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[peridot]

This is only my second fortress - first abandoned after I realized I had no water, no iron ore, and so many trees I couldn't keep caravan routes clear. So please be gentle.

I have a reasonably secure fortress, with a drawbridge to block the caravan entrance and route all comers through a zigzagging hall of traps (weapon traps on a raised path, so once they dodge off the path, they're stuck); the walls are fortifications with firing positions behind them. I have walls around my entrance with second-level fortifications overlooking the moat, all roofed over. So really I think I should be able to hold off a siege. And indeed, the goblins get minced pretty effectively (which is good because I still don't have iron ore). My problem is with the marksdwarves.

I have three squads, in metal armor and with crossbows firing mostly copper bolts. They have an archery range where they occasionally practice. I even have a pit where captured goblins and trolls get to be target practice. So a few of the dwarves even have a little skill with their crossbows. But the marksdwarves are useless.

For example: goblin siege! Initial invaders come into the hall of traps and are chopped to bloody gobbets. A few run around on the lower level, so I try to order my marksdwarves to stand behind the fortifications and kill them (using "station"). Half the marksdwarves don't show up at all. A quarter go rushing into the hall of traps. One or two stand behind the fortifications, rarely firing. Eventually the goblins are cleaned up, mostly by traps. Back at the main entrance, there's a large force of goblins standing quietly in front of the open door, perhaps mourning a leader that dodged into the moat and drowned. So I close the door and order my marksdwarves up to the battlements. Where they stand gormlessly, staring out at the goblin horde, crossbows dangling uselessly from their fingers. It seems none of them thought to bring any bolts. I rotate squads on and off duty for a bit, hoping sooner or later one of them will think to bring some of the thousands of bolts from my stockpile. No dice. Eventually I send them back inside and entice some more goblins in by raising and lowering my drawbridge a few times. The last few goblins I have to mop up by just letting my army run out and bash away at them.

Even when I pit a goblin and tell the marksdwarves to kill it, they're hopeless. Using the kill command doesn't even get them to the right part of the fortress, since they can't path to the pitted goblin (I assume that's why). Using the station command on a spot carefully chosen so that the only nearby places they can stand all have clear shots gets a few of them near the goblin, eventually. Most of them just stand there doing nothing, though. Eventually one will come along who has a bolt, and they will shoot the goblin.

What am I doing wrong? Is there a way to make marksdwarves carry bolts, and replenish them when they get low? In the military screen each squad is set to carry 250, and the stocks screen shows several thousand bolts, all unforbidden. I have them training with the same bolts they fight with. There are no restrictions on what the bolts can be made of; all the wooden and bone bolts (*those* were a waste of time) are forbidden and/or dumped.

[Iamblichos]

This is a good question... along with another favorite, why (with over 1000 bolts in inventory) do you still get the occasional notice "Hunter cancels hunt: no ammunition"

/facepalm

[EvilBob22]

The best way to avoid having them charge into the traps is to make sure the way there is blocked.  They are trying to group near the "station" location, and don't notice or care that it is on the other side of a fortification in the "kill zone".

Do you have enough quivers for all of them?  They won't carry bolts to battle without quivers, and that isn't exactly obvious at first.

One other thing: the way to keep the caravan route clear on a tree heavy map is with roads (but not dirt roads).  Although on your first fort, the lack of water is probably a much worse situation.

[Blue_Dwarf]

What am I doing wrong? Is there a way to make marksdwarves carry bolts, and replenish them when they get low?

A good way to make them equip anything from armor to bolts is to make the squad active/inactive several times, assuming you have set up everything correctly.

I won't go into how to set up stuff correctly, because it's a freaking nightmare to describe it.

[Button]

OK, marksdwarves are a little tricky.

Stationing Marksdwarves

If you give a marksdwarf squad a 'station' order, valid locations for them to path to are any square within 3-5 squares of the station order, on the same z level. Therefore, I recommend you build your fortifications a z level up from wherever you're likely to be firing at. Also make sure that you don't station a squad within 5 squares of an outside tile on that Z level, because that will tell the squad that those outside squares are valid station squares, and they'll run into the trap hallway.

Alternatively, you can ensure that your military dwarves stand in the correct place by making the valid squares a burrow, and tie that burrow to an order & alert. Then when you want a squad to go to that burrow, you activate that alert for that squad. Be careful that you have a good sense of how orders and alerts work first though, or your marksdwarves may run away because they think they're still civilians.

