v0.34 Talk:Archery

Reorganization

The wiki has a lot of different ranged articles which essentially cover more than one topic. Crossbowman/Bowman/Marksdwarf is one article. Crossbow/Bow is one article, Quiver and misc. military equipment is one article and then there's Ammunution, Hunter and Ranger, Weapons, and Combat skill. Bows have bowman as a skill although crossbows have crossbowman or marksdwarf as a skill but they're too similar in practice to warrant two different pages. The article for the Crossbow item has a nice detailed exposition, and in the 40d version it used to encompass the quiver item, but it also essentially covers the bow item as well although there's not much mention of bow materials/weights and if they're different which might be nice if someone would pull that out of the raws

Archer, or Archery should be the main page which all references to the skill in general should link to as it has all the links to articles which deal with the skill.

Keep articles like:

• Archery

• Links to all archery-based articles. --updated Richards 13:19, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

I'd like to hear some ideas.

Furthest engagement distance

The furthest distance of engagement is 21 tiles including the tile that the Dwarf is on. This means diagonally too. This was tested in the object testing arena. Dwarves will also shoot at 21 tiles away from themselves from 3 z-levels up, and that's the highest that the object testing arena goes up, so it might be higher.

My anecdotal understanding was that the range of engagement was a sphere of radius 20 centered on the archer, and that there is no benefit or penalty to being higher or lower than the target beyond the reduction in horizontal range.--UristDaVinci 05:49, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I had a somewhat skilled Marksdwarf/Archer shoot at a Yeti and 2 Louse Men over a distance oft at least 35 tiles.

This happened after they "interrupted" him, while he was supposed to be fighting another Louse Man, and he decided to fetch more ammo despite still having 10 shots or so left. He then proceeded to empty his quiver at them at ludicrous distances. He didn't hit a thing, tho. 79.223.183.253 13:10, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

Archer Skill

I did some testing on the Archery skill versus no archery skill. There doesn't appear to be any accuracy improvement or firing speed increase.

Five rounds were done with each dwarf having 100 steel arrows and an iron bow. Each team had 40 dwarfs at the furthest possible distance; 20 tiles away from each other on a pedestal. Team 1, (or skilled dwarves), had Grand Master Bowdwarf and Grandmaster Archer. Team 2, or (skill-less dwarves), only had Grand Master Bowdwarf.

Round one : The skilled won with I think 4 dwarves to spare Round two : The skill-less team won with I think 6 dwarves to spare Round three : The skilled team won with 10 dwarves to spare. I gave them all full plate copper armor and grand master armor user, Round four : The skilled team won with 20 dwarves to spare. 19 tiles away same teams. Round five : The skill-less dwarves won with 15 remaining. I gave them all full plate steel armor

I don't think the Archery skill does anything. Feel free to test. --Richards 18:15, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

rate of fire vs marksdwarf skill rank

Tested in arena using 15 Giant Desert Scorpions with featherwood crossbows and 100 featherwood bolts against 1 giant sponge vampire. The GDS won't gain experience from shooting, and the GSV won't die.

rank	shots fired	relative speed
14	98	1.69
13	95	1.64
12	95	1.64
11	94	1.62
10	92	1.59
9	92	1.59
8	90	1.55
7	88	1.52
6	86	1.48
5	84	1.45
4	80	1.38
3	74	1.28
2	68	1.17
1	61	1.05
0	58	1.00

It appears that there is a dramatic improvement in firing speed from rank 0 (dabbling) to rank 5 (proficient), followed by diminishing returns. The graph of the data looks like an exponential decay function.

Keep in mind that Toady likely controls the rate of fire by altering the "reload time", and that the time between shots is rounded to an integer number of ticks.--UristDaVinci 05:03, 8 July 2012 (UTC)