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Advanced marksdwarf training guide
Marksdwarves are fairly buggy, and often refuse to use archery ranges, or stand in front of them, and fail to fire their crossbows. This guide goes into details explaining known bugs, and getting your Marksdwarves to train properly, as well as going into details regarding various ranged weaponry.
Understanding Ranged Weaponry
In vanilla Dwarf Fortress, the raws define three types of ranged weapons, each with their own skill and ammo.
| Ranged Weapons | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Ranged Weapon | Ranged Skill | Melee Skill | Ammo |
| Crossbow | Marksdwarf | Hammerdwarf | Bolts |
| Bow | Bowman | Swordman | Arrows |
| Blowgun | Blowgunner | Swordman | Darts |
Of these, dwarfs can only make crossbows and bolts, but can use bows, and blowguns if you recover them from downed enemeis or trade for them. If playing a modded game, replace crossbow in the following with one of the above weapons, and proper ammo type.
Equipping You Marksdwarfs
The Minimum Outfit
At a minimum, each dwarf requires the following to successfully use the crossbow.
- One crossbow
- One quiver
- One stack of bolts for each markdwarf to fire
Quivers are equipped on the upper body slot. Due to a bug, sometimes they fail to pickup a quiver if wearing heavy armor. A workaround for this is below if you run into it. Wood and metal bolts are generated in sticks of 25. Bone bolts are generated in stacks of 5.
Crossbows
Crossbows can be made out of wood or bone at a bowyers workshop, or out of metal at a metalsmith/magma forge. Metal crossbows can be forged out of copper, bronze, bismuth bronze, iron, steel, or adamantine. Quivers must be made of leather at a leatherworks. The material a crossbow is made out of appears to have no effect on its lethality on ranged bolts. However, if you expect your marksdwarves to end up in melee, they will use their crossbow as a hammer, thus it is recommended to make them out of a dense metal.
Quivers and Bolts
Quivers can hold 25 bolts, and dwarves will pick up multiple stacks if necessary to fill it. In other words, they will successfully pick up five seperate stacks of bone bolts, or 25 seperate bolts if you're using a bolt splitting technique in your fortress. Bolts are collected in last-in-first-out order; that is, dwarves will always go for the newest bolts in your fortress, even if there is an ammo stockpile three steps away from them. Each squad with markdwarves must be assigned ammo; as they deplete it, Dwarf Fortress will automatically add addition ammo to the squad if there are some in the fortress, again following the principle of LIFO.
Avoiding 'Equipment Mismatch' Issues
Miners, wood cutters, and hunters have a"default "uniform". When these labors are enabled, a dwarf will carry the equipment apprioate to that job, making it unavailable for the military, and causing issues if that dwarf is then drafted. In general, its safe to put miners and wood cutters in ranged squads, and hunters in melee squads, as this prevents them from equipped the same type of item twice.
If you are going to draft hunters, clear their labors, and [b]confirm[/b] that your hunter has put his quiver and crossbow away. If you don't, he'll generate equipment mismatches. Furthermore, if a marksdwarf grabs a quiver that was once used by a hunter, and still has bolts in it, they may cause a mismatch which the dwarf itself can not clear. This can be resolved by opening the dwarf in the "k" menu, then open his inventory, find the quiver, and forbid the bolts in it. He'll dump them, and properly reload.
If you don't use hunters, you may want to remove their bolt assignments from the ammunition screen.
Setting your Marksdwarf's barrack
The first rule of marksdwarf training is you do *not* assign them a normal barrack. If they have that, they will prefer to train as hammerdwarves with their crossbows vs. actually shooting bolts. Furthermore, as the game gives precedence to melee training, they will almost never use an archery range even if one is assigned if they have a choice.
When training, a dwarf has four possible options, which they will take in roughly this order:
- Squad Training - Individual Combat Drill - Spar - Archery Training
Squad training and sparing require multiple dwarfs (and yes, marksdwarves *will* spar as long as they're novice hammerdwarves, training their melee skills while doing so). Except for archery training, dwarves require a standard barracks to conduct any of the above activities. Notably, it is possible to actually train marksdwarves via demonstration, both Crossbow and Archery skills are trainable via demonstrations.
Training, minimium of 1 forces them to work solo. Since they don't have a normal barrack, they can't drill, which leaves Archery Training as the only possible way to train. Except for food and drink, they will *constantly* offload bolts, switching to "Cannot follow orders" when the fortress's supply is depleted. As soon as bolts exist, they'll reload, and make them disappear too.
Instead, build a room with a bunch of archery ranges. I recommend putting them against the left most wall so the shooting direction is automatically correct, but this should work regardless.
The room must be large enough that the marksdwarf has a one gap space between them and the target; I just make their "barrack" 10x10, and put an ammo stockpile in it.
Here's a screenshot.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/1uBGRIz.png[/img]
Once you build your range, you must define it as a room. Make it so it touches the far wall, and don't worry, range rooms can overlap. You have to do this for each. Make sure the shooting direction is correct! In addition, your marksdwarf squad MUST at minimum have train, and squad equipment set.
