WARNING: Creating too many squads can kill your save due to a current bug, so this workaround might cause a more serious issue. Note about relevant skills: Marksdwarf - Accuracy, higher rate of fire, enemy dodge reduction. Archery - Enemy dodge reduction + enhanced fortification use (allegedly). Hammerdwarf - Using the crossbow in melee. A more efficient version of the archery range is to have your dwarves shoot live targets. Check out my cage video to see how to set up such an area. th-cam.com/video/wyauXMMVt-M/w-d-xo.html
**Another fix for the not-picking-up-bolts bug** (worked for me for all my 10 ranged squads): 1. Make sure that you add the xbow uniform before creating a xbow squad. (Do it while selecting your melee squad, or while selecting a dummy squad created just for this reason) 2. Then "create new squad", with the xbow uniform by defeault. Do not assign a milita camptain, do this after creating the squad. => The problem arises if you try to first create a squad, and then give it xbow uniform. **Some, background** : - All my "civilians" are put into a ranged milita, to train once a year in crossbow/bow/arquebus use (last one is a mod) - I assign them all to squads, using the steps above, haven't had the ammo problem: but who knows, maybe I was lucky. - One month a year will not create experts, but they will become noivce shield users / xbow dwarves which hopefully increases their chances of survival. - Make sure to not only give them a archery range, but a proper barracks as well, so they can also train dodgeing and shield use. **Some more details** : - The ranged milita is equipped with: ranged weapon, chain mail (as it covers neck), helm (covers head and neck), shield/buckler, leather robe (looks cool, gives a bit of cover maybe). - Could probably afford more armor for them, but untrained armor users will be slowed down greatly from too much armor; but maybe giving leather leggings and high boots would be nice. - When attacked they are all called to the ramparts. A hail of bolts, arrows, bullets from above. I always keep my bridge/front door open for enemies to come accross the bridge. - While crossing, many enemies are knocked off, or they jump off to dodge the arrows. Underneath is an array of upright spikes and fixed spears. - Once enemies come inside the fort, they are in the courtyard (they come in as I have chained up some dogs to aggro / lure them in). - my marksdwarves turn around and start peppering again. Right before my dogs are attacked, I unlock doors all around the courtyard, releasing my melee squads. - There aren't much friendly fire in DF, except for ballista bolts, have only had a few cases, and normally the melee dwarves don't hold a grudge. - To ensure this strategy, the marksdwarves are locked inside the towers / ramparts. "Defend burrow" command seems to be most successful. Also add some stockpiles of ammo inside the burrows. Doesn't always seem to work, but often dwarves will go and re-supply if they need more. Also added a barrel of brew inside each burrow, just in case the siege is a long one.
That's the way I "fix" my marksdwarves too. For the armor I would add chain leggins and low boots to provide some more defense. Cloaks don't provide any physical defense and easily teared by wooden arrows (all civilian clothing has tag, nullifying protection), but can protect against "dust" type of attacks.
@@Feanor1397 any particular reason you use low boots vs high? From what I gather, having marksdwarves with metal Xbow, metal shield, metal helm, chain shirt, metal gauntlets, metal high boots, provides very decent protection without too much weight. Then maybe leather leggings and leather armor but those don’t usually give near the protection as plate does and would be the heaviest pieces. Metal has come in so useful against bite attacks from werebeasts that have saved many from potentially turning.
Dude your videos are so good. Maybe the best tutorial videos I have ever seen for any game. Concise, so informative, amazingly edited. I love you, and you allow me to love this game.
I've had marksdwarves standing by fortifications leave, go down stairs, around a hallway, and rush into melee combat with enemies rather than use their crossbow. I can only assume that they do this because they can *see* the enemy, but because they were not directly adjacent to the fortification, they couldn't fire at it, so rather than path to the fortification and fire, they pathed into melee combat, which required turning around and leaving to go down stairs. The burrow method seems like the only reliable method to get them to stand directly adjacent to fortifications, which appears to be necessary for the AI to decide to use the crossbow. One concern is that, will militia members assigned a "defend burrow" command path out of the burrow when they are hungry/thirsty/sleepy? Civilians won't, but that's because they're assigned to the burrow, rather than given a military command. If so, then we should only try to use the burrow defense command when there is immediate danger, otherwise they might starve themselves.
