v0.31 Talk:Squad

Doing Stuff

Since the major edits are now in, and the redirect is closed, I think it's probably safe to go ahead and clean this discussion page back up. I'll wait for now however. Doctorzuber 03:40, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

(agreed, and cleaned up as per suggested) --Retro 05:53, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm shifting my attention back towards the various pages on fluid mechanics (water, flow, rivers, brooks, etc...). I've looked through the Template:L and Template:L pages and pulled them forward into 2010 with minor editing.

Meanwhile I am always keeping a close eye on the bug tracker for current news. If any new bugs are discovered that are relevant here, or if anything gets patched, I'll be sure to drop by over here and do updates. As for the rest of the content here, I'll let someone else worry about that for a while. Doctorzuber 20:04, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Priority Assignments and Supplies

We still have nothing on Pri/Assignments (m-e-P) and Supplies (m-u). Dunno much about them myself yet, just saying. --Retro 06:39, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, but I'm afraid they are still quite impenetrable to me. Pretty hard to write about it when we don't understand it ourselves yet. Doctorzuber 15:28, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, ditto. I'll investigate later I guess. I suspect Priority Assignments allows you to re-prioritize what your dwarves are doing judging by its name, but can't tell how it works yet. The latter just seems to be for food/flask/water orders and the like but still going to put aside some time later to look into it --Retro 18:07, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

As far as I can tell Supplies is just to set up how much food and what drinks your military dwarves carry, meaning, (0/1/2/3) rations of food and (alcoholic/non-alcoholic/no) drinks. I assume it works much like the food or water for military squads used to in 40d, except that you can tell your dwarves to carry drinks in their waterskins instead of just water, so it's nothing fancy --Ramperkash

Another Buggy behavior

I'm dumping this here for now because it's debatable, and it's a bit of a mess. Here's the issue. soldiers still get unhappy thoughts from leaving their duties if they have no civilian skills. At just hearing that, it doesn't sound like a bug, it's how it was in 40d, expected behavior right? Here's what it really means in the present environment.

The thoughts in question are "upset about being relieved from duty" and "complained about the draft" and likely minor variations of the same two thoughts depending on how recent the thought was. These would apply to civilians who have no military skills, or to soldiers that have no civilian skills. The times these thoughts are believed to occur are.

at the end of every month in the militia^[Verify]

every time they eat or drink^[Verify]

when joining/leaving the militia^[Verify]

after a squad cancel command^[Verify]

If this is accurate, it basically means drafting an unskilled peasant into a squad is a very fast recipe for insanity. I saw this in the bug tracker, I haven't personally verified this yet nor have I seen what the official word is on the subject yet. I just thought I would go ahead and list it here. Do with this information what you will. Doctorzuber 15:36, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Ooh, that sounds like a big one. I don't have time until tonight to add it but I'll make note of it within the article as a word of warning when I can. --Retro 17:37, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I just tried to verify this one myself with a brand new batch of 7 peasants, and then again with one axedwarf and 6 peasants. In hopes of a bit of fun I also brought along one good axe for each test which I assigned to my test subject. In both case I issued a brutal series of move, kill, and cancel commands to the dwarf in an attempt to drive him into a mad killing frenzy.

I was unsuccessful. Despite my best efforts to be the most irritating squad commander in the history of dwarf-kind I could not seem to induce even so much as one unhappy thought with active squad commands of any kind. Admittedly, I made no effort to test for the other passive behaviors. That little test will be a lot more tedious so I think I'll leave that one alone and see if more people jump on the report or not. Doctorzuber 18:46, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Several more updates on the ticket, and a breakthrough. On careful inspection of the thoughts page I find the thought "Complained about the draft lately." This bears more investigation. Doctorzuber 20:14, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Wasn't that specific unhappy thought in 40d as well? Or do you think it might've changed since then to include these thoughts, being bugs or not? --Ramperkash

