They are about useless. It's driving me to irritation. 1. They don't work in teams. 2. They don't defend any one unless they are relatively close. 3. They don't keep their weapons on them 3a. They don't Sleep with their weapons? What good is a soldier without their weapon? They live and die by their rifle. I'd love to see a DI get a hold of some of these schmucks. 4. Further more, I had one soldier walk out, put their bundle down on the stockpile, which I had just disabled all "jobs" for the military in the hope they'd protect people. Then they put down their pistol, while surrounded by four fish scum. Then run off and promptly died. 5. You took away my rally point so I can't even send them to intercept a hoard of fish scum when I see them a mile away. 6. I have no town bell or warning system so when they attack at night and the population is asleep, my people get picked off one by one as they wake up with fish scum standing outside the door. Don't folks even scream any more while getting hacked apart? 7. I read your blog post about dropping loads to do take up arms and defend people, but I guess it's not implemented yet? 8. Did I mention they don't keep their weapons on them and put them in the stockpile? 9. No one carries a saber either. Not even the NCO. 10. No barracks, headquarters, or assembly area. These are the Queen's soldiers and they don't even have bureaucracy. 11. Any chance for a bugler to rally, assemble, or gather the troops together? I mean you even worn us of impending fish attack, even without scouts, and there's not a thing to do about it. Any way I needed to rant a bit. It's getting a little frustrating without even a modicum of professional soldering in the Queen's Engineers or only protecting her people when it's convenient.
Rally points aren't removed, they're now a button on the squad in the work crew panel. The other question I'd ask is whether you are on the stable or experimental branch? Military are a lot more effective with 32b (though retreating still needs some work) than 32.
Soldiers have always been a fickle topic. It is being worked on, that can be assured but every patch seems to negate progress made in making them "useful". Part of it is indeed the current primitive nature of military buildings (A single ammo production building), there can certainly be more sophistication as to where and how soldiers spend their time and where they base. Tactically, the empire apparently sits every recruit in-front of Call of Duty and leaves their training at that. Zero communication between troops, no formations, legendary AI goofs, and other various mean spirited jokes can be made about them. Starting with colonial weapons, you would assume line battles of some kind where the soldiers line by their NCO and fire in unison. Strangely, this ties in with the absence of roads. Currently every colony I build is crowded around a large storage yard with farms on one side. You would think soldiers would patrol around such a compound but do not. Having roads would let players make the choice of "civilizing" their city planning and would also give soldiers something to patrol that the player can see. An older game Populous The Beginning had Fires you could place that you could task units to patrol (AKA: Dance) around, a similar system that lets me loosely tell the AI what I feel is important to me or better yet, lets the AI itself figure out what is important to itself. I love the alarm bell comment in the OP post because it's both something true to the period and represents something in the game world the colonists attribute to absolute safety. Maybe the Church could have a bell tower module for this purpose, as could the Arsenal. (A Happy Hour bell for the Distillery that reminds all that hear it how thirsty they are would also be nice). And don't let us *directly* sound the bell ourselves, the people must do it.