They do path out in some situations - during the burrow demo in the video one of the dwarves wandered away to sleep. However I don't know if they'll also wander away to eat/drink.
If they have military duty i think they will stay hungry and thirsty until they are relieved from orders. I think i had in one of my forts some undisciplined where they started to disobay orders and go eat but they did stood there for quite some time. Enought where that will make many people question ok nothing is happening and i really dont do anything can i go eat something. So asside from the most extreme nonsense like kipping them an entire season in a defend borrow they are listeling the orders preaty reliebly.
Yeah! At least I think so? I haven't gotten a chance to play since that last big patch but apparantly it fixes a lot of this and also might have fixed building destroyers too.
For training with crossbow, do you know there is an option where you can set to forbid used ammo only during sieges? This way your dwarves will shoot arrow, collect (if you set your archery target right with a ditch behind it) or re equip ammo, shoot again and continuosly train their marks dwarf skill this way?
Yup you can do that, however other bolts might fall on top of them when they go to retrieve it so it is safer to leave it forbidden until the range is not in use.
Yeah I've been having this issue too. A lot of my latest stream was spent looking at a stack of steel shields and wondering why they weren't swopping out their iron ones.
@@FurtherReadingTV I mean mine did pretty bad but i think its because thy where novices in 1 skill and dabbling in the others. aside from that i think it just gonna take longer to train but i do think crossbows are essential in fortress defence. That is if you don't want to cheese the AI with trap labirint.
Forget the target all together you don’t even need it just make a downslope at the end of a training zone and all the bolts will fall in it. Dwarfs will have to pick them up but you never lose any.
Oh I didn't know FBs not attacking doors was a bug. I'm lucky then haha. Kinda sad that a month after the initial release, one of the most important aspects of the game (ranged fortress defense) is so bugged it's nearly unusable.
Been like that for more than ten years. This dev is incompetent. Despite all the praise he gets I wish it was just about anyone else making this game because it has so much potential that will never be realised.
Dwarves can hold a shield and a crossbow at the same time, they will simply have less ammo as they would carry some in their off hand without a shield.
@@NIL0S All this time and I was under the impression that crossbows required 2 hands, to be used. Its prob in some of the older patches. Guess my fully armored crossbowmen will have a bit more protection now.
My dwarves shoot bolts, The first squad I make armor and then create two new uniforms from their squad info doing full steel. After that I create archer squads, full steel crossbows. I have storage for iron bolts exclusively. NO BINS!!! Seems to do the trick. I am also very careful unforbidding stuff of fallen enemies as to not touch spent bolts. Some UI interfaces to solve these issues are missing,
You should probably have watched the video. You're listing "fixes" that were debunked. Plus you got the bug wrong: the bug is that Dwarves won't refill their ammo. This is a luck based bug - some Dwarves randomly lose the drive to refill spent ammo. You're just performing pointless rituals and assuming they have any impact on the outcome.
Thanks for all the tips so far. Would really appreciate an in depth look at world generation. Like how to replicate the low, medium, and high selections for say 'savage' relates to the corresponding settings in custom world generation. Again, thanks for all the help your vids provide!
In recent review Toadies said they want to completely rework xbowdorfs, no one uses it not only because of bugs but because its too much hassle to get it to work.
Another way of making sure they stand right by the fortification is by building a 3-block thick wall behind where you want them to stand. So the only place they can be is in front of the fortifications
With the bolt bug it's yellow because there is a bolt they want to pick up, the issue is that bolt is forbidden! If you unforbid all the bolts on your map they'll run around picking them up and using them. This often happens in seiges or with targets where you collect bolts. There's a standing order you can change to stop bolts from being auto forbidden
@@FurtherReadingTV Along that vein of thought, could the bolt they want be inaccessible? I haven't run into (or at least noticed) this bug yet, and my current map is fairly new and doesn't have a real marksdwarf squad set up, so I'm not able to mess around with it.