Quick response/not running outside in the middle of the fight

Sometimes dwarves are lazy and won't equip their equipment until they need it. After you make equipment changes to your squads, give them a station order during peacetime to get them to go grab what they need, so it's on them when they need it.

Bringing ammo

First, make sure that your dwarves all have quivers equipped, or at least that there are enough quivers for them all to equip one.

Second, make stacks of ammo available. Dwarves prefer stacks of ammo, they're a lot faster to pick up, and single ammo pieces get buggy. Also note, forbidden ammo is sometimes claimed, and will take up assigned-ammo space without being usable in combat. Try to avoid forbidding ammo - if you need to dispose of it, melt it, sell it or destroy it.

Third, never mix bowdwarves in a squad with marksdwarves. If you must have bowdwarves, create a separate squad for them. If you have mixed-ammo squads, they'll pick up each other's ammo and be unable to do friggin anything because they have the wrong type of ammo.

If ammo claiming has bugged out, try removing all ammo from all squads, waiting a few ticks, and then assigning it back again. It'll take them a little while to reclaim it, but they'll get around to it.

Fourth, if you have no hunters, make sure you don't have ammo assigned to them.

[peridot]

Bringing ammo
Second, make stacks of ammo available. Dwarves prefer stacks of ammo, they're a lot faster to pick up, and single ammo pieces get buggy. Also note, forbidden ammo is sometimes claimed, and will take up assigned-ammo space without being usable in combat. Try to avoid forbidding ammo - if you need to dispose of it, melt it, sell it or destroy it.

All interesting advice, but this one in particular got my attention. I was using bone bolts for a while, because I have a meat industry and a legendary bone carver, but it became clear that they're not very effective. Mostly I just let the fired ones stay forbidden, which should have kept forbidden bolts out of quivers, but at some point I did a mass forbidding. Will dumping them get them out of the quivers of my marksdwarves? I guess I can use my usual merchant-as-junk-disposal strategy. It's amazing how ecstatic they get when given a mountain of worn-out socks and bloodstained troll-sized clothing in exchange for useful items.

[KingBacon]

Use 1 tile thicks behind your fortifications, use the scheduling command to set a few xbow dorfs on guard duty.

I usually put burrows behind all of my fortifications, and when I want dorfs to got there, I change their designated burrow in the scheduler. That and I conscript every dorf into my army...

[peridot]

Second, make stacks of ammo available. Dwarves prefer stacks of ammo, they're a lot faster to pick up, and single ammo pieces get buggy. Also note, forbidden ammo is sometimes claimed, and will take up assigned-ammo space without being usable in combat. Try to avoid forbidding ammo - if you need to dispose of it, melt it, sell it or destroy it.

Is there a way to re-stack fired bolts? I have bins full of individual bolts. I can't even melt them down from inside bins. At least the ones fired on the practice range I can mass-melt (I have a channel behind the targets to catch bolts that miss), exploitily increasing my metal supplies.

[EvilBob22]

I'm pretty sure you can set the tile with the bin to mass-melt and the bolts inside will be marked (then you can un-mark the bin if it is metal).  Either that, or you can (v)iew the bin, and hit enter with a bolt highlighted.  That will view the individual bolt which you can (m)elt.  Also, try going to the z screen and look at the stocks for bolts.  Highlight "126 steel bolts" and hit tab, you'll get an expanded list that you can melt-designate the individuals.

After hitting tab, the list will look something like:

-steel bolt-
-steel bolt-
(steel bolt)
+steel bolt [25]+
-steel bolt-
(steel bolt)
...

[Iamblichos]

Where do you equip quivers?  Don't see the option anywhere...

[Urist McVoyager]

Quivers are auto-equipped like backpacks and waterskins. The idea's just to make sure the supplies they carry are available, and they'll load up on their own.

[Moogie]

Isn't there a building mod somewhere that re-stacks single bolts? I thought there was something like that, but I could be mistaken.

[Robsoie]

I discovered recently what was apparently a known bug (that i didn't knew about) regarding ammunition and bins, if in your ammo stockpiles you have all your bolts into bins, after a couple of ingame years, your marksdwarves will simply cease to go refill their quiver with them :
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=133302.0
And apparently there's even more problems with bins, so despite they're very usefull at keeping your stockpiles clean, it looks like they're really buggy in the current version and you should simply never make any and forbid your stockpiles to accept bins.
Side effect is that then you will need either much larger stockpiles or much more of them.

So be sure to setup your ammo stockpile to accept no bins ! and keep all the ammo on the stockpile ground.
As soon as i had the bolts on the ground, suddenly all my marksdwarves went to refill their quiver.