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[squamous]

What it says on the tin. Right now it's pretty long, back in the day it was way too fast, but if its a raw thing we could just set our preference and also make things like repeating crossbows and slow-firing greatbows and things like that. It could be neat.

[DerMeister]

In current version reload rate is so long, in adventure mode even throwing ammo is better than shooting.

[Luckyowl]

It would make sense to let us choose when to reload our range weapons. If a Titan is charging towards me it doesn't make sense for my character to choose to reload at that time, it would make more sense if I fire my crossbow and a message pops up saying "do you want to reload?" If yes, I will have to stay idle  for 5-7 turn to reload my crossbow . If not, I can choose to reload it a later when I hit the 'f' button to fire again. Also would be nice to choose where we want to shoot our arrows giving us a choice to aim for a specific limb, and your archery skills will determine if you will hit that intended limb or end up aiming an unintended limb.

[Nordlicht]

I think a dedicated reload button would be better. In my opinion a y/n question every time you shoot would harm the game flow massively. It also let's you reload without shooting or having shot recently.(And I want crossbow play to be like the shotgun in DoomRl  )

[Nordlicht]

deleted

[Atarlost]

I think a dedicated reload button would be better. In my opinion a y/n question every time you shoot would harm the game flow massively. It also let's you reload without shooting or having shot recently.(And I want crossbow play to be like the shotgun in DoomRl  )

Unless magazine repeaters are implemented there's no need for a second button.  Fire/Reload can be context sensitive without ambiguity.  Now, there is a Chinese magazine crossbow that could justify a separate key in the time period Toady One has set for Dwarf Fortress, but everything's been mostly eurocentric so far and I don't think Europe had magazine crossbows. 

[Ninjabread]

Yeah variable reload rates would be nice, might make bows and crossbows actually noticeably different. Perhaps when using the bow, the idle time spent loading the weapon could be before the arrow is loosed, since one of the main advantages to using a crossbow over a bow is that the crossbow can be pre-loaded.

And on the subject of reload buttons, how about this? If you're holding a pre-loadable but unloaded weapon, the '.' button changes from the long wait button to the reload button, similarly to how it becomes the performance button under the appropriate context. No need to add a new button, but you can still reload outside of combat.

[DerMeister]

Yeah variable reload rates would be nice, might make bows and crossbows actually noticeably different. Perhaps when using the bow, the idle time spent loading the weapon could be before the arrow is loosed, since one of the main advantages to using a crossbow over a bow is that the crossbow can be pre-loaded.

And on the subject of reload buttons, how about this? If you're holding a pre-loadable but unloaded weapon, the '.' button changes from the long wait button to the reload button, similarly to how it becomes the performance button under the appropriate context. No need to add a new button, but you can still reload outside of combat.

Double this.

[voliol]

I'm sure this has been a popular request for quite a while, but +1 to the top suggestion either way.

[GoblinCookie]

We would have to come up with a reason to have crossbows rather than bows if this were the case.

[Splint]

We would have to come up with a reason to have crossbows rather than bows if this were the case.

This request seems mainly to be geared towards the fact that currently, bows and crossbows are practically identical and suck equally, and more specifically, aimed at giving modders far more freedom with what they can make, otherwise things like automatic crossbows, bolt-action rifles, slings, thrown weapons, and javelin guns are just a crossbow/bow with a different name and more often than not suck just as much.

Strictly without modding, the game has three ranged weapons. Bows, crossbows, and blowguns. Dwarves can only make crossbows and their ammo, unless the end user mods their game. In this context, let's assume the end user doesn't plan to do so.

The only sources for bows and arrows is trade and battlefield salvage/stripped POWs. This by definition means 99% of the time, most bows and arrows will be of very poor quality compared to the crossbows and bolts your own in-house producers can output, and supply is limited to whatever merchants or attackers bring.
 - In the case of the former, arrows will often be of poor material, or hideously expensive if prepared meals aren't abused. I've seen more silver arrows than anyone should have to just playing as humans in my own game.
 - In the latter's case, supply provided is erratic. An attack might be all archers or only have one archer and he fled off the map when the fight went south. Without cage trap abuse there's also the fact that a portion of the ammo will be expended by the enemy defending himself from your arrow-hungry militia.
 - The best resource for arrows is elves, and obviously their arrows are only useful as training ammo, further diluting your ammo pool of what can actually be used to hurt things. In contrast, you can produce training bolts in vast quantities without antagonizing your trading partners from wood or bone.