Repeat this for each range; you'll have 5-10 targets overlapping each other and assigned to your marksdwarves squad (in my screenshots, they are the "Home Guard")
[b]3. The Military Management Screen[/b]
This is by far the most difficult part. Fear the 'm' menu, for it eats children. The 'm' menu is confusing on the best days, but this guide will walk you through it.
The first and default page is the positions page. Ignore it for now, you want to make the right uniform for your marksdwarves, press 'u' to bring up that screen. Do yourself a favor and just delete the default archer uniform. It's wrong and will not work properly.
Create a new uniform, and add the following:
- crossbow (do NOT used individual choice, ranged; you *will* end up with dwarves who think an axe is a ranged weapon) - shield (optional) - leather armor - leather headwear - leather legwear - leather armor - leather legwear
Make sure "exact match" is selected. This appears to fix most of the issues of them not picking up quivers. You might be able to get away with over clothing however.
Here's what it should like if you did it right:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/gdBlhru.png[/img]
Now press 'p' to go back to the positions menu. When you create the squad, it will ask for a uniform. This is misleading; the game *only* applies the uniform to the first dwarf selected. We'll fix that in a moment. Select your recruits, like so, then switch to the 'e' menu. Select your squad, then press 'U' (that's captain U) to bring up the uniform selection screen.
Here's what it looks like.
Highlight your crossbow uniform, and press 'Shift-Enter' to assign it to all positions in the squad. If you then check the positions screen, at the top, it will say 10/10 marksdwarves, instead of 1/1 markdwarf 9/9 wrestlers, which is what will happen if you leave it on defaults.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/U4Iz9ua.png[/img]
We're almost done. Go to the ammo screen.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/Fkrp6hG.png[/img]
If you haven't done anything with marksdwarves before, then the defaults are correct, go to the schedule screen.
If you're setting this by hand, here's what to know.
- Each squad needs the correct ammo - Crossbowman/Markdwarves use bolts - Bowman use arrows - Blowgunners use darts
- Set a material preference if you want*, and set it so bolts are used for both training and combat. I generally have enough ore that it isn't hard to mass produce copper bolts. They will gum up if bolts for training and combat are different, here's the bug report: www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?action=post;board=11.0
* - might gum up if they pick a quiver with the wrong ammo. I strongly recommend just leaving it as "bolts"
Generally, for me, once they get elite or legendary, I just put them on patrol duty and have them stop training, in which I change their ammo assignment.
Now, for the magic bit that gets them doing nothing *but* training. Open the schedule screen, and look at the orders. The default is "Train, 10 minimium". [b]This is WRONG[/b]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/MjsLA2U.png[/img]
Press x to delete the order. The schedule screen will change to show no scheduled orders.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/IjBQQzv.png[/img]
Press 'o' to pull up the give order screen. Press o until 'Train' is set, and then press + so it shows minimum 1, like this. Then press shift-done to give the order. The screen will look like this:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/rlGRoJ9.png[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/rVahErV.png[/img]
Now do it again, for the total members of your squad (you CAN give more than 5 orders, you just have to scroll in the orders screen to see it). When you're done it should look like this, after doing it 10 times. [img]http://i.imgur.com/aOyxjsZ.png[/img]
Copy and paste the order to all the months. You can also set Sleep in Barrack at need to increase their training time, though this will raise the stress levels of dwarves in the squad due to tired thoughts.
You're almost done. Activate your squad, and after they finish picking up equipment, watch your bolt supplies vanish as your marksdwarves do nothing *but* archery training.
[b]4. Wait, what?[/b]
Yup. Here's how it works. Military dwarves have a preference list roughly as follows to training
- Squad training - Individual Combat Drill - Spar - Archery Training (if equipped with a bow).
Squad training and sparing require multiple dwarves (and yes, marksdwarves *will* spar as long as they're noivce hammerdwarves*). Training, minimium of 1 forces them to work solo. Since they don't have a normal barrack, they can't drill, which leaves Archery Training as the only possible way to train. Except for food and drink, they will *constantly* offload bolts, switching to "Cannot follow orders" when the fortress's supply is depleted. As soon as bolts exist, they'll reload, and make them disappear too.
* - Replace hammer with sword for bowdwarves and blowgunners.
Archery training grants less experience than live fire (8XP per bolt vs. 30XP), but no micromanagement, no hauling, one setup, and you can ignore it until you get that glorious announcement that Urist has become an Elite Marksdwarf.
[b]5. Stopping them from charging into melee/Reloading issues[/b]
The short version: DON'T USE STATION!
There's two ways to stop them charging into melee. Patrol Routes, and Defend Burrors order. I'll expand this guide once the science is done.
For patrol routes, marksdwarves *will* not take a Pickup Equipment order as long as they have line of sight on their enemy. Have them go through a door or something, and as soon as they loose sight of the goblin/forgotten beast/demon, they'll immediately go find bolts and reload.
I'm still sciencing the Defend Burrows order to see how effective it is at preventing melee charges.