Yes, as I have already said at first glance these appear to be the expected behaviors consistent with 40d. However with the new military system, they occur much more frequently than you might expect which can potentially be quite dangerous. I've just updated the details above to reflect my better understanding of this issue as the reports come in on the bug tracker. I'm watching the bug tracker on the issue and attempting to verify this through experimentation as well. Doctorzuber 21:14, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Done some testing on this, at first I couldn't seem to reproduce it, but now I have found something. apparently a key element of this behavior is that you must have your orders set to have less than all dwarves on duty at a given time. With this setup they will periodically go off-duty and other dwarves will take their place. it is at this off-duty change that bad thoughts occur. With a rotation schedule like this you will also see a message in the announcements every time a dwarf switches duties. The workaround to avoid this bad thought problem would be to cross train all your military to have at least one level in a civilian skill which is probably not a bad plan in any event. Doctorzuber 03:10, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand this issue quite as well as I like yet but I have confirmed enough to feel comfortable adding a short warning about the matter, which I have already place up in the military page. Doctorzuber 04:13, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Equipment

Gave Equipment its own page, to be used for info on equipping soldiers, making/applying uniform templates, and will also serve as a good spot to store related summaries on weapons/armour much like this 40d page. Nothing there yet but we can move the stuff here into there and replace the current stuff with a summary, then expand within that page from there.

On a side note, I'm working on a Category thing for Military v0.31 that we can apply instead of this See Also nonsense every time. I'll go add it when I'm done; getting there. --Retro 22:02, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Squad or Squads?

It occurs to me that this maybe should be the squad page instead of the squads page. I notice that the backwards link to 40d is non-functional as things are right now although that may be because there was no need for a squad page before. Anyhow, if this needs to be changed, I'm sure someone will take care of it sooner or later. Doctorzuber 04:35, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Just checked; 40d's Squad redirected to the military. So it's a new page and we can basically do what we want with it. Personally I feel the plural is more appropriate as I say things like "rally your squads," "open the squads menu," "do this when scheduling your squads" more often than I use the singular. --Retro 04:38, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

well, it's not a big deal, I'm just wondering if there's a consistency issue. Most pages are in the single form, not the plural form. But I guess it's a question for the admins to decide on, I won't worry about it. Doctorzuber 14:56, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

How to Activate a Squad

Love the changes. I think. I am unable to use them, however, likely because I am dense and not due to any bug. This article seems to go over everything except how to actually activate your squads in order to give them direct (active) commands. I have created a squad because a cougar is approaching my undefended fort. (just a bunch of civies with picks and axes). However, all of the active commands (move, attack, active, etc) are all grey'd out and unusable. I can't see anything in this article on how to actually activate a squad. Am I missing something or is something missing from the article? --Frewfrux 19:46, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I suppose I should've emphasized - you need to select a squad before you can use it, even if there's only one. In the squads screen you can do this with a / b / c (it'll list which squad = which key) or hold shift to select multiple at once. Should fix your problem; lemme know if it doesn't. --Retro 20:01, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Read the section on selecting a squad, it's there. There's just a ton of information to swallow so it's a bit overwhelming still. Doctorzuber 23:48, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

AH HA!!! That did the trick. (Thank you thank you thank you) One mutilated cougar. That was a little too easy. I was assuming that because the squad was showing up on the screen that it was activated. This does not appear to be the case. As a side note, shouldn't a cougar run faster then a group of untrained dwarves? Just a thought. --Frewfrux 11:39, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

the current speed system is a placeholder. I opened a ticket about it but they closed it for now. I had an alligator that led my dwarves on a merry chase all around the map for days. Doctorzuber 13:55, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Naming Squads?

The change list says you can name squads, but I can't find the option, how do I do it? 24.255.86.193

I don't believe you can - the squad leader seems to still use the RNG to name themselves. You can name alerts, scheduling, and uniforms though. --Retro