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[Gizogin]

Gizogin, does the barracks defined from your armor stand cover the whole room? Does it overlap the barracks defined from the archery target, or just bump up against it?

What assignments does the squad have for the archery target barracks? Z,T,Q, the other thing I forget? What about the assignments for the Armor Stand barracks?

Both the barracks and the archery range cover the entire room.  I only have them set to train, not to sleep or equip.
Proof:

That arrow was fired by the dwarf standing just in front of the door.
EDIT: also, that piece of clothing is just a hat that a dwarf left there (when changing into uniform, I think).
EDIT2: defining the other two archery targets as ranges now has one dwarf shooting at each.

[Hannibal Barcalounger]

Thanks for that. Maybe my problem is that my ranges are too short. Next chance I have to play, I'll expand them to cover more spaces and see if guys finally start shooting.

One more question: do you have your marksdwarves set to any kind of schedule in the squad orders? Train, or No Order Given?

[Finn]

Hello,

I am a new player, however the other night I set up my first military squad, which happened to be archers, and I had them successfully training in my archery range.  Because I'm a new player, I followed the instructions at http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Military_quickstart to the letter.  In fact, I followed it a little too closely because when I got to the bottom I realized I needed to swap out my armor stand for archery targets, but everything seemed to work fine after that.  Little buggers came in and started plinking away at the targets.

If you are interested, you can download my game here: http://www.chevrie.com/df-mil.zip.  I warn you, this is a zip of my entire DF directory as I don't know what sub-parts are needed to move a save game around.  The archery squad is in region 1.

Cheers,

Finn

[Grumbledwarfskin]

FYI, it's the "region" folder (usually df/data/save/region1 for the first world you create) that you need to zip up when sharing  save.

[knutor]

Also, do burrows work with hunters?

I cannot see why not.  Mining works.

Well it works for the one block perimeter around our cavern, that we can brush off with our burrow painting tool.  Shame we can't paint our burrows into the black unknown and beyond, so our miners can keep at it, until they pop open a cavern or pit.  Its hard to keep repainting out that one block cavern perimeter.  At least it is for me, I'm a lazy noobie.  I'm still trying to figure this all out.

An ambusher prolly won't hunt outside 'his' burrow, if ya assign him to it.  I gotta test that, I got two hunters in my current fortress, when I get into it again, I'll whip up some topside burrows and see what happens.  I'm hoping to set them near the prevalent entry points that stuff tends to enter at.  I'm hoping its like setting up a hunting spot on a game trail.  HA!  I'll have to cut shooting lanes, and lay down some female scent.

I am learning not to fear the unknown or get too attached to any one dwarf, but its hard after all the games that teach just the opposite.  It hurts to lose a legend of any kind.  Hunters get pretty dangerous, I like to turn off everything but ambush so they just kill, kill, kill.  With a dozen hunting grizzlies on one, I wouldn't wanna be the invaders.  I'm not sure what traits are good for hunting, so much is hard to flesh out in DF.  That's part of the charm tho.  IMO.

Sincerely,
Knutor

[Hannibal Barcalounger]

My current fort has a lot going on, and every time I load it up I get consumed with making the pump stack for the entryway flush tank, or assigning dwarves to burrows so that the marble transported south by my catapults doesn't get hauled back north to the catapult feeder stockpile. I have poor impulse control, and so it's easy to get distracted from marksdwarf testing.

To test out what people have shared, I made a new embark, set up some stockpiles, farms, and a still, and then concentrated on marksdwarf training. To me, it has never made sense that there has to be a large, overlapping barracks designated from an armor stand or weapon rack, so for the first test, I left this out.

Quivers, crossbows, bolts, archery targets, squad... check. But nobody is moving. It turns out that I'd assigned my miners to be the marksdwarves, and they would run to their stockpile with the Pickup Equipment job-- then get there, get confused, and go back to the dining hall without swapping picks for crossbows. I never figured out how to get them to drop the picks, so I dropped them from the squad and chose two others instead.