Bolt bug has been around at least since DF2012. Im sure Tarn has an idea where it is, but who knows when he'll next pass over that code. I never found a better workaround than the one described here, though marksdwarves who are engaged in combat and then leave it sometimes reload, so i had some luck with shutters on my pillboxes to break LoS on demand
Oh... I was wondering why my marksdwarves would always run into melee... well... so I wasn't all this time setting up my ranged dwarves for nothing... great
I noticed that sometimes dwarfs will shoot right from the edge, however I found 100% working method. Make sure that archery range include path to target from any point of range on same z level. If you have 10 targets in line, make 10 tile channel in front of them, but make little path around channel and include it in range
WARNING: Creating too many squads can kill your save due to a current bug, so this workaround might cause a more serious issue.
Note about relevant skills:
Marksdwarf - Accuracy, higher rate of fire, enemy dodge reduction.
Archery - Enemy dodge reduction + enhanced fortification use (allegedly).
Hammerdwarf - Using the crossbow in melee.
A more efficient version of the archery range is to have your dwarves shoot live targets. Check out my cage video to see how to set up such an area. th-cam.com/video/wyauXMMVt-M/w-d-xo.html
Any idea what "too many squads" is? I'm 15 years into my fort, and have 12 squads. Idk how many times I've had to remake them, now I'm scared 😨
No idea! It's just something putnam said in the recent Blind interview but I don't think the number was shared.
ok..only 5 squads..so im still safe then..
**Another fix for the not-picking-up-bolts bug** (worked for me for all my 10 ranged squads):
1. Make sure that you add the xbow uniform before creating a xbow squad. (Do it while selecting your melee squad, or while selecting a dummy squad created just for this reason)
2. Then "create new squad", with the xbow uniform by defeault. Do not assign a milita camptain, do this after creating the squad.
=> The problem arises if you try to first create a squad, and then give it xbow uniform.
**Some, background** :
- All my "civilians" are put into a ranged milita, to train once a year in crossbow/bow/arquebus use (last one is a mod)
- I assign them all to squads, using the steps above, haven't had the ammo problem: but who knows, maybe I was lucky.
- One month a year will not create experts, but they will become noivce shield users / xbow dwarves which hopefully increases their chances of survival.
- Make sure to not only give them a archery range, but a proper barracks as well, so they can also train dodgeing and shield use.
**Some more details** :
- The ranged milita is equipped with: ranged weapon, chain mail (as it covers neck), helm (covers head and neck), shield/buckler, leather robe (looks cool, gives a bit of cover maybe).
- Could probably afford more armor for them, but untrained armor users will be slowed down greatly from too much armor; but maybe giving leather leggings and high boots would be nice.
- When attacked they are all called to the ramparts. A hail of bolts, arrows, bullets from above. I always keep my bridge/front door open for enemies to come accross the bridge.
- While crossing, many enemies are knocked off, or they jump off to dodge the arrows. Underneath is an array of upright spikes and fixed spears.
- Once enemies come inside the fort, they are in the courtyard (they come in as I have chained up some dogs to aggro / lure them in).
- my marksdwarves turn around and start peppering again. Right before my dogs are attacked, I unlock doors all around the courtyard, releasing my melee squads.
- There aren't much friendly fire in DF, except for ballista bolts, have only had a few cases, and normally the melee dwarves don't hold a grudge.
- To ensure this strategy, the marksdwarves are locked inside the towers / ramparts. "Defend burrow" command seems to be most successful. Also add some stockpiles of ammo inside the burrows. Doesn't always seem to work, but often dwarves will go and re-supply if they need more. Also added a barrel of brew inside each burrow, just in case the siege is a long one.
That's the way I "fix" my marksdwarves too. For the armor I would add chain leggins and low boots to provide some more defense. Cloaks don't provide any physical defense and easily teared by wooden arrows (all civilian clothing has tag, nullifying protection), but can protect against "dust" type of attacks.
Thanks for the very detailed comment! I love how much I learn from people commenting on my vids!
@@Feanor1397 any particular reason you use low boots vs high?
From what I gather, having marksdwarves with metal Xbow, metal shield, metal helm, chain shirt, metal gauntlets, metal high boots, provides very decent protection without too much weight. Then maybe leather leggings and leather armor but those don’t usually give near the protection as plate does and would be the heaviest pieces.
Metal has come in so useful against bite attacks from werebeasts that have saved many from potentially turning.
You can also simply make a different burrow for each side of the fortifications and activate the burrow you need, instead of repainting.
