Print

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

[Buel]

I have some dwarves who have skills in marksmenship, their are available quivers, and crossbows. They are in an archer squad, yet they only pick up their swords and stuff.

[sal880612m]

Do you have bolts?
Do you have an archery target for them to train on?
What are the orders do you have set for them? Do you have them set to the correct alert?

[ancistrus]

They can't wield both melee weapons and crossbows at the same time.

[greycat]

Press m e to check their uniform (equipment) assignments.  From here, you can either change individual squad-position equipment, or you can assign a whole uniform to a whole squad.  You will also see green checkmarks by the equipment that has been assigned -- but this does not necessarily mean the dwarf is actually wearing it.

Press m f to check ammo assignments.  A full squad of crossbow dwarves should have about 400-500 bolts assigned; the default is 250, or 25 per dwarf on average, but it's good to have more assigned due to the way they fill their quivers.  (A dwarf who fires 1 bolt now has a quiver containing a stack of 24.  24 is less than the capacity of the quiver, so the dwarf will pick up the next assigned stack of ammo and add it to the quiver.  A stack of bolts may be as large as 25, so this could mean the quiver now holds 24 + 25 bolts.  Thus, you can have up to 490 bolts in active use by a single squad.)

If you don't use hunters, you may also want to unassign bolts from the "hunters" pseudo-squad, available on the m f screen.  This frees up a bunch of bolts for use by regular military squads.

You can also see which stacks of bolts are assigned to a squad, and which are assigned to individual members of the squad (the latter have the green checkmarks).

[Buel]

They are very much active and have targets, oh okay. So pressing m will let me choose the default stuff, alrighty. Also wells, my dwarves let someone die due to lack of a well. We have one set up, its full of water, and we had a lot of idle dwarves too. They also have lots of bolts assigned to them, most of the dwarves do pick up the bolts to fill their quivers, and they are set on active too.

[sal880612m]

I have no idea as to the accuracy but I have heard that if dwarves are set to train the will use barracks as opposed to archery ranges so if you want them to train you need to have them have no scheduled orders.

[Buel]

I got it all figured out, thanks guys!

[Larix]

They are very much active and have targets, oh okay. So pressing m will let me choose the default stuff, alrighty.

Ancistrus is mostly right - giving them both a melee and missile weapon doesn't really work, they'll only properly use one of them in training and combat. Decide whether they're supposed to be ranged or melee and only give them the appropriate weapon, remove the other from the equipment assignment.

If they're archers and you want them to train actively, they'll need both a barracks and archery ranges, and they will spend some time mucking around in the barracks, training stuff like dodging and shield use.

Also wells, my dwarves let someone die due to lack of a well. We have one set up, its full of water, and we had a lot of idle dwarves too.

Was this an imprisoned dwarf? There's a notorious bug where "give food/water" jobs for prisoners fail to be generated, making a 40+ day prison term a death sentence if you don't offer other provisions. Easiest solution - don't nominate a captain of the guard and build no prison. "Justice" is not mandatory.

[Panando]

I've had the same thing with dwarves dying of thirst in hospital. Mass producing buckets and/or using 'drybuckets' seems to help sometimes. But sometimes... man... they seem to just decide to let the poor guy die. Last time it happened my water supply to the hospital sucked and the water ran out and was then refilled, perhaps at that point the job got 'stuck' and never got recreated. I normally try to have a proper reticulated water supply to the hospital but on scorching no river no aquifer maps it's harder.

[BoogieMan]

I've had some success with setting Crossbow squads training number requirement (when a full group of 10) to something like 5 or 6. Half the squad will train up in the barracks like the melee dwarves, while others will either mess around with civilian duties or go to the range and shoot. It has worked out pretty well, some times nearly all of them are at the range, others times only a few.. But it seems to be a decent way to keep up on their defensive skills while still working their ranged skill. It also has the added bonus of giving you time to keep a steady supply of bolts going.

[Panando]

If you have a bolt shortage it's better to not build archery ranges and just shoot wildlife, because you get I think it is 3x the experience per bolt. Either way marksdwarf trains pretty fast, but live target practise is much more bolt-efficient. If you only want to raise a few marksdwarves then archery ranges are decent, but especially if going for quantity over quality then the bolt economy of live target practise is hard to argue with.