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[Lexyvil]

It's the first time that I handle a fort using the militia feature and so far I'm amazed at how much you can do with it: scheduling squads, defining routes, deciding what they wear, setting up different alarms for different situations~

But there's one aspect I'm still not sure of and that's training marksdwarves: I only made wooden crossbows and bolts so far and I'm planning on making better bolts eventually (I have bronze bolts on the side for now).

My question is can wooden bolts kill or are they only for training? And is there a way to let my dwarves change ammo from wooden bolts to bronze bolts when they change their schedules from training to actual combat?

[martinuzz]

What seems to work is:

Forbid all bolts that you want them to use for combat, and only unforbid those when enemies are on the map.
Now if you go to your (m)ilitary >> ammuni(f)ion screen, you can assign wooden bolts to be used both for training as well as combat, and metal bolts for combat only.
For some reason setting bone/wooden bolts to training only seems not to work very well.
Note that commands on (m)ilitary subscreens are case-sensitive, so for example, capital M for material setting.
You might want to also use bone bolts though, unless you like mass deforestation. Archery training works so darn well, my 2 marksdwarves can easily use up all bolts my 2 bonecrafters are making on repeat.

Now. If you have an archery range set for training, your marksdwarves will do a LOT of archery practice when set to "No scheduled order" as well as "Training". They'll burn through your training bolts like crazy. Whenever enemies arrive, unforbid the metal ammo. Your marksdwarves should grab some, cause most of the time, their quivers can hold more, cause of how fast they empty them when training, and they will prefer metal bolts over bone bolts.

Once they've grabbed some metal bolts (which can be very fast if you make sure the ammo stockpiles are near their training area) they're ready to send out.
They'll first use up any remaining training bolts in their quiver, I think, before reaching the metal bolt stack, but there shouldn't be many of those left. AFAIK training bolts can still damage enemies, unless df2014 changed that drastically.

When the enemies are gone, you might have trouble getting them to train again. Allowing metal bolts for training temporarily (after forbidding any that have not been quivered in the battle), so they'll use up the stack that they have quivered, should reset things back to training mode.

[greycat]

My question is can wooden bolts kill or are they only for training?

Wooden bolts were quite deadly in 0.34, but are probably much less deadly in 0.40, due to the overall reduction in power of ranged weapons.

[Lexyvil]

Thanks for the information, I now found out that I could indeed add two types of ammunitions to use per squad: The default wooden bolts for training and Bronze bolts for combat.

Knowing that it's a common issue, it makes me wonder if DF2014 made it easier for dwarves to grab the right ammunition depending on the situation though.

I'll try the item forbidding technique next time I get my squad to attack to see where that goes.

[Dasqoot]

My question is can wooden bolts kill or are they only for training?

Wooden bolts were quite deadly in 0.34, but are probably much less deadly in 0.40, due to the overall reduction in power of ranged weapons.

My skilled marksdwarves could only bruise skin with wooden bolts. This was mostly against zombies with multiple layers of cloth armor though.

When I was getting hit with goblin silver bolts they weren't very deadly, as you'd expect, but they packed a serious wallop, usually outright breaking limbs or tearing off feet or hands. After 30+ dead dwarves in that fort though, no one was ever shot and killed, dwarf, goblin, were-lizard or zombie.