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[ColonelTEE3]

Right now there are 7 goblins waiting outside my fort, the remainder of a nearly defeated army. My dwarves have decided 90% of a siege force defeated is good and have chosen to ignore me.

-When not ordered to do anything, they practice archery with wooden bolts -- whenever i see one do this, i stop him, and order him to stand by the fortification to practice his archery on goblins
-They've successfully taken potshots at the goblins with wooden bolts from my fortifications.
-When wooden bolts are forbidden, they do not take any bolts, they stop practicing archery
-Hunters have no ammo assigned at all.
-I've played with changing the ammo assigned to my squad from 10 to 110
-I've tried unassigning and reassigning new crossbows to force them to pick up new equipment; they all have quivers but never get ammo.
-Multiple ammo stockpiles are accessible to them that contain both wooden and metal bolts; apparently they rifle through the metal bolts until they find wooden ones

Unless they decide, on their own whim, to practice archery, they will not pick up any bolts, and certainly not metal bolts. In terms of defeating any serious threat, the goblins have, technically, captured my fortress of 150 with their remaining 7...

Ideas?

[PatrikLundell]

Marksdwarves have a lot of issues. One of them is that assignment of war bolts and training bolts at the same time doesn't work, at least not in practice. Your only chance is to change the bolt assignment to a single type of bolts at a time, which potentially mean you'll have to accept that they use metal bolts for training as well.
Setting the ammo amount to more than 25*#marksdwarves usually has no effect, since they only rarely pick up more than one stack of bolts, and wooden stacks are 25 while bone ones are a paltry 15 (I think metal gives 25).

[Loci]

Problems have been reported with bolts stored in bins--marksdwarves sometimes fail to collect them. Try dumping them out of bins and see if your dwarves suddenly decide to collect them.

Also, I've had luck in stationing dwarves out of sight of the enemy; they seem more likely to collect new bolts if they don't have to choose between that and glaring menacingly at an invader. My crossbow emplacements have a small dead-end room on the other end; stationed dwarves will trundle along the fortifications, fire all the bolts they are carrying, continue on to the dead-end room once their quiver is empty, and then decide to go grab replacement bolts.

[GhostDwemer]

Seconding the "Markswarfs in sight of enemy won't reload" and "Training bolts are borked" explanations. Try not using training bolts, and setting up ammo stockpiles out of line-of-sight of the enemy, but near the barracks or archery targets.