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[VerdantSF]

Has anyone else tried forts with a military composed of mostly marksdwarves?  Did you enjoy them as much or even more than traditional melee-heavy forces?  Hails of bolts seem to be a much better way of dealing with giant spiders and syndrome beasts. 

[Garath]

can marksdwarf wear metal armor? they seem to default to leather and i got quite some "equipment mismatch" warnings

anyway, i usually try for 50% melee, 50% archer, exactly for the things you just mentioned. Plus the occasional lucky faceshot

[JackoftheBox]

Marksdwarfs are effective, very effective, but I enjoy more playing with the traditional melee forces, usually not having a single marksdwarf. It all comes down to things like, do you use a danger room, how you build your fort etc etc... and yes you can equip marksdwarfs with any kind of armor, just make your own uniform in the military menu or manually change the weapons of your marksdwarf squad

[Mickey Blue]

I use both but use mostly melee, oddly I went from using mostly marksdwarves to mostly melee because I wanted more of a challenge.  Normally I have three layers of military; 'fodder' at the front, they are untrained melee with whatever equipment they want.  The next layer is skilled melee (a mix of piercing, slashing, and blunt), then in back marksdwarves (sometimes if I have the appropriate buildings I put them in an elevated position).  Overall I'd say I have a three to one ratio of melee to ranged though.

I do think the easiest way of defending a for with military is marksdwarves on top of a wall and completely walled in.

[tommy521]

Only marksdwarves. Ever. Granted, I've only ever made about three successful Fun hating militaries, and marksdwarves just allowed me to keep them safe.

[VerdantSF]

Only marksdwarves. Ever. Granted, I've only ever made about three successful Fun hating militaries, and marksdwarves just allowed me to keep them safe.

What were most of your bolts made out of?  Back in the day, I used a lot of bone bolts, but those take soooooo long to make now.

[Diamond]

I tried.
It didn't work out well with FD mod.

Though in my current human fort 40 out of 50 are bowmen, but I have quite well-designed defenses, where enemies have to walk around under the fire from 4 squads to get  to the front gate where 10 melee soldiers wait for them. For now it works great.

[King DZA]

The slightly higher complexity of marksdwarf squads scared me off when I first started playing DF. Now, when I get them to work properly, they are a great addition to my fort defense. Although I don't think I've ever had a military composed mostly of them. I think the closest I've got was 50:50.

[Starver]

Some people say Marksdwarfs are broken, but I find them the easiest to arrange.  (Maybe avoid the 'broken' stuff.)

My current fortress has just one marksdwarf unit and further (fairly full) units dedicated individually to spears, axes, maces, swords, and whatever else I have, plus a couple of other units for basic training of more recent immigrants (with worthwhile military skills, but not yet put into gaps in other units or used to create new ones), plus a number of immigrants that I've just not gotten around to getting even to that stage.  With nearly 200 dwarfs in, I impose a schedule that's either a third-on, two-thirds off or two-thirds on and one-third off, so that they get civilian lives.  This includes the marksdwarfs.

But due to the design of my fort, I very often call upon the marksdwarfs to deal with most foes (actual enemies or troublesome zombiebeasts that are frightening the civilian workforce).  That's the one unit.  And they deal with them all quite well.

Nearly all.  The Brush titan made of amber was injurable but seemed unkillable by bolts (generally the gamut of wood, bone and silver...  don't think I had any steel ones), and when I finally got fed up with it I just sent the marksdwarf unit in to bite and bash it to death.

Also, on a recent occasion, I'd only just released the marksdwarf unit from killing off some pesky zombie livestock when some more zombie livestock popped onto my territory, so I sent the next unit along (the speardwarfs).  They tended to get bad thoughts about encountering undead animals, but they dealt with them Ok (having spent most of their 1/3 or 2/3 time training, whichever way around it was with them).  The marksdwarfs at least don't get that.

I just don't like not making use of a significant skill (insignificant ones might be all the fishery ones, the way I play forts, all military skills, including teacher and student and observaton, I consider to be significant).  To the end that while I won't intentionally make any more than two miners, anyone who arrives on the map with significant expertise in mining gets allowed to mine, meaning that out of the nearly 200 total, I have five true miners, all now legendary, and it's only the dabbling ones that didn't.  And two of those newer miners came with some other military skills, so they've been doing both mining and their combat training part-time, since they arrived.  (I know there's a military equipment issue with miners/woodcutters, but I just like the idea that at least a couple of my miners might surprise anyone they accidentally come across, down in the depths, and naturally they're armoured.)

