Print

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

[Stovepipe Arnold]

I'm looking to use marksdwarves for the first time ever, for hunting as well as military combat. So far, my hunter seems to be pretty self sufficient. He'll get a kill, butcher it, and then go back to pick up his spent bolts.

What I am worried about is the military later on down the line. From what I've read, getting marksdwarves to train properly, without then bringing their wooden bolts into combat, is ungodly hard. Does anyone have any tips for when I jump into this endeavor?

I don't have dfhack or any other addons, BTW.

[Button]

Just have them train with the same ammo they use in combat.

[PrimusRibbus]

Bolts that hit a wall and fall down a Z level before hitting the floor don't break, so they can be gathered and reused. You can have marksdwarves use the same metal bolts for training and just channel out the tile behind the archery target so you don't waste bolts. Also, this allows you to use the bolt splitting exploit if you are so inclined.

[PopTart]

So you want to train marksdwarves?

Here's the guide I use, and it basically works.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=150494.0

[Bumber]

What I am worried about is the military later on down the line. From what I've read, getting marksdwarves to train properly, without then bringing their wooden bolts into combat, is ungodly hard. Does anyone have any tips for when I jump into this endeavor?

If you're using the latest version, it's supposedly fixed.

Bolts that hit a wall and fall down a Z level before hitting the floor don't break, so they can be gathered and reused. You can have marksdwarves use the same metal bolts for training and just channel out the tile behind the archery target so you don't waste bolts. Also, this allows you to use the bolt splitting exploit if you are so inclined.

You'll still lose them if they hit the target. This method has a greater recovery rate and also has the benefit of live training exp.

[Panando]

There's a really easy way to train Marksdwarves:

1: Fire all hunters. Hunters will screw this up.
2: Stick a bunch of unskilled dwarves in a squad of 10.
3: Arm them with wooden bolts using the military/ammunition screen.
4: Have them attack wildlife until they can reliably hit and kill - the rectangle targetting thing is very useful for this.

How this works is that live shooting is I think 3x more effective per bolt at raising skill, so it's very bolt-effecient. Unskilled dwarves are excellent at missing, misses raises XP just the same as hitting, when you have a bunch of unskilled dwarves missing a rabbit their skill skyrockets, it only takes mere minutes to raise skill level.
Once they get up to about competent they become fairly effective at hitting, at that point wildlife doesn't last that long (although wooden bolts are very poor at killing stuff, especially larger stuff), however once they are at the stage where they can quite reliably hit wildlife they will also be able to quite reliably hit invaders. You can let them resume their civilian duties now.

The reason why hunters screw this up is because they kill the animals you'd otherwise use for training. They tend to train themselves up and if you put an elite marksdwarf with 9 unskilled dwarves the elite will almost instantly terminate the animal and deprive the unskilled dwarves of their missing-based XP gain - even if he's not in the squad and just allowed to run free he'll terminate the animals you want to train on. So fire hunters.

My general experience is that melee dwarves are most effective when highly trained, 2 super-legendary melee dwarves can demolish sieges, while a couple full squads of barely trained melee dwarves just die. Otoh marksdwarves work really well in large quantities even if they aren't particularly skilled. In many of my fortresses I train every non-career military dwarf as a marksdwarf so every dwarf is armed with a crossbow and lightly armored. When sieges come everyone goes out to meet the siege and the dwarves can further work on their marksdwarf skills - live combat trains marksdwarf extremely fast.

[Stovepipe Arnold]

Thanks for the input guys. Here's hoping I can get things going smoothly!

[Mostali]

Hopefully this is on-topic enough, but I haven't used ranged dwarves in well over a year and this discussion got me wondering...

- Will an inactive/in-uniform/crossbow-equipped dwarf us it if in danger?

- Can I assign both a melee weapon and crossbow to a dwarf?
   - Assuming I can, if the squad is assigned to either a barracks or a range, will that dwarf train the appropriate weapon?
   - Again assuming, if the squad is assign to both a barracks and a range, will the dwarf prefer to train one over the other?
   - Still assuming, will an inactive/in-uniform/crossbow&melee-equipped dwarf prefer one over the other if in danger?
   - And lastly, will an active crossbow&melee-equipped dwarf prefer one over the other in real combat?

[Chevaleresse]

To my knowledge, your best bet with crossbows is training them as hannerdwarves and using metal crossbows. Failing that, training them with an edged weapon should get them to use that over their crossbow in melee.

[Skullsploder]

Hopefully this is on-topic enough, but I haven't used ranged dwarves in well over a year and this discussion got me wondering...

- Will an inactive/in-uniform/crossbow-equipped dwarf us it if in danger?

- Can I assign both a melee weapon and crossbow to a dwarf?
   - Assuming I can, if the squad is assigned to either a barracks or a range, will that dwarf train the appropriate weapon?
   - Again assuming, if the squad is assign to both a barracks and a range, will the dwarf prefer to train one over the other?
   - Still assuming, will an inactive/in-uniform/crossbow&melee-equipped dwarf prefer one over the other if in danger?
   - And lastly, will an active crossbow&melee-equipped dwarf prefer one over the other in real combat?

Inactive marksdwarves will indeed use their crossbows when in danger, tending to prefer staying at range over charging into melee. A fairly reliable way of ensuring good melee weapon use (as crossbows are crap) is to assign dwarves steel battleaxes and make the squad leader a axe-only veteran. He'll hold regular axe demonstrations and ensure that the squad axe skill is higher than the squad hammer skill, making dwarves prefer melee training with axes over crossbows, making them further prefer axes, and so on. This translates into about 3/4 attacks in melee using the axe in my experience.Hammer training and heavy crossbows are an idea but they are very inneffective melee weapons, to the extent that the extra micro is worth it.