Of course they get hungry and thirsty -- and then they go eat and drink. They won't starve or dehydrate themselves.
I don't know if they'll die, but they do get unhappy thoughts. And my dwarves aren't all that happy to begin with (especially since they started throwing themselves in the river, riding over the waterfall and going
splat at the bottom).
You're micromanaging too much.
You're probably right. But I was seeing them get unhappy from long patrol duty, unhappy from getting hungry, unhappy from being thirsty,... and in general, I get worried in Dwarf Fortress when I start seeing those kinds of things!
But I'll give that a try. Thanks!
Now, marksdwarves are a bit more complex. I gave up on archery targets for a variety of reasons. ... I have each squad spend one month Training, and one month Patrolling Wall.
Again, I kept seeing unhappy thoughts from long patrol duty, but I'll give this a try. Still, my marksdwarves won't shoot through fortifications, anyway - even when I've arranged prisoners for them to shoot - because they're too dumb to step close enough to the wall to fire through it, even when they happen to be carrying bolts (which they do about half the time, I guess) and I specifically station them there!
So they
never get any better (because, as you say, archery targets seem to be completely worthless). And almost all of my military consists of novice marksdwarves, because I've gotten almost no migrants with other military skills (and no two melee skills the same).
It doesn't train them up very fast, but that's not the point -- the point is to fill out their defensive skills, which an archery target wouldn't do anyway.
Hmm,... I never worried about their defensive skills, because I thought they'd be firing from behind fortifications, anyway. But if they won't do that, I guess I'll have to send them down into melee range, huh?
Heh, heh. I had a troll show up in my dining room unexpectedly (my miners opened up a cavern in a location I missed), so I sent my military to kill it. My marksdwarves showed up with their wooden crossbows and no bolts. You know, it takes a LONG time to kill a troll when you're just slapping him with a light piece of wood! If it wasn't for a couple of dogs which happened to be there, I would probably have lost a lot of dwarves. (The dogs didn't really do any damage, but the troll attacked them, rather than my dwarves.)
The thing is, I thought this new military system was hopelessly confusing, but I expected that it would work after I finally figured it out. Well, after more than a year now, I thought I had it figured out, but it still works terribly for me - not to mention being awkward and even less user-friendly than the rest of Dwarf Fortress!
But maybe I just need another year to figure it out.
Thanks for the tips!
Embark with two dwarves set with Proficient weapon + Proficient teacher, and the second Proficient armor/shield/whatever + Proficient teacher.
Well, with only 7 dwarves and a whole lot of other skills they need - some of which also train slowly - that's kind of hard to do, isn't it? But I often embark with one dwarf with military skills, just not with teacher. Thanks for the tip.
I figured out the secret to train markdwarfs. BOLTS.
If they aren't shooting at your