Dude your videos are so good. Maybe the best tutorial videos I have ever seen for any game. Concise, so informative, amazingly edited. I love you, and you allow me to love this game.
Excellent video, I gave up on Marksdwaves as they wouldn't equip bolts I had for them. I'll have to give them another go
"Badhail" is a really good name for a crossbow squad.
Awesome tip about fixing the ammo bug. Worked like a charm for me!
I've had marksdwarves standing by fortifications leave, go down stairs, around a hallway, and rush into melee combat with enemies rather than use their crossbow. I can only assume that they do this because they can *see* the enemy, but because they were not directly adjacent to the fortification, they couldn't fire at it, so rather than path to the fortification and fire, they pathed into melee combat, which required turning around and leaving to go down stairs. The burrow method seems like the only reliable method to get them to stand directly adjacent to fortifications, which appears to be necessary for the AI to decide to use the crossbow.
One concern is that, will militia members assigned a "defend burrow" command path out of the burrow when they are hungry/thirsty/sleepy? Civilians won't, but that's because they're assigned to the burrow, rather than given a military command. If so, then we should only try to use the burrow defense command when there is immediate danger, otherwise they might starve themselves.
You can lock your marksdwarves behind doors to force them to not chase after enemies.
They do path out in some situations - during the burrow demo in the video one of the dwarves wandered away to sleep. However I don't know if they'll also wander away to eat/drink.
If they have military duty i think they will stay hungry and thirsty until they are relieved from orders. I think i had in one of my forts some undisciplined where they started to disobay orders and go eat but they did stood there for quite some time. Enought where that will make many people question ok nothing is happening and i really dont do anything can i go eat something. So asside from the most extreme nonsense like kipping them an entire season in a defend borrow they are listeling the orders preaty reliebly.
OMG thanks a lot I haven't found any fix for this ammo bug and this fixed it
man its to bad you can't select where you want the dwarves to station like you were highlighting a burrow or something.
Cool video!
Nice video, educational and useful as always!
A tavern covered in blood, vomit, teeth and a few corpses. Just dwarven things.
I seen a "fixed bolts bug" in a recend changelog, is the same bug you are talking in your video?
Yeah! At least I think so? I haven't gotten a chance to play since that last big patch but apparantly it fixes a lot of this and also might have fixed building destroyers too.
For training with crossbow, do you know there is an option where you can set to forbid used ammo only during sieges? This way your dwarves will shoot arrow, collect (if you set your archery target right with a ditch behind it) or re equip ammo, shoot again and continuosly train their marks dwarf skill this way?
Yup you can do that, however other bolts might fall on top of them when they go to retrieve it so it is safer to leave it forbidden until the range is not in use.
Really helpful video, thanks!
Have you tried to press the "Update Equipment" button
Yup, doesn't work.
I still have problems with squad not having full designated armor equip..despite im convince, ive enough armor available for all dwarf
Yeah I've been having this issue too. A lot of my latest stream was spent looking at a stack of steel shields and wondering why they weren't swopping out their iron ones.
Has the bolt bug been fixed yet?
Yes I believe so! The last patch had some ammo related changes, although I haven't played myself yet to confirm.
I have a Question. What if i arm my Crossbow dwarfs with hand weapons like war hammers.
Good question! I believe they can't have both a melee and ranged weapon equipped, but I've never tried it myself.
@@FurtherReadingTV I mean mine did pretty bad but i think its because thy where novices in 1 skill and dabbling in the others. aside from that i think it just gonna take longer to train but i do think crossbows are essential in fortress defence. That is if you don't want to cheese the AI with trap labirint.
Ok i come back to my old dwarfs and traind them and it looks like now that they are better they start to kick some ass.
Had hope it'd work this time since your method is different from the popular fixes but alas still no marksdwarfs for me 😔
Really good content
Forget the target all together you don’t even need it just make a downslope at the end of a training zone and all the bolts will fall in it. Dwarfs will have to pick them up but you never lose any.
Oh I didn't know FBs not attacking doors was a bug. I'm lucky then haha. Kinda sad that a month after the initial release, one of the most important aspects of the game (ranged fortress defense) is so bugged it's nearly unusable.
Been like that for more than ten years. This dev is incompetent. Despite all the praise he gets I wish it was just about anyone else making this game because it has so much potential that will never be realised.
