They still have the "cannot follow orders" thing, but they snap out of it much more often. This seems to get them to train much faster.
"Cannot follow orders" is because they want to be doing all the other training that melee soldiers do. They want to juggle individual weapon drills, archery practice, demonstrations (i.e. lectures) and sparring. They need a barracks to do the rest and an archery range to shoot. One-man squads don't get "cannot follow orders" as often because you can't do sparring or demonstrations without a partner. And as I said before, they don't know how to put down bolts in their quiver so they better have training-approved materials in there or you have some micromanagement to do.
So here's one suggested way to get marksdwarves:
- I find it easiest to simply have every bolt type marked for combat and trainnig. Dwarves don't know or spend aeons messing about with logistics if these are separate.
- Put all your haulers in crossbow squads (be specific about weapon specs: that it's a crossbow and what cheap material) with bone/wood bolts for training AND combat (emergency measures).
- Leave all these crossbow squads inactive. Your haulers do their job and in their spare time they'll take a few shots at the archery range.
- Optionally make them active to shoot something that can't pose significant threat back to speed up training.
- Incidentally, there is no friendly fire. Your shots will pass through your dwarves so feel free to have melee guards standing in front of crossbows. Not true of ballistas, but we're talking crossbows here.
- When one of your trainees gets high enough skill (determined by you), remove him from his squad and put him in an official marksdwarf squad (again, helps to be specific about weapon specs) with the good ammo. Do not assign an archery range for these guys for their "training" bolts are combat-grade bolts. Give them a barracks though so they can do the other training.
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Topic: Marksdwarves 101 (Read 1804 times)