Military Setup?

[Harry Coxx]

I'm 1 year into my fortress with 22 dwarves and I want to set up a milita right now. 5 of my dwarves are good fighters and I have a few questions now.

1. Should I focus on the fighters and only train them or should I train every dwarf in my fortress to become part of the military?

2. I'm also unsure about the training method, should I use constant or staggered training?

3. Should I use training weapons or real weapons for training?

[Thom293]

I'm not sure what is best, but this is how I do it in young fortress:

I have 1 hunter. Let him hunt. Make sure you have wood bolts and a 2x2 ammo stockpile on the surface. Assign him to his own squad so you can give him attack orders. Useful for dealing with most agitated animals. NO UNIFORM. Hunters and uniforms don't mix. You can try adding an archer uniform to him if you want, but it's wonky.

I have a melee squad with 4 other dwarfs. Axe, sword, spear, warhammer or mace (silver blunt weapons if you can). This weapon mix will deal with most anything. Set them to train every other month. Uniform add whatever armor you can over clothes. When you have full sets of armor set it to replace clothes and exact matches. When starting out I don't use breastplate. Slows dwarfs down a lot until they are trained. Add them later when you have training and lots of metal.

Once you grow and get metal up and running deck them out and add a second squad of melee dwarfs set to full time train. Then grow from there. I rarely have more than 2 ranged squads with with 2-3 dwarfs each.

[Twomillion]

These answers may be a little off, used to the previous version of the game.

1- put your fighters into a squad and some rookies too. 22 dwarves will turn into 50+ quick, make a full squad now and add more in as your fort grows. As wealth increases, you’ll get more migrants. The proficient fighters will help tutor up the recruits. I tend to make squads single weapon because they teach lessons on their weapon, so focusing one weapons skills them up faster. Otherwise you’ll get a spread of xp in weapons.
2 - constant initially, until they can handle themselves. Once mine are adept I switch to staggered with 5 training at a time. After some experience, your military dwarves have a desire to train/ fight etc in their ‘needs.’ Early on, I turn constant off sometimes for their down time, like a month a season.
3 - use real weapons. Really hard to make a squad switch weapons before sending them to a fight. They won’t hurt each other sparing. Bronze or iron until you can make steel. Bronze/iron wielding and clad dwarves still wreck house if they’re good and have a shield.

4?- training weapons are good for you captain of the guard squad… who are more like police than military. Make training weapons out wood for that squad so they don’t hurt your citizens badly while breaking up a drunken fight.

[Twomillion]

I should add, my 200+ fort has 4 full squads; 1 axe, 1 silver warhammer and 1 spear squads. Also 1 ranged squad. I send one out for raiding at a time. Warhammer for undead and beasts cutting weapons won’t hurt much. Swords are cool too :)

[Haethei]

You can get away with 1 or 2 military dwarves for a while, depending on the place you embarked. If you're in a savage or evil area I'd probably do a few more. If the dwarves are idle, go ahead and recruit them anyway. Otherwise they can be useful for hauling and construction, really anything else that they're assigned to do

I like to have my military dwarves training 100% of the time until they're quite skilled, then you can stagger it to maintain their skill level while allowing them to do other things for happiness.

Training weapons are useless for equipping your dwarves. They can't hurt eachother sparring with metal weapons at all, and it's difficult to get them to switch when it's time for a real fight. Training weapons are best used in strange scenarios, like spear traps that are activated on your own military dwarves to help them train dodging and toughness skill.

[Valstra]

Based on my expirince, it's better to have a dedicated military, that is focused on fighting, since those dwarfs will not be available for labor while they train, stationed, patrooling, or fighting. And of course, you don't want to loose your legendary gem setter in a fight.

That being said, you want to have as much of a fighting force as you can muster in the beggining, some early threats can be brutal. I suggest assigning everyone non-essential to your first militia.

About training, i suggest using constant training, untill your dwarfs at least compitent at using their chosen weapon, then switching to staggered training. The difference is, that during staggered training, your dwarfs will only train every other month, so they'll always have time to rest, socialize, and practice craft, but it's twice as slow to train them.
Constant training on the other hand, causes dwarfs to be in a bad mood, since all they do is train all day, with no time for breaks, but it is much faster to train your dorfs that way.

The reason why i suggest using constant training untill your dwarfs are compitent, is because compitent dwarfs are pretty decend at fighting, and should be able to protect your fort from small threats without an issue. But untill then, they are almost as good as lemmings.

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

Barring special circumstances (evil/savage biomes), having 20-30% of your population in the military and frequently training by the time you hit 80 dorfs (the FB/Titan trigger) is a good policy. For obvious reasons, military building works best if you have a couple skilled dorfs for demonstrations and the bulk of your military should be comprised of otherwise (mostly) useless dorfs. They don't need to be particularly well trained early on, but effort should be made to ensure that training is improved before trying to conquer the caverns or fight off goblins, as untrained dorfs have a strong tendency to die horribly to inferiorly-equipped goblins.

Putting the entire fort in the military is unwise for a laundry list of reasons, but is doable for short periods without (much) ill effect. Mobilizing 200 dorfs for an emergency will take time, though, and you can expect an absolute flood of discarded clothing if you are using uniforms that prevent mass foot loss (i.e. replaces clothing).

An excellent supplementary training method not discussed above is making heavy use of cage traps, disarming the captive goblins/cave beasts/etc. via dump orders (leaving them armored will spoil some of the goblinite, but provides more experience on average), and then executing them via firing/shanking/hammerin' squad. This can also be used to train siege operators if you like to use really big guns for the purposes of execution, but there are better ways to do that.

[Alocrin]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2903131375

Just made a guide that covers some of the basics. However there is more to it. For 22 dwarves you should be able to realistically spare 5-6 dwarves. For your military make sure you break them in half so half are training at once and the other half are resting. The only other dwarves you should use in a pinch are hunters and miners. Miners thrown into a military squad using their picks use their miner skill as a weapon proficiency and the picks themselves are not half bad weapons. As long as you armour them and use them defensively you can use them as a reserve.

Use real weapons for training. That way if you get attacked your dwarves are ready to rock at any time.

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

Originally posted by Alocrin:

snip

Ah, yes. Legendary miners in iron/steel armor is an excellent stopgap.