This article is far from adequate for teaching you to run your military, but hopefully it will get you started. Note that the military configuration interface is a bit tricky, so pay close attention to some of the details mentioned.

Finding Recruits

Legendary Fish Cleaner of Death

Using job titles can help you spot expendable dwarves. For example, if a dwarf is a "Fish Cleaner" then his most expert skill will be fish cleaning and he probably won't be very good at anything but that. Since super-efficient fish cleaning isn't likely to be that useful, even if you do have a fisherdwarf, your legendary fish cleaner would be an excellent candidate for the draft. If he manages to survive and gain some combat skill, he'll be able to clean fish and kick ass at the same time. If he dies, at least it won't impact civilian operations.

Look over all your dwarves. You are looking for any dwarves with Template:Ls, or at the very least, without useful civilian skills. These dwarves will be your first Template:L.

Creating a Squad

Open up your military screen. Press c to create a squad and choose "Metal Armor" as the uniform. A "uniform" is essentially a predefined specification for a set of equipment which you can change or reassign later.

Enjoy a hearty laugh at the delightful name your dwarves come up with for their squad. All tremble before the might of the fearsome Geared Warthogs! No, you can't change the name. (You can disband the squad and create it again, but it will just end up with another random name.)

Press →→ to move the menu selection over to the Candidates column and select the dwarf with the best fighting skills (or the best leadership ability) then hit Enter. Notice that as you scroll through dwarves that a few bits of relevant information about the currently selected dwarf will be shown in the upper-left part of the screen.

This first dwarf will be your militia captain. Once you select a dwarf for the first position, the highlight will automatically move to the second position. You can then use ↑ and ↓ to select the dwarf for this next position with Enter, and so on.

Pick four more dwarves for positions two through five. Try not to pick Template:L; they will shamelessly carry their babies right into battle. Any married female dwarf will produce babies nonstop, so don't pick them either, even if they don't currently have children.

Melee Training

Make sure you have a melee weapon for everyone in your squad. If you made five axes (or more) earlier then you are all set. Ideally you should have at least a shield and helmet for everyone too.

Barracks

Queue up an Template:L or a Template:L of any material you want, stone being cheapest.

Pick a location for your training grounds. It should definitely be placed in a defended area, and ideally it should be near the entrance. Training areas can be easily moved though so feel free to just dig out an area somewhere for now and you can move it to a better location later.

Build your weapon rack or armor stand where you want your dwarves to train. Use q to define your training area as a Template:L. Your squad should now be listed in the menu. Hit t to tell them to train there. You must do this or they will not use the training area.

Schedule

See also: Template:L

This is one of the most confusing and difficult to understand parts of the game's user interface, so pay close attention to the following instructions.

Hit m then s to get to the Squad Schedules screen. Notice that at the top it says "Squad Schedules: Active/Training". This means that you are editing the schedule for squads that are set to the "Active/Training" alert level (as opposed to the "Inactive" alert level). More about alert levels will be described below.

The newb-unfriendly Squad Schedules screen.

The upper part of the schedule screen is a table with names of the months of the dwarven Template:L along the first column and the names of squads across the top row. (You only have one squad right now so you should only see one listed.)

Each table cell under each squad name shows a term that briefly describes what the squad is scheduled to do during that month. By default it should say "Train", however the detailed description of what is scheduled for the selected table cell is shown just below the table on the left. It should say, by default, Train, 10 minimum.

At this point you only have five squad members, but the default order is to train ten at a minimum. This will cause problems, so it must be changed. Do the following:

Highlight the "Train" cell under the month of Granite
Hit e to edit it.
At the lower left of the screen you will see "10 soldiers minimum". Press - until it says "4 soldiers minimum".
Hit Shift+Enter to save your changes.

Under the table on the left you should now see "Train, 4 minimum", but currently this only applies to the month of Granite. (If you move the highlighted cell to another month you will see that it goes back to 10.) Luckily there is a copy and paste feature that will allow you to copy the orders you just set up for Granite to other months. Highlight the "Train" cell under Granite, hit c, move to the next cell down with ↓, and hit p to paste the orders for Granite into the next cell. Hit ↓ and p until you have pasted the order into every cell. You should see the order detail under the table change to "4 minimum" when you hit p. Go back through all the months and make sure they are all set to "4 minimum".

The reason for setting this to 4 is that you want to let soldiers go off duty to do various personal things and, with 5 squad members, setting this to 4 means one can be off duty at any given time. This helps to keep dwarves from complaining about "long patrol duty" and otherwise keeps them happier than they would be if they were always on duty. If you need to allow more dwarves to be off duty at any given time you can lower the minimum further, but 4 should be reasonable.

Exit the military screen by hitting Esc twice.

Alert Level

Now that you are back to the main map, hit s to open up the squad menu. Press a to select your squad from the list. Notice that toward the bottom of the window it will say t: Sched - Inactive. This is the squad's alert level which indicates which schedule they will follow.

The default schedule for "Inactive" basically says "do nothing". To tell them to use the "Active/Training" schedule you just configured, press t and this should change to t: Sched - Active/Training. (You can also change the alert level on the military screen with m-a.)

If you've done everything right, you should see some messages like "Urist McGoblinFodder has become a Recruit" and the named dwarves should report to the training grounds you have set up.

Keep an eye on them using the units screen. Their tasks will initially be something like "Waiting for (something) demonstration" or "Organize (something) demonstration" but they should eventually start the session after a while. The graphics won't look any different, but the units screen will change to show "Watching (something) demonstration" etc.

The usual cause of not progressing beyond the "waiting for" stage is having orders to train more dwarves than there are in your squad. They will wait forever for that tenth dwarf to show up. If dwarves are not training, go back to the section on scheduling and make sure that everything is set up properly.

Marksdwarf Training

Each marksdwarf requires a Template:L, Template:Ls, and a Template:L.

Targets

For marksdwarves to train you will need to build one or more Template:Ls using b-A, define them as archery range rooms with q, and assign squads to train at them. Make sure to properly set the shooting direction with wasd or the target may not work. Also note that you don't have to build an archery target at a workshop first; you only need a piece of stone.

Equipment

Crossbows can be made of wood at a Template:L by a dwarf with the crossbow making labor enabled, or at a metalsmith's forge by a dwarf with weaponsmithing enabled. While the material used for a crossbow doesn't matter for shooting purposes, it does matter when dwarves use crossbows to bash enemies in melee combat. So, making crossbows of iron can give archers a little more of an advantage in melee combat should they be unfortunate enough to get into that situation.

Bolts are made at a Template:L, so make sure you've built one of those and then have your manager queue up some bolts. Wooden ammunition will do just fine for training purposes, but if you happen to have butchered any animals at this point you can also make bone bolts.

Quivers are made of leather by a dwarf with leatherworking at a Template:L. Quivers are required, not optional. You may not be able to get enough leather to make quivers until the first trade caravan arrives.

Configuration

Once you have all of the needed equipment for an archer, the easiest way to set up an archer in the military is to create another archers-only squad, giving them the archer's uniform. Then, assign one or more dwarves to the squad and set up their training schedule as you did for the first squad above. Just make sure to set their squad to train at archery targets and not the weapon or armor rack you built.

If you have done everything right here, eventually you will see piles of broken bolts at the base of your archery targets, a sure sign your marksdwarves are actually practicing.

v0.31:Military quickstart

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