Print

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

[Telgin]

So I'm positive this has been asked before, but I fail at the search feature and didn't see it in the last few pages, so here goes:

My marksdwarves kind of suck.  They take more casualties than my melee militia, and don't seem to get many kills.  I'd like to fix that.

Weapons:

• Weapon - My marksdwarves are currently equipped with wooden crossbows, because they were easy to make.  I now see that my dwarves run out of ammo quickly and try to cave in some skulls with their wooden crossbows, and get quite little accomplished.  Should I be making these out of something more dense than wood?  Steel?  Copper?  Silver?
• Ammo - Similar question.  I've been using wooden and bone bolts in my crossbows because it was fast and easy.  However, my bolts seem to do little other than tear skin or occasionally tear muscles.  What's a better material to make bolts from?  I've seen people recommend silver, but the wiki claims bolts are edge weapons, which tells me that steel would be better.  Any thoughts?
  
  Also, how many bolts can a dwarf actually carry?  I'm setting my squads of 10 dwarves to carry 250 bolts for the squad, but they run out quick.  Can I bump this up to 500 or more without issues?  I've got plenty of bolts.

Armor
My marksdwarves are all using leather armor, so I could get my melee dwarves in steel plate faster.  They get destroyed in melee combat (which they seem to relish in moreso than standing back and shooting).  Am I correct in that wearing steel armor would have no negative effect other than slowing them down from the weight?  Their shooting wouldn't be affected, would it?  Training in armor raises armor skill and eventually negates this anway, right?

Training
Seems this has been asked a few times, but I've never seen a conclusive answer.  What sort of training schedule should I set up for my marksdwarves?  I have a shooting range with 10 targets, and the dwarves show up for archery practice, but I don't know how much it's helping their skill. 

How many months on / off should I have them practicing to mitigate bad thoughts?  I have my squad of 10 set to train with a minimum of 7 required, alternating months on and off.  I'm beginning to question if this is counter productive with bad thoughts from being put on duty every other month, instead of say, 2 months on, 1 off.  Is there a better strategy for getting skill trained up?  I can't seem to find a straight answer on whether the minimum number required causes bad thoughts or actually setting a month to have no orders.  If you can leave them all on Active/Training for the entire year I think that would help, for example.

Also, is it possible to train on prisoners in any way, other than releasing them in room and kill ordering them?  I have relatively little experience with dumping prisoners for the melee to pound on, but never tried this with marksdwarves.

Deployment

So my current fort has a two z-level curtain wall with the top level carved into fortifications for the dwarves to shoot out of.  They seem to do this, but their range seems to be absolutely terrible and their attention span is quite small.  Do you normally have to station the marksdwarves directly against the wall within, say 5 tiles of enemies for them to take notice and try to shoot?  I've seen them hanging around a tile or two away from the fortifications without moving up to the fortification to take a shot, when the enemy looked like it was in range. 

Should I carve fortifications in the bottom wall to shoot out of to get around the range reducing bug from z-level differences?  I'm hesitant to do so, because that would allow goblin archers to shoot back if they got close enough, right?

Lastly, when I do kill order something with my marksdwarves, they tend to do stupid things like run up to them and try to melee them instead of staying at a safe distance and shooting.  I realize that some dwarves might be out of ammo, but should I just station them near an enemy instead of kill ordering it?

Or even better, should I just ignore enemies outside of my walls too far away to be shot at, instead of opening the gate and charging them with my military?

Thanks for any input.

[geail]

1. weapon - as they are blunt weapons when used in melee, you want them to be as dense as possible.  I'd suggest looking up the steel v. silver differences.  *note: you cannot make crossbows from silver.  substitute copper*  But really, quality is the most important thing.  I'd rather have masterwork bone than low quality steel.  Also, if made from metal, they are made using the Weaponsmithing skill, not the Bowyer; this makes getting high quality weapons a bit easier.

2. ammo - I have never seen a dwarf carry more than 50 bolts, 1 stack equipped and 1 in quiver.

3. armor - leather is fine if you keep them out of melee.  Upgrade to the metals if they regularly see combat.  Also, wooden/leather shields can save you a lot of hassle.

4. training - I train my marksdwarves the same way I train my regular dwarves. multiple squads of 3 with a min set of 2 until they become Elite.  That is when I merge them.

5. deployment - build a 1 tile wide room along your fortifications and designate that as the barracks.  This way they are always looking out of the fortress.  When shit hits the fan, lock the door into the room so they don't try to melee when they run out of bolts.  If you are ordering them elsewhere, use stations, not kill orders.

[melphel]

Crossbows have a range of roughly 20 tiles.  Being on a higher/lower z-level than the target will reduce the horizontal distance a bolt can be fired, and if they are on top of a wall, they may not be able to shoot straight down at something right next to that wall.  You could try putting the fortifications at ground level, but be warned that if an enemy can stand next to it, they can fire through it unhindered.  Even if you had a moat or some obstacle on the outside of the fortifications, skilled archers can shoot through them, and your dorfs might have line of sight to enemies outside, causing cancellations.

You are best off giving station orders to your marksdorfs.  They will automatically shoot at an enemy from behind fortifications if they can see them.  If they are never going to be in range for melee combat, then it doesn't matter what the crossbow is made of, otherwise use something heavy.  Better armor might be a good idea, if there is a penalty on heavy armor on marksdorfs, it is incredibly small.