Once I'd made enough bolts, I activated the squad to their training schedule, and voilą! Lots of shooting. Until one guy was out of bolts, and the other was down to 10. At that point they went back to standing around in the dining room, complaining about Soldier (Cannot Follow Orders).

So, I've edited the known-good method, and once I've produced more bolts, I'll upload a save so that anyone who is having trouble can compare their setup to mine and hopefully find the problem.

There's still more science to be done, though.  Please continue to ask questions and make contributions, and in particular point out any issues or ideas that you think would be a good addition to the Ultimate Marksdwarf Training Guide.

I am a new player, however the other night I set up my first military squad, which happened to be archers, and I had them successfully training in my archery range.  ... If you are interested, you can download my game here: http://www.chevrie.com/df-mil.zip.

Thanks for your help Finn. I'll take a look at your example later, and add any info I can glean from it to the Known-Good Method post.

FYI, If you look in the earlier posts in this thread, I made a step-by-step on how to share your save file. You can use that to reduce the file size of your uploads in the future.

[Hannibal Barcalounger]

Also, do burrows work with hunters?

Well it works for the one block perimeter around our cavern, that we can brush off with our burrow painting tool.  Shame we can't paint our burrows into the black unknown and beyond, so our miners can keep at it, until they pop open a cavern or pit.  Its hard to keep repainting out that one block cavern perimeter.  At least it is for me, I'm a lazy noobie. 

You can make a big huge burrow including black unknown spaces. It won't show up when you view the burrow, but cnce your miners uncover the spaces, they'll be included. I just verified this myself.

[knutor]

Great tip, tyvm for verifying it.  I'll prolly do that, as I'm trying to get a lil better grasp on the AI.

I just verified, burrows don't work with hunt.  Had a tigerfish standing there wandering around my hunter, with two hunting dogs attached to him.  Thing was just wandering right thru my topside burrow region painted off at 55x55.  Hunter never went into stalking, or Hunt action.  He sat there in the meeting activity zone in No Job.  Minute I removed him from the topside burrow, bingo!  He goes into Hunt action.  Strange, that's a shame it doesn't work.  Sorry to get everyones hopes up. 

Back to the shooting ranges.  Plz, chalk that one up as a clueless newb mistake.

Sincerely,
Knutor

[Finn]

I am a new player, however the other night I set up my first military squad, which happened to be archers, and I had them successfully training in my archery range.  ... If you are interested, you can download my game here: http://www.chevrie.com/df-mil.zip.

Thanks for your help Finn. I'll take a look at your example later, and add any info I can glean from it to the Known-Good Method post.

FYI, If you look in the earlier posts in this thread, I made a step-by-step on how to share your save file. You can use that to reduce the file size of your uploads in the future.

Thank you.  I found your post and modified the file to contain only the region1 subfolder and it is much smaller now.

[Fredd]

When a marks dwarf under inactive(no scheduled orders month) has nothing to do, will go to the archery range to practice. If on a active(no scheduled order month) will go to practice quicker than inactive schedule.
 Target practice is a job. If there are no open ranges, will not practice. Also will not if no ammo is available, obviously.
An archery target assigned to a squad is the same as a melee squads barracks. If they run out of bolts, will go invid train. But do not train hammerdwarf. I guess they sit around smoking, and gossiping. If you assign them a shield, least they will practice shield work, which could save their lives.
 If you want them to spend more time training at the range, turn off hauling labors.
 When you assign them a month to train, on either schedule, you just messed up. They will stand around giving demonstrations of any combat skill they have, instead of practicing archery skills. Now this is not a bad thing, for when they become very good archers, they will use up bolts fast as you can make them. This is when you give them a training month. Perhaps assign a really good melee soldier to that squad to give armor user, other military skill demos to them.
 Unless you want to micromanage bolt supplies, assigning certain bolts for combat, and another for training can really cause extra confusion, and at the worst, non use of bolts. Just  craft enough bolts for them to practice with, and have a small supply of weapon grade bolts for combat purposes when fun arrives that you can assign.
 Ranges set at maximum distance does not seem to matter. Even if they do not hit the target, they get exp for each bolts fired. When they reach elite level, they can acquire a target at the max range(20) even if not next to a forti. 