So, anyway, if someone comes along with any skill in mace, I plan to get him into the mace-squad.  And I've equipped them with maces, and they've been training a lot.  So if I ever need them, I can use them.  Other than that, right now I would be happy to field an army totally of marksdwarfs (current lot can hold the line while the others get trained up, or just zerg-rush them, with or without zerg-vollies being fired) and I'd be happy.

And my marksdwarfs are metal-clad and shield-bearing.  Not all steel.  Neither my map nor my home civilisation has any sign of iron ore, but I have imported steel bars and steel items I can melt down, so in six years of operation I've managed to make some equipment in that, rather than copper...  and the local silver that I have used for the hammers/etc.  But they seem happy enough with it, and have come up against marksgoblins and triumphed (across an impassible ditch, but without the advantage of fortifications on their own side, and in a roughly 1:1 ratio, where I'd normally be looking to have bent the odds much more in my favour.), so they're far from vulnerable to being range-attacked in their turn.


Did that answer any questions?  I think it did, but I've probably drowned it in other irrelevant stuff.

[VerdantSF]

That's awesome!  How did you keep the marksdwarves restocked with arrows?  The patrol/supply-depot-out-of-sight trick?

[gomwon]

Fun hating militaries

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I saw that, and this is all i could think of.

I was very bored. Dont judge me.

[Sutremaine]

Bone bolts are pretty quick as long as you stick to smaller animals. You start getting clutter at around llama size.

can marksdwarf wear metal armor? they seem to default to leather and i got quite some "equipment mismatch" warnings

The uniform defaults are 'leather armour / ranged weapon' and 'metal armour / melee weapon'. Armour can be allotted to melee and ranged dwarves as you like, though you might run into problems if you try to assign too much shield / weapon stuff. I have no idea what the game considers too much, as a dwarf can apparently hold a crutch, a shield, a crossbow, a dagger, and a hauled item in one hand.

The 'equipment mismatch' announcements are quite common when you're in the middle of making stuff. Dwarves switch uniforms whenever something better than what they have becomes available, and that will happen a lot if you're making a big batch of armour.

[melphel]

I've had a fort where I used nothing but marksdwarves.  This wasn't really intentional, I was still new to the game and didn't know that I could make silver weapons from galena (which was the only metal ore on the map).  With simple defenses, it makes things really easy.  A dry moat with a wall and fortifications gave me the option of just taking potshots at sieges until they gave up or died off.

They aren't as good against enemies that are made of inorganic material, can't bleed, or can't feel pain.  The above fort ended when I decided to go hunt down the FBs sealed in the caverns.  Poor guys were melted from the inside out.

[Telgin]

My experience with marksdwarves is that they're very useful, but only as a supplement to the melee dwarves.

My last fort (using the pony mod, but the results should be similar) had 20 melee soldiers and 20 marksmen.  The marksmen would pelt enemies repeatedly, do a pretty good bit of damage, but quite rarely killing anything.  I had to send in the melee soldiers to finish most things off.

Forgotten beasts in particular were bad about this.  I could unload an impressive number of bolts that would cripple body parts and tick the enemy off, but it wasn't until the axes started swinging that they usually died.

Since it was the pony mod, maybe the bolts were less effective against the goblin equivalent ponies than it would be against goblins.  I still get the impression that I'd run out of ammo before a siege was finished off.  I suppose you could turn the squads off to get them to rearm, but that feels like it would be unreliable to me.

[Starver]

That's awesome!  How did you keep the marksdwarves restocked with arrows?  The patrol/supply-depot-out-of-sight trick?

If that's to me (doubt it, my usual wall of text approach is not particularly awesome, I know), I don't even know what that trick you mention is.  I may occasionally put bolt stockpiles right next to patrol-points, and it works Ok.  In the described example my only dedicated bolt stockpile is under my archery range[1], 21 Z-levels below ground, but there may also be some bolts freshly unforbidden bolts in the surface refuse pile after being dump-retrieved from the outer defensive ditches.

It all seems to work.  Maybe because I have tons of bolts.  One or other of my nobles likes bolts, I have loads of silver, and I don't mind making silver bolts when needed.  I've been doing it a lot, anyway.  And I get a whole load of bone bolts from the massive number of bone-giving butchery jobs I run, just to avoid being swamped with each livestock animal that I tend to accumulate breeding stocks from.)


Note the "totally inefficient" comment in the description of the linked-to-fort.  But it works for me.





[1] Consulting my uploaded map of that fortress, for the details...