Agreed. Usually (Since my squads run a 3 month rotation of training+danger room+off duty) Setting up my military consists of me creating a single order + pasting it 25 times to other months and squads, then creating another order +25 pastes, then the third one +25 pastes. Then I just create one last order for the "everyone run and defend the main entrance" and paste that 50 times or so (with macro's this comes down to about 5 button presses) and I'm done. Total time to set up my military's scheduling averages at about 5-10 min. It seriously takes me longer to find all of my intended military dwarves in the list of 150 to add them to their squads then it does to set up the scheduling. And since I tend to just use the basic metal armor uniform that is eventually followed by my saved more complex uniform, even uniforms only take like maybe 2 min to setup for all of my squads. And then after my total time of of maybe 7-12 min setting up my military for the fortress, I never have to do another thing save going to the alert menu and activating the alarm or the all clear and putting new dwarves into the spots of any that died (which is a simple matter of hunting through the list of dwarves and finding the first peasant not already in a squad) and only takes maybe a minute even with large numbers of deaths.
Trust me, though it seems like the new military stuff would suck since it requires so much work, the majority of the work such as uniforms only needs to be done the very first time, if at all. Combine this with the fact that usually by the time you set up your military the second time you know exactly what you want so you don't have to mess around with menus and the amount of micro-ing drops drastically. I might even go so far as to say that the new military stuff takes less management then the old 40d stuff, since you no longer have to manage dwarves training so they didn't kill each other or handling and complex stations to defend your fortress. Now my entire defense, from civilians heading to safety to arming the fortress guards can be armed or unarmed with a single toggle, and all with only about 10 minutes of setup time total + maybe another min after heavy casualties.
Author
Topic: 'Alerts' (Read 1783 times)