They would also burn through usable ammo at a higher rate (say firing three arrows for every one bolt as a random example,) and not necessarily with any greater accuracy than a crossbowman. So they pay a price in rate of fire for needing to be cycled out to reload much more frequently on top.

So for someone who just plans to grab and go, crossbows are what they are given; they're easier to acquire, can be acquired at higher quality and in higher numbers, and so aren't limited to whatever you can buy or pry from the mangled corpses of your enemies.

Plus thematically dwarves are generally imagined at crossbowmen. There's certainly nothing stopping a dwarf from using a bow, but that's like giving a samurai an arming sword - they can probably make it work, but they'd be more effective with what they know and in a vanilla game, dwarves know crossbows.

Unrelated to all of the above, everything also fires at the same rate, which is absurd when bows and blowguns by their nature should be faster to fire than a crossbow. Right now, at least in my opinion, different ranged weapons are basically just flavor content since they're functionally identical in performance - that is to say, they're fuckin' useless unless you invest a ton of resources into training skilled ranged fighters regardless of the type of weapon they use or field them in such large numbers that you're basically playing a statistics game - doesn't matter if all your men are terrible shots if you have 100 of them shooting at as many targets coming at them down a narrow hallway.

[ZM5]

I personally think this'd also require some changes to allow quiver-like items to be modded in that allow for more ammo to be carried around - npcs seem to usually carry around 25 of their ammo type, unless they're blowgunners - for a fast-firing weapon this probably wouldn't be enough to last an entire siege.

[Atarlost]

As a gross simplification, bows force scales with the size*strength of the wielder and their firing rate is constant, crossbows have constant force with reload time scaling with the strength of the wielder, blowguns have constant (low) force and constant reload, and slings (which really should replace blowguns because blowguns are not viable weapons outside hunting with poison in reality) have force either constant or scaling with agility and constant rate of fire (slower than a bow). 

Bows would be thus favored for tall and strong users, crossbows for short and strong users, and slings for weaker users.  Adventurers would be incentivised to pick one or the other based on their stats with a bias towards slings since rocks can be acquired in adventure mode with relative ease and while they don't fly as far or as fast as a cast lead or other relatively dense metal bullet they do work in a pinch.  And blowguns would be pretty much garbage, though they probably do make the least unwieldy bludgeons and there's no reason you couldn't make them from silver. 

If all options were available in fortress mode bows would be for arming lintelbasher immigrants, crossbows would be for if you have weapon metals, and slings would be for if you don't because you can make bullets out of rock or clay or any metal.  Probably you could even use glass.  And you might do blowguns if you were trying to make a primarily melee squad with ranged harass and a silver blowgun wound up heavier than a copper crossbow.  Or if the ability to poison weapons was implemented. 

[GoblinCookie]

We would have to come up with a reason to have crossbows rather than bows if this were the case.

This request seems mainly to be geared towards the fact that currently, bows and crossbows are practically identical and suck equally, and more specifically, aimed at giving modders far more freedom with what they can make, otherwise things like automatic crossbows, bolt-action rifles, slings, thrown weapons, and javelin guns are just a crossbow/bow with a different name and more often than not suck just as much.

Strictly without modding, the game has three ranged weapons. Bows, crossbows, and blowguns. Dwarves can only make crossbows and their ammo, unless the end user mods their game. In this context, let's assume the end user doesn't plan to do so.

