find the dwarves with a "1" next to them and add to the squad.

Sadly Therapist or DF has a bug where military dwarves will lose their nicknames periodically over time, so don't expect the "1", etc tags to stick.  I use the tags mostly to make it simpler to find the recruit in the list.

Another trick for recruiting:  every time a new migrant wave comes in, pause the game and sort in DT by happiness.  Your new migrants will all be near the bottom in a block of 'content' yellow (with some like-minded fort dwarves occasionally mixed in).  Review their skills, and tag the less impressive ones with recruit-me tags.  Even if your military is full, you'll have replacements already pre-tagged for quick recruiting later - in fact in the middle of combat when a dwarf goes down I'm frequently whipping into the military menu to recruit and replace the dead instantly.  The other plus to this method is that migrant dwarves have fewer relationships and are less likely to be missed when they bite the dirt, so they make a great recruiting pool while you can still 'recognize' them as newcomers.

[Sutremaine]

You can sort in DT directly by migrant wave.

I'm curious about how that battle with the crocodile went. Are the combat reports still available?