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[veok]

So I hate having idlers in my fortresses. Invariably, my dwarves will finally finish hauling the chert boulders out of their newly-dug bedrooms, and then many of the dwarves simply begin congregating in the meeting halls etc.

It occurred to me, however, that if I were to enlist most, if not all, of my dwarves into the military, wouldn't they go off and practice "indiv. training excersizes" when not tasked with a more important job?

Are there any negatives I'm missing? (I understand woodcutters and miners will be finicky about their equipment) And besides, having more dwarves trained to deal with invaders means that I'll have a replacement military all ready to go as soon as the first guys die to forgotten beast extract.

Dwarf redundancy is good, yes?

[flieroflight]

the miner/ cutter problem can be addressed by not giving those dwarfs picks or axes as weapons. other than that, its probably a good ide, and it could be possible to have them training in staggeres blocks of onths so theres some available for  work at all times.

[nanomage]

yes it does work in the way you describe.
military dwarves will never have "no job", preferring to train.

While this kind of behaviour seems so splendid it is the downside of this approach. They will prefer individual combat drills not only to idling but to some useful labors too and the better they get the more they like to train. When they get sufficient military skill level you'll have great problems with getting them actually work.(unless you unassign their barracks of course)

[AWdeV]

Or lock it.

The obvious answer to the question is ofcoure that you'll have a lot of military dwarves.

[Oaktree]

yes it does work in the way you describe.
military dwarves will never have "no job", preferring to train.

While this kind of behaviour seems so splendid it is the downside of this approach. They will prefer individual combat drills not only to idling but to some useful labors too and the better they get the more they like to train. When they get sufficient military skill level you'll have great problems with getting them actually work.(unless you unassign their barracks of course)

Heh. I had this issue with my legendary armorsmith.  So I disbanded his squad to get him back to work.  Otherwise it does do a nice job with having idlers doing some training.  Once I want more serious activity I switch the dwarf to a squad with better equipment and an active training schedule.

[dbay]

I did this in my current fort, and it worked pretty well. Here's some things I found out, though:
-dwarves often run off training even when there are jobs piling up, so you might want to consider not assigning them a barracks
-dwarves wearing heavy gear will move and work a little slower
-but here's the big one. Having an armed populace means that when someone throws a tantrum, BAD THINGS HAPPEN. in seconds, there are cripples everywhere. the fact that everyone else is wearing armour helps somewhat, but tantrum spirals become even worse.

In other news, I never had another civilian death to random monsters or ambushes. The weavers especially (who run down into the cavern for webs) basically cleared the place out

[ohgoditburns]

Even though they are armed and armored, don't the weavers still run from trouble when on civilian duty?

[dbay]

They did, but if the thing caught them (which seemed to happen a lot) they'd turn around and behead it. once in a while i'd have to activate them to do the job if it was something slow