The only sources for bows and arrows is trade and battlefield salvage/stripped POWs. This by definition means 99% of the time, most bows and arrows will be of very poor quality compared to the crossbows and bolts your own in-house producers can output, and supply is limited to whatever merchants or attackers bring.
 - In the case of the former, arrows will often be of poor material, or hideously expensive if prepared meals aren't abused. I've seen more silver arrows than anyone should have to just playing as humans in my own game.
 - In the latter's case, supply provided is erratic. An attack might be all archers or only have one archer and he fled off the map when the fight went south. Without cage trap abuse there's also the fact that a portion of the ammo will be expended by the enemy defending himself from your arrow-hungry militia.
 - The best resource for arrows is elves, and obviously their arrows are only useful as training ammo, further diluting your ammo pool of what can actually be used to hurt things. In contrast, you can produce training bolts in vast quantities without antagonizing your trading partners from wood or bone.

They would also burn through usable ammo at a higher rate (say firing three arrows for every one bolt as a random example,) and not necessarily with any greater accuracy than a crossbowman. So they pay a price in rate of fire for needing to be cycled out to reload much more frequently on top.

So for someone who just plans to grab and go, crossbows are what they are given; they're easier to acquire, can be acquired at higher quality and in higher numbers, and so aren't limited to whatever you can buy or pry from the mangled corpses of your enemies.

Plus thematically dwarves are generally imagined at crossbowmen. There's certainly nothing stopping a dwarf from using a bow, but that's like giving a samurai an arming sword - they can probably make it work, but they'd be more effective with what they know and in a vanilla game, dwarves know crossbows.

Unrelated to all of the above, everything also fires at the same rate, which is absurd when bows and blowguns by their nature should be faster to fire than a crossbow. Right now, at least in my opinion, different ranged weapons are basically just flavor content since they're functionally identical in performance - that is to say, they're fuckin' useless unless you invest a ton of resources into training skilled ranged fighters regardless of the type of weapon they use or field them in such large numbers that you're basically playing a statistics game - doesn't matter if all your men are terrible shots if you have 100 of them shooting at as many targets coming at them down a narrow hallway.

Ah but quality does not matter as much as rate of fire and when the economy is developed we would be able to reliably buy better quality bows.  That is the point, we have to come up with a reason to have crossbows that isn't rate of fire, of which they are inferior to bows pretty much whatever their quality.

[Ninjabread]

There were 2 irl reasons that most European medieval armies picked crossbows over bows; it takes less skill and strength to be passable with a crossbow, so troops took less time to train up and could more easily be replaced, and, as I have previously mentioned, readying a shot and loosing an arrow/bolt are part of the same action for a bow, but are separate for the crossbow, so crossbow users could take cover in order to reload, thus only exposing themselves to enemy projectiles for the brief moments it takes to aim and loose their bolts.

First part can quite easily be represented by accuracy for bows being much more heavily affected by skill level than it would be for crossbows. Second part would need some combat AI changes before it could really have any effect on fortress mode, but that's something that's likely on it's way at some point anyway. If this were how it was implemented, crossbow users would be the slow, steady, and ultimately replaceable option that works best when they have somewhere to take cover and some melee soldier allies to prevent their melee weapon wielding opponents from reaching them too quickly, while bow users would be more versatile but also riskier, being faster on a shots-per-minute basis, and thus more able to hold their own without support from melee troops, but would not be capable of preemptively readying a shot, and thus would require a little idle time before loosing an arrow to draw back the bowstring. Bow users would also be less replaceable due to the greater training requirements.

This implementation has the added bonus of making your average dwarf fortress much more suited to having squads of marksdwarves as opposed to bowdwarves thanks to a) it being a fortress and therefore having plenty of places to take cover, b) most dwarf fortresses having copious amounts of melee squads, and c) access to an abundance of spare hands that could be easily trained into somewhat competent marksdwarves if necessary. Meanwhile, invading forces and adventurers would be much more capable of exploiting the speed and versatility of the bow, largely because they are not guaranteed to have any of the conditions that benefit crossbow users, but also because they don't have to worry so much about training times either because an invasive force doesn't need to be replenished as quickly as a defensive force, or because they are an independent party that doesn't plan on being replaceable. Goblins and elves also likely don't really care much about how long it takes to train bow users compared to crossbow users because they're immortal, so they literally have all the time in the world.