Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Caskman]

Ok so I created a squad of marksdwarves, set their weapon to crossbows and I confirmed that they have them equipped.  I set their ammunition to be wooden bolts for training, and I built an archery range and used one of the targets to create the room.  I set the direction, set that marksdwarves squad to train there...and they're not training there.  For each of them, it says they can't follow these orders.  Anybody got a solution???

Thanks guys

[MythagoWoods]

1. Make sure they have Quivers
2. Pray to Armok that they decide to train
3. Tell them to kill wildlife.  With wood/bone bows they make wildlife suffer horribly while they fill them with bolts.  Repeat until they kill wildlife in a reasonable amount of time.

[Hyndis]

Don't bother with training. Just build an equal number of crossbows and quivers. They cannot carry ammo without a quiver.

Make your marksdwarf barracks in a location with a good vantage point, so any invaders will need to go right by them, allowing the marksdwarves to freely fire at any invaders.

Set them to active/training all the time.

They will very quickly skill up with live fire training, and in large numbers even rookie marksdwarves can quickly take down a siege or megabeasts with ease. 50 marksdwarves will give a massive weight of fire even if they are unskilled. Your marksdwarves will then close in to melee to finish off any survivors, but by the time they run out of ammo the attackers should be either dead or incapacitated.

[Caskman]

Sweet thanks guys can't wait till this gets patched

[thegoatgod_pan]

Actually the simplest trick to getting them to train is to assign one or two archery ranges (must be at least 5+ tiles long), make sure the direction is correct and then assign your squad to train.

Then comes the important part

Take them OFF duty. Meaning "Inactive" vs "Active/training"

This will actually make them train without fail.

You will quickly see dwarves training in their spare time, between jobs.  I think the reason is not a bug, but that "active/training" refers to the same  "Organize biting exercize" type stuff melee guys use.  Archers can't do that kind of training at a range, and thus they will either ignore the order, or meet at a weapon rack to practice crossbow bashing.  Which is useful for a leet squad already good at shooting, but not what you are looking for.

Assign the archers to range, set them to inactive and you'd better be making bolts, cause they will use all of them

[Psieye]

The alternative is to put them in 1-man squads. Some of the time they'll have "soldier cannot follow order" (because they're thinking of doing demonstrations) but leave them alone and they'll shoot the target sometimes.

[devek]

I have a lot of well trained archers at my fort and can share my experience.

The reason they can't follow orders, is because they are trying to train skills besides archery and have no barracks to train them at. If they are off duty and have nothing else to do they will only practice archery. Keeping them off duty is a bad idea because other combat skills matter too, armor skill for example is very important if you want them to be able to catch up with goblin thieves.

You're also going to enjoy equipment mismatch messages if you use a lot of archers no matter what. What happens is that a dwarf will be going to grab standard quality bolts, but before he gets them you may end up producing a high quality stack of bolts which will cause him to change his mind about the bolts he wants (equipment mismatch). The common knowledge that you need to allocate 1000 arrows is wrong. You just need 25 arrows or so allocated per dwarf in the squad. You actually get less equipment mismatch messages when you allocate less arrows. If you go into the ammunition screen and view assigned arrows for your squad it will be more obvious what is going on.

[Syrup Roast]

Leave the archers and their targets alone and they'll eventually train every now and then.

But the best bet on getting them to shoot quiver after quiver of bolts until your crafters can't keep up is a live target, preferably one that doesn't die from crossbow fire. Bronze Colossi, FBs made of ice or rock or metal, etc.

[Tjolme]

I've found if you make one large room with lots of targets then most of the dwarves won't use it. However, making all the targets into their own little room and setting the squad to use all the rooms gets a lot more of them shooting at the targets.

You also need an unobstructed path to the target. So no firing over trenches, through fortications etc.