User:Furlion

Started playing DF around July 2009. Amazing game, especially to be available for free.

Military tutorial

A brief tutorial for the new player. This is not intended to be comprehensive, just help you get a basic set of military instructions setup and running. Please feel free to ask some questions on my discussion page if you have any. I am going to make a few assumptions here. First, I am using the Mayday pack which might have a few keybinding changes. I don't think there are but keep it in mind. Second, you need Dwarf Therapist to play this game beyond 20 or 30 dwarfs. So if you do not have it, check the wiki for the link under utilities.

Preparing your dwarfs

1. Load up your fort and pause the game. Then load up Dwarf Therapist.
2. Check your dwarves military skills and pick a group of dwarfs to use as guinea pigs for this grand experiment.
3. I create a custom profession for my dwarfs called Military or Archer, depending on the obvious, with all of the labor skills cut off. Yes all of them. Technically this is not necessary but it helps get around some annoying glitches.
4. Apply this profession to whichever dwarfs you want to use for your military. This makes them easier to find when scrolling through the list for assigning dwarfs to a squad.

If you aren't playing on Windows fear not! I will keep you poor heathens in mind. Instead of doing this using Dwarf Therapist just do it using the in game menus. It takes longer but still gets the job done.

Creating a squad

1. Open up your nobles screen. Highlight militia commander and press enter. Scroll through your unit list and look from someone with some relevant skills (they should be at the top of the list). If no one has any skills I use hardest to pronounce name. If you followed my previous suggestion regarding a custom class use one your Military/Archer dwarfs.
2. Go to your military screen and press c to create a squad. It will ask you for a uniform, choose none. The reason is that armor can get really complicated and this is a beginner setup. I will have a more advanced armor setup later. The Militia Commander is the default captain of the squad. Any subsequent squads can be made by pressing l with the commander's squad highlighted.
3. To add members to your squads highlight the desired squad and press → to go to the Squad Position column. Then press ↓ to highlight a vacant position below the Militia commander. Then press → to move to the Candidate column.
4. Highlight a dwarf you have designated as Military/Archer (or whoever you want) and press Enter. Repeat this until your squad is full (I am only going to use 1 squad for this tutorial) or you have selected all of your previously selected Military/Archer dwarfs.
5. Press a to go to your alert screen. Go ↓ to highlight Active/Training. Press → to highlight your squad and press Enter. The letter A should appear beside your squad's name. The [CIV] tag on inactive means your civilians are set to that alert status.

Scheduling

1. Now press s to go the Schedule screen. Scroll to the top month and press x to cancel orders then o to give orders.
2. Press o to switch between orders until you see Train.
3. Now this part is very important so pay attention. If you look at the bottom of the screen you will see where it says 10 Soldiers Minimum. This means that if there are less then 10 members they won't follow the order. If there are more then the minimum (and the minimum is below 10) then any extra troops will rotatin in and out. Use the corresponding keybind to decrease the number to however many people you have in the squad. Its + and - for me.
4. Once you have setup the number of dwarfs to the exact number in your squad, press Shift and Enter to exit back to the Schedule screen.
5. Use c and p to copy those orders and paste them year round.

Create a barracks and designate for training

1. Create a Template:L by creating a bed,armor stand, or weapon rack at a Template:L and then building it in a 5X5 room. I chose 5X5 tiles arbitrarily but remember the larger the room, the more mechanisms and spears you need for a Template:L.
2. Set the task for it by hitting q from the main menu and highlighting the structure you built.
   1. If its a bed hit r to make it a bedroom and change the size to fill up the room it is in and hit Enter. Change it into a barracks by press b.
   2. If an Armor Stand or Weapon Rack just press r and adjust the size to fill the space of your choice and hit Enter
3. If you have multiple squads highlight the squad you are using for this tutorial and hit t. Beside the name of your squad a T should appear indicating they will train at that barracks. Multiple squads can be assigned the same barracks. You can press q to make your squad store their equipment in this location.

Archers

The above will not work for archers. Instead just replace the barracks with an archery target. There are some caveats though.

1. You need one target per member of your archery squad. I recommend a 4 tile wide space around your archery target although I have tested and the gap does not seem to affect skill increase.
2. You will need to supply ammo under the Military screen. As of right now don't bother setting only bone/wood bolts or arrows for training. Just make sure you have lots of metal on hand. If this is not possible, be aware that your dwarfs will only hold 1 type of ammo. So if they are training and then need to go kill something they must first run back and get ammo.
3. Archers will not work with a danger room to train archery ,instead they will train hammers, so there is no way to speed up the process that I am aware of.