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[GannonDork]

Hello I am Very new to dwarf fortress.
I set up a few archery targets and made them into rooms long enough for the dwarves to shoot from.
I set up the shooting direction correctly (from bottom to top)
Then on the "Q" menu I designated each of my squads to "train" at each archery range.

(I am hope this is the right forum to ask this in)

[Numeroid]

I find that you have to activate the squad through the archery range menu but leave them off duty in the Squad menu. They train for me like that.

[mobucks]

Do they have bows, quivers, and ammo?
Is ammo assigned to the squad within the military UI? Is it designated to be used for training?
Can they reach the ammo?

Other than that, I find dwarves will more often practice if they have no scheduled orders. If set to active/training, they will spar and train other skills at their barracks.

[Findulidas]

For starters always look at the wiki, if it still doesnt work its good to ask. To be completely honest most people seem to know less than the wiki anyway.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Archery

[Urist Tilaturist]

I have had terrible problems with this. It is a known bug which has not been fixed for months. Doing weird configurations with squad activity can help, but I mostly gave up training marksdwarves except by live training on captured foes.

[Goblins]

From what I have learned (which I am a new player too) is that you need to assign ammunition to your squads in the military menu. 

[Bitharne]

I recently returned to lovely land of DF myself. I made it my goal this time around to learn military in-and-out and make sure I always had good dwarf-power defense as I don't find it very fun to focus on traps for heavy defense.

I feel like archery just has too many moving parts that can get hung up on...yet when you keep those moving parts in mind and cover your bases everything seems to work out well.

For instance, I did a few forts with heavy focus on my melee guys. Then dropped in marksdwarves later on down the line...for whatever reason or another they sorta trained, sometimes. One fort I had had tons of copper so wanted to keep my smiths busy and cranked out tons of copper bolts. I forgot to set the ammo before this. So when they trained they were using my valuable copper ammo and not their crap wood ammo. I couldn't get them to train properly after that unless I gave them free reign on the metal bolts as they wouldn't drop them to pick up wood bolts.

Of course, after fiddling with it for a while I had some dwarves with copper and wood bolts in their quiver that would train sporadically. Not sure what changed exactly.

All that said. On my most recent fort (It's basically heaven: infinity wood, so don't gotta dick with magma, the first two layers are soil for crops and easy stockpiles, the next 5 are pure marble/limestone/obsidian/magnetite, and bellow that is more marble imbedded in Diorite...also have a spattering of Malachite for copper) I have 10 melee-lords (one happened to become a countess, imagine that) and 10 marksdwarves training away almost perfectly.

I have no clue why my ranged dwarves are training so effectively this fort. They are just killing it. Usually 3-6 are popping off bolts at targets while the rest drill/lesson right next to them. I have them fully kitted like my melee dwarves, full steel with leather under-armor. I have them set up with a 3 minimum train order, a 2 minimum, and five 1 minimum orders every month (I believe in writing off military dwarves and force them to train round-the-clock till they are good and then can patrol constantly).

Now, the caveat is that I have never given them multiple ammo types. I've send them to kill things (A Cyclops and a siege of like 8 goblins) with their wooden bolts marked for combat...of course the melee masters murdered everything before the archers got near so whatever.

Not 100% sure what the trick is: but my best guess is making sure you set up everything properly and then let them train like a melee squad. I'll experiment with metal bolts for combat soon and see if things change. If that gums it all up I'd put my money on quivers being the culprit on a lot of training misshaps.

[fearlesslittletoaster]

I think its making them swap ammo types that gums up the works. I set my up a squad to use copper bolts (tetrahedrite and magma woop woop) for both training and combat and they burned through close to three thousand bolts in something like an in game year. Then I tried to set them to use bone for training and copper for combat and the archery practice came to a screeching halt.

[GannonDork]

Too Late...
Some goblins read this thread and realized I was new, Fun ensued...
I managed to take out all of the goblin tribe's scrub soldiers, except this one goblin hammerer singlehandedly defeated my entire 14-Man army...
I decided to quit the fort because my embark sucked anyway

[GhostDwemer]

Just mentioning this because no one else has: you need a regular barracks assigned to your archery squad, as well as the ranges, or they will not use the targets when active. They will only use archery targets when off duty. Also, as hinted at by bitharne, you need A LOT of bolts. Many, many thousands of bolts. If your stock of bolts drops much below 1000 for a ten dwarf squad, they will tend to conserve bolts for combat.

[Urist Tilaturist]

My advice to you: use close combat teams. Close combat beats archery against armoured foes. The best thing is to mix them, and to keep archers away from possible close attack, shooting from behind fortifications or meat shields of close combat squads. I have never seen a dwarf hit by a friendly bolt, something which should happen with inexperienced archers trying to shoot over their heads.

[Dirst]

My advice to you: use close combat teams. Close combat beats archery against armoured foes. The best thing is to mix them, and to keep archers away from possible close attack, shooting from behind fortifications or meat shields of close combat squads. I have never seen a dwarf hit by a friendly bolt, something which should happen with inexperienced archers trying to shoot over their heads.

At least in 0.34, there were no friendly-fire incidents with personal ranged weapons.  So the animal-man blowdarts would never hit their guys, and your bolts would never hit yours.  As far as I can tell, that is still true in 0.40.  Siege engines are another matter entirely.

[mitrigol]

Hello,

I had big trouble too to configure archery.

But.

I found a way:

- First create your squad
- Build archery range, give orientation and finally set your squad to "T"rain on each and every targets, Also, be sure they each have their own "room". Their zone must not cross.
- Build and assign barrack to train the squad, the barrack zone must cover the archery target you want them to train on.

Now is the funny part, ammunition management:

- In m, f, you can manage ammunition for hunter/archer squads, i usually set wooden/bone bolt for "T"raining and Metal bolts for "C"ombat.
- Be sure to never get over 250-300 assigned bolts shared between all types.
- But but, will you say, after my squad get in Combat, they will never train again (or very occasionally)!!!
- After any Combat, go back to m, f and change metal bolts to 10, also add the "T"raining tag.
- Once they emptied their quiver from Metal bolts (which mean they have only 10 bolt listed in m, f menu) , you can remove the "T" and get back to your normal number of metal bolts.
- Do this each time your archery squad get in Combat or they switch to combat ammunition for any reason.

This is because of a known bug where dwarves does not empty their quiver from combat ammunition to get training ammunition once combat is over.

Hope this helped.

EDIT: I tried again and found out training is workign fine now. Updated process.

[GhostDwemer]

I make a squad of ten, give them a barracks, give them each their own target, set them to active/training, and get master level xbow skills in two years, plus they have auxiliary skills like dodging and shield user, which can be important. Not sure why others have to go to such lengths to get trained archers, it has always just worked as advertised for me.

[gunpowdertea]

[...] give them each their own target [...]

This is the most important thing (IMNSHO), otherwise you can have only one dorf training at a time.