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[Micro102]

So I've looked around and found that for some reason dwarves will temporarily train archery if you keep toggling their activity. I have 4 archery targets set up all individually but when I toggle the activity, a single random dwarf goes down to the targets and trains. Does anyone have any idea on how to make more dwarves train?

[Panando]

I can't answer your question because I always find the much more effective thing is to shoot wildlife, IIRC you get 3x the experience per bolt when shooting at live targets, and who can resist 3x experience per bolt?

The only thing to note is that sometimes the ammunition settings need tweaking. The default bolt allocation is 250 bolts per squad, that is enough for a squad of 6 or 7, but a squad of 10 requires at least 400 bolts, or the last dwarves wont get any bolts (also make sure you HAVE enough bolts). There is also the thing with training vs combat ammo... this is no issue when shooting wildlife, but when it comes to training if the dwarf has a quiver full of combat ammo, they can't fit any training ammo, so wont train. There is a DFhack fix for this, or you can make all ammo available for training.

If you want to do the cool thing and shoot wildlife, then rectangle select is helpful, you just target the entire group/pack/flock/etc of beasts in one go, and your marksdwarves will hunt down every last one with no further orders. Once you kill off one group of animals, another group will immediately spawn, so it's pretty effective. The only thing which can go wrong with this is that you can extinct all species in a biome and then no animals at all come. Normally that's not a problem though, and it's completely prevented if you let even a single survivor leave the map from each cull.

[UristMcUrist]

Assuming that you have everything else set up correctly, check out this thread. It very literally brought my marksdwarves from zero to hero.
http://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/241knp/marksdwarf_training_science/

EDIT: Basically make sure they also have a barracks assigned, set them to active training, and set each archery target to be its own range.