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[Hypcso]

10 years. Watching 20 champion maxed stat quad legendary melee dwarves in full steel plate get slaughtered by 4 automatic machinegunn.. Er bowmen in 15 seconds: Horrific

They say a picture is worth a thousand words... Well. This about sums it up. They killed maybe 2 goblins. Most of the corpses are being stood on/trampled. Never again will I train melee dwarves. I just hate the fact that the only useful military dwarf is a crossbowman.

[Nos3y]

Atleast you got what you trained for. I've been training bowmen by hunting... Somehow half of them ended up as Hammerdwarves....no clue how either

[Capntastic]

When they run out of ammo they bludgeon enemies with their crossbows.

(750th post!  Hurray!)

[Grek]

If they run out of bolts they use the crossbow as a hammer.

[Lord Dullard]

Ouch. Yeah, the combat system definitely needs to be revamped.. then again, the game's still in alpha, so I'm sure improvement is forthcoming.

In the meantime, I usually just save my legendary melee dwarves for megabeasts. And if I decide to take on a goblin siege with melee fighters, I never meet them on open ground (it looks like that might have been your problem there) - I wait until they get into an enclosure (generally made for just this purpose).

[ December 03, 2007: Message edited by: Lord Dullard ]

[Skyrage]

Picture kinda shows that you had those dwarfs out in the open...so yeah...obviously they'll end up as cannon fodder no matter how good they are if they're facing ranged units.

[Hypcso]

There's not exactly any way to get them into a different area. Any unit I send within visibility of them is instantly killed by the machinegunners, then they just continue standing there.

[Shooer]

Dig under them and then dig a ramp under one, kill it and any who follow.  Rinse and repeat.

[Paul]

Yeah, arrows/bolts are a bit powerful.

You could edit the raws and make them a wee bit less lethal. Right now arrows/bolts are doing 100 pierce damage, if you change that to say 25 it should make them significantly less lethal. They'll still fire off like machine guns, but it will take 4 shots to do the same damage as 1.

I just wish you could reduce the rate of fire by a factor of 10 or so. That way they wouldn't run out of arrows in half a second, and also wouldn't slaughter everything instantly. They'd get off say 2 or 3 arrows before the enemies got to them, instead of 20 or 30.

[Slappy Moose]

Yeah, crossbows that can fire once every 2 seconds = what the hell, where did my 50 melee dwarves just go.

I will probably reduce the damage to about 20, or more. a 15 plate armored sword dwarf rush vs 20 goblins should not be dead by the time they get there because the goblins had 2 crossbowmen.

Maybe bows and crossbows should be possible, bows shoot faster, but crossbows do more damage and are more accurate.

[sphr]

yeah.. also realised this.  Range attackers definitely have advantage unless the target is resistent... (e.g. I find range combat against collosus a little difficult, prob due to regeneration of non critical wounds, while a legendary swordsman can take it apart all by himself)

What I do now is :
1) basic training : wrestler
2) melee training : weapon of choice, preferably hammer (for non-lethal and works with crossbow with no ammo) and sword/spear (good criticals against megabeasts)
2a) armor/shield training : if not legendary, cross train another weapon (pref hammer again).
3) Marksdwarf training

Basically, everybody can be both a melee or marksdwarf on demand.  You prob want melee for megabeasts and marksdwarf against other archers.

sadly, even with platemail and all, charging a couple goblin archers with your fully armored marksdwarves can still cause casualties... my suggestion : let each military dwarf have a war dog.  This is the first "standard issue" i give my military dwarves, even before they get armor. War dogs are good for
1) distraction to enemy archers and attackers.  A bolt firing at one of your dogs = a bolt not firing at one of your dwarves
2) attached war dogs are not pets.  they don't need coffins.  I haven't lost any after my new plan yet, but I think you can even butcher the dead animal for food and resources.
3) Dogs breed relatively fast.  Put those stray dogs to good use.

Frankly speaking, this is quite a long-term training plan and I've only advanced up to melee training for some of my dwarves (all legendary wrestlers + legendary

btw, Nos3y's idea of using hunting to train marksdwarf is actually quite good, less the trouble/unhappy thoughts that may arise.  It is good for controlling the ammo as range training can quickly deplete your ammo supply.  If train by hunting, you can lock up your metal/master bolts and just let them use bone bolts.  If they manage to kill something, it brings back bones and you can then make more bone bolts.  If there are no animals to hunt, they shouldn't use up their ammo (unlike archery target).  And it actually frees up some of your original hunters to do other things.  Only bad thing is that they may be too way out of your fortress to respond to emergencies.  Perhaps a better workaround is to only put fresh marksdwarf on hunting exercise.  After they reach a certain skill level, pull them back into military to train full time and be ready to respond to threats.