[humblegar]

Training

• Just use default arhery range size, works fine. More targets means more practice for the squad and more ammo spent.
• The default training schedule at "active/training" also works fine if you have the equipment, assigned ranges for the squad ("T") and ammunition.
• Keep it simple with the ammo assignment, just use "CT" on unspecified bolts.
• Assigning "T" at a barracks for your marksdwarves is only wise if you don't want them to spend their ammo practicing (look below).

Cannot follow orders
This usually means out of ammo as mentioned. This can be solved by:

• Making more ammo.
  
• Setting "T" in a barracks and removing "T" at all ranges, at least they will attempt to practice at a barracks in stead of "cannot follow orders". Be warned that their ranged skills will rust if you do not have live targets to compensate.
• Whenever low on ammo turn off all hunters and set all ammo to "C" only, or you may die to the next siege.
• If you change something, make a note to change it back when you have made more ammo.

Labor
I like turning off all labor for my military, and especially marksdwarves. The best of them usually started off as hunters though. If you need a hunter; activate one outside the squad. If he becomes seriously good recruit him and activate another hunter.

Tactics (assuming your squad is the letter "a").

• You can "hunt" with your squad of marksdwarves, just use kill from list(s-a-k-l), make sure you hit to cancel order (s-a-o) afterwards.
• If you build a wall around your depot and carve fortifications, you can simply empty your quivers at whatever's inside. Make a burrow 1 tile wide surrounding it, then a schedule/alert to guard it. When they are positioned use s-a-k-l and and liberate some goods from the caravan. This is great when low on ammo, as it will give experience, use a limited amount of ammo (compared to ranges) and will give happy thoughts. Just like mass pitting, except you have to order them to fire on the elves.
• A huge room above your entrance with carved fortifications can be great. Barracks for your melee squads in the middle, archery targets around the wall (remember direction). You can have a burrow 1 tile wide for your schedules, and you can safely order a "station" at a wall or corner, since the +1z level will make them gather there and not run outside. 10 Marksdwarves gathered in a corner at +1z when an ambush walks by is rewarding
• I don't let my marksdwarves engage a siege of any kind without fortifications. At least not in any fortress I have without danger rooms (like my last).

[Hannibal Barcalounger]

Thanks for the info Humblegar.

One other thing I've discovered: it does NOT seem like we can use a channel in front of the archery targets for bolt recovery, even if you give the dwarves an alternate path to walk to the target. I had the following two setups:

Code: [Select]

.......|
.WWWWW.|
d...._T|
.WWWWW.|
.......|

.WWWWW.|
.......|
d...._T|
.......|
.WWWWW.|

Key:
d marksdwarf
. floor
| wall
W wall
_ channel/open space
T archery target
In each case, I set up the range, verified that the dwarves would practice, and then dug a channel in front of the target. As soon as that channel was dug, they did not come to train. (I didn't try digging the channel DURING training out of fear for my miner's health. A very un-dwarfy weakness, I know.)

I waited a season while I worked on other things, but no broken bolts ever appeared on the floor of the Z-layer below the channel. As soon as I covered the channel with a floor, the dwarves started shooting and practicing again.

When I have a chance to take some screenshots and test channeling while a dwarf is actually shooting, I'll add this info and humblegar's troubleshooting to the main post.

[Xenogenic]

Hey Guys,

I think I can confirm that the marksdwarf training problem has to do with the ammo settings. I had metal bolts set for combat and bone bolts for training. I had tons of bone bolts, and only a few metal bolts scattered around. I kept getting mismatch messages. Once I set both metal and bone to both training and combat, a surge of archers ran to the target area and started plinking away. It seems even dwarves with some metal arrows were not practicing because I see a few metal arrows being fired every now and then.

I guess the other solution might have been to just make more metal bolts.

But yeah, it seems to be ammo designation.