From what I've seen, bolts are always effective regardless of material.  Metal does do better than bone or wood, but that doesn't mean that bone and wood bolts are not deadly.  Most enemies have only a metal breastplate, metal helm, and some cloth/leather clothing, and your marksdorfs tend to shoot at the less armored bits.  All metals preform equally well, or at least I haven't been looking close enough to see a difference.

I don't think quivers have a limit on how many bolts can be put into them, but your dorfs will stop putting in ammo after a certain number.  Bolts get made in stacks of 25 (thats for metal and wood, bone only come in stacks of 5...I think invaders can show up with even bigger stacks of ammo), so if they only need a few more bolts, but grab a big stack, you can see a quiver with 70+ bolts.  Also, ammo designations are for the entire squad, so each member gets a proportional amount of that.  What's more, the full amount of the designation is assigned to the squad, even if they can't carry all of it at once.  So if you have all your bolts given to one squad, another squad may have to wait for more bolts to be made.

[Jake]

You can also assign them a backup melee weapon, though this can be a bit hit-or-miss as they'll still use their crossbows as bludgeons some of the time. Still, it's a good a way as any to use all those looted goblin weapons you can't be bothered to melt down.

And so far as armour goes, if they're mostly going to be fighting from behind fortifications, I suggest adding a breastplate on top of their leather armour and a metal helmet. They needn't be anything special, plain iron ones made by a rookie armoursmith will do against bolts.

[Telgin]

Thanks guys, that does help.  I hadn't thought about using a moat and fortifications on the first level.  I originally intended to get a magma moat going but dropped the idea when I couldn't make enough magma safe pumps.  Not really enough water for a water moat either, but I suppose I could channel out an empty moat...

[EveryZig]

>Weapons
I usually use copper to make bolts from, as it is effective enough with high quality bows/bolts, and common enough that you can just churn it out. Steel bots are a waste of precious steel.

>Armor
As far as I have seen, armor and shields have no adverse effects on shooting.

>Training
I usually don't bother with archery range training. It gives pitiful experience. I just have them shoot at sieges (when the siege doesn't have ranged attackers) and they level up pretty quickly. (Though that might be because I use fortress defense mod.)

You can release caged prisoners via lever into a space surrounded by fortifications, and use that to prisoner-train marksdwarves.

>Deployment
Highly skilled dwarfs (and goblins!) can shoot through fortifications from practically any distance away with only a small chance of the arrow being stopped, but lower level dwarfs are unable to shoot through fortifications altogether if they are not standing right up next to them.

If you want to use the 'kill' command, you should put a hatch on the stairs down from your walls/towers, and lock them in when using the kill command. (Remember to have your ammo pile inside the locked portion.)
Also keep in mind that dwarves will go to anywhere within 3 squares of where you station them, so if there is a walkable floor on the other side of your wal they will try to go there. A 2-3 square wide moat next to your wall can be useful as a space that your marksdwarfs will not try to walk to.

[AWdeV]

You'll want some basic armour and basic training for your marksdwarves to ensure that they survive longer under hostile fire.

My own marksdwarfs seemed to do fairly well with high quality bone crossbows and even higher quality bone bolts.

Ofcourse, they'll need to avoid getting into melee, but I generally have other squads for that. A heavy shield works well too. But yes, if you want to do melee with your marksdwarves, metal crossbows are advised. Copper is IIRC the heaviest and therefore most efficient at bashing heads in, but accuracy is determined by quality (and also has effect on the hittingefficiency).

[Ieb]

Last time I had dwarves go into melee with silver crossbows, they spent days bashing the bird they were targeting. Every hit dented the skull but didn't actually kill the damn thing. Then a bigger bird casually walked up to them and killed both.

[AWdeV]

Yeah, crossbows are fairly shitty in melee regardless of quality or material but silver is slightly better. Send someone with an axe to finish business.

[Kogut]

"How many months on / off should I have them practicing to mitigate bad thoughts?" - AFAIK half of time should be off to stop this bad thought. I ignore this and install mist generator in barracks.

[Telgin]

"How many months on / off should I have them practicing to mitigate bad thoughts?" - AFAIK half of time should be off to stop this bad thought. I ignore this and install mist generator in barracks.

Yeah, that's basically what I've done in the past, but I have this nagging desire to do this "correctly".  This being Dwar Fortress, you could argue that the correct answer is to just abuse the dwarven psyche by balancing things out, but I think you know what I mean. 

I've seen conflicting answers on whether or not this is caused by a squad not having no orders for a number of months, or if it's caused by the minimum number of dwarves required for the order.  I suspect the answer is related to both.

My suspicion is that if you have, say 10 dwarves training all year round with a minimum of 7 for the orders, that the game more or less randomly lets dwarves off duty to do whatever they need to.  Sometimes it does this intelligently and no dwarves get unhappy thoughts, but sometimes a dwarf gets unlucky and ends up enraged at patrol duty since he's been on duty for 7 months.

I've kind of tried testing this out, but can't seem to get any consistent results.  In particular, dwarves seem to go from nothing to enraged in a single month sometimes, which doesn't make sense.  Maybe a bug, but the dwarves never really seem to actually get unhappy from it...

So, I guess then the questions become: how long does a dwarf have to be on duty to get an unhappy thought?  Is 2 months in a row enough?  Does letting a dwarf off negate this immediately, or does he need to be off for several months?  Is ping ponging between training and no orders every other month a bad idea because of this?  Does setting the minimum number of dwarves low enough (half maybe) reduce unhappy thoughts enough that you can leave a squad on training all year round without them going insane or tantruming?