Effective military scheduling

Question

Recently my militia commander has got a bug up his rear. Looking at his thoughts, I see that he is both upset at being relieved from duty and also depressed from long patrol duty.

I currently have him and two other dorfs in a squad. This squad is set to train year round. Should I intersperse the training schedule with breaks (by breaks I mean no orders)? Would this prevent him from feeling like he had a long patrol duty? Or does that count as being relieved from duty?

Also, my training orders have a minimum of 10, so that all dwarves are training together, instead of 1. Should I have a minimum of 1 and hope that they train together to allow for breaks?

Answer 1

The thing about "upset at being relieved from duty" and "depressed from long patrol duty" at the same time is a known bug. The problem is that going on break doesn't actually reset or decrease the counter of how long the dwarf has been on duty, so when he goes back on duty, he thinks he's been working for an ever-increasing amount of time.

Having orders with fewer than 10 minimum should fix this, but it has its own problems. As you note, it does count as being "relieved from duty", which is a problem if your military dwarfs have no civilian skills. Additionally, it runs afoul of another known bug having to do with training rotations, which causes all the dwarfs in the entire squad to be momentarily "relieved from duty" every month so that new dwarfs get a chance to participate in the training order.

The training order is pretty unreliable to begin with. Dwarfs have extremely busy lives, and often it is just too difficult for them to actually schedule a group training session. Supposedly this will be fixed sometime soon.

The only workaround I know of is to quickly train your military dwarfs up to the Elite level (with a danger room), which causes them no longer to complain about long patrol duty; then just keep them employed all of the time.