Can they shoot to different Z levels?
Yup! However their range is reduced (even when firing from a higher position)
fixed?
The bolt bug is fixed and dwarves are better at using archery targets for training! Everything else mentioned in video is still relevant though.
Bolt bug. I sorted mine by simply making a new dedicated storage area and deleting the old one.
gg
Wait, your dwarves are using shield and crossbow!!!??
You can have this but you would want buckler i believe if they have shields they will run in and bash shield xD
Dwarves can hold a shield and a crossbow at the same time, they will simply have less ammo as they would carry some in their off hand without a shield.
@@NIL0S All this time and I was under the impression that crossbows required 2 hands, to be used. Its prob in some of the older patches. Guess my fully armored crossbowmen will have a bit more protection now.
your dwarves can wield 5 weapons in one hand (but hit only by one each time)
Loose the armour and they're quicker to sort their lives out
My dwarves shoot bolts, The first squad I make armor and then create two new uniforms from their squad info doing full steel. After that I create archer squads, full steel crossbows. I have storage for iron bolts exclusively. NO BINS!!! Seems to do the trick. I am also very careful unforbidding stuff of fallen enemies as to not touch spent bolts. Some UI interfaces to solve these issues are missing,
You should probably have watched the video. You're listing "fixes" that were debunked. Plus you got the bug wrong: the bug is that Dwarves won't refill their ammo.
This is a luck based bug - some Dwarves randomly lose the drive to refill spent ammo. You're just performing pointless rituals and assuming they have any impact on the outcome.
🐉these ⚾🏀🏈🏐🏉🎱
Thanks for all the tips so far. Would really appreciate an in depth look at world generation. Like how to replicate the low, medium, and high selections for say 'savage' relates to the corresponding settings in custom world generation. Again, thanks for all the help your vids provide!
In recent review Toadies said they want to completely rework xbowdorfs, no one uses it not only because of bugs but because its too much hassle to get it to work.
Another way of making sure they stand right by the fortification is by building a 3-block thick wall behind where you want them to stand. So the only place they can be is in front of the fortifications
For me when I go to equip the bolts symbol is red like I don’t have the arrows
That is usually due to hunters calling dibs on the current arrows. Try making more and eventually they'll notice that there are free arrows.
With the bolt bug it's yellow because there is a bolt they want to pick up, the issue is that bolt is forbidden! If you unforbid all the bolts on your map they'll run around picking them up and using them. This often happens in seiges or with targets where you collect bolts. There's a standing order you can change to stop bolts from being auto forbidden
Just checked that and it doesn't seem to be the issue - all the bolts on the map are unlocked.
@@FurtherReadingTV ah that's unfortunate, it works for me consistently. There's definitely some crazy voodoo going on with it
@@FurtherReadingTV Along that vein of thought, could the bolt they want be inaccessible?
I haven't run into (or at least noticed) this bug yet, and my current map is fairly new and doesn't have a real marksdwarf squad set up, so I'm not able to mess around with it.
@Masau Fuku Hmmm, yeah I think that's it! Some of the bolts are in the water.
I think you're on to something! Gonna try this the next time the bug comes up.
Bolt bug has been around at least since DF2012. Im sure Tarn has an idea where it is, but who knows when he'll next pass over that code. I never found a better workaround than the one described here, though marksdwarves who are engaged in combat and then leave it sometimes reload, so i had some luck with shutters on my pillboxes to break LoS on demand
My archer has the ammo always showing in red and it's never picked up. Should I still try the workaround mentioned in the video?
Honestly I was gonna avoid having any archers, but we did manage to steal a steel crossbow artefact
Try building more bolts - might be your hunters are hoarding all the bolts.
Oh... I was wondering why my marksdwarves would always run into melee... well... so I wasn't all this time setting up my ranged dwarves for nothing... great
I use crossbow and melee weapon uniform, works well enough. Only need shields for fire threats.
I thought channeling in front of archery targets didn't work anymore?
Due to the bolt bug I've been avoiding them so that could be the case - I'm just going by what the wiki says.
I noticed that sometimes dwarfs will shoot right from the edge, however I found 100% working method. Make sure that archery range include path to target from any point of range on same z level. If you have 10 targets in line, make 10 tile channel in front of them, but make little path around channel and include it in range