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.

Creating a military

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 relevant skills, pick one by whatever method you prefer (I prefer hardest to pronounce name).
2. Go to your military screen and press c to create a squad. It will ask you for a uniform, choose leather. It is a good starting point for a new squad. 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 → and then ↓ to highlight a vacant position. Press → again to go to your dwarf select column. Highlight a dwarf and press Enter. Repeat this until your squad is full (I am only going to use 1 squad for this tutorial).
4. 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.
5. We are done with the military screen for now so back out to the main screen.

Setting up stations and routes

1. From there open your Notes/Points/Routes menu.
2. Move the curser to a location of your choosing, somewhere out of harms way is preferred, and place a note. Give it a name, like say squad 1 station 1, or something equally creative, press Enter to finish naming it.
3. Now move away from that location by changing z-levels or just moving away a few tiles. Use the above commands to make 2 more notes, named point a and point b that are about 5 tiles or so apart.
4. Press r to switch over to the route menu. Press a to create a route and name it Route practice.
5. Move your cursor near point point a and edit your route. If your cursor is close enough to point a then it should blink and the name should be at the top of the route menu.
6. With your cursor on point a add a waypoint. Now move your cursor near point b and repeat. A colored line should pop up between the two point showing that they are connected. Congratulations you have connected point a to point b.

Create a barracks and designate for training

1. Create a barracks by creating a bed at a Carpenter's workshop and then building it in a 5X5 room (b,b to designate a bed).
2. Set the task for it by hitting q from the main menu. 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.
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. Now press q so that your squad will train in their uniforms.

Scheduling multiple activites within a single squad

1. Back out to the main menu and return to your military screen. Go to the schedule menu.
2. Highlight the squad you are interested in using ← and →. Scroll up or down till you have the current month highlighted. It should say Train if you set your alert up as I said above.
3. Press x to delete the current training order as we are going to be a bit more complicated.
4. Assign the squad a new order. Press o until you see Train. Hit → and highlight your top squad member and hit Enter. They should now be selected. Press ↓ to highlight the second member and press Enter again. Then hit Shift+Enter to save the change.
5. Assign another order. This time press o until Patrol route pops up. If you only have the one route made then it will automatically be selected. Otherwise scroll around until you find the desired route.
6. Hit → again and just like before highlight and hit Enter on the 3rd and 4th member of the squad. They will now be patrolling the designated route. Hit Shift+Enter again.
7. Give another order and scroll through until you see Station. This time station the 5th member of the squad at the lone point. Note that you can also station members at patrol route waypoints.
8. Well it seems we forgot to assign orders to the remaining 5 dwarves. Not a problem! Press Tab and the cursor will highlight your training orders at the bottom of the screen. Use e to edit each order assigning the remaining dwarves however you would like to each position.
9. This can be copied to each month by copy and pasting over each month. Set them to go for the first 6 months of the year.

Working with multiple squads

1. Try and create a second squad, and assign them the same rough pattern of training as the first. Copy and paste for the last 6 months of the year.
2. For the months that are still set to the default of Train, highlight each and press x. Now you can give your military some much needed R&R.
3. You can use the u key to change whether they stay in uniform or put their civilian clothes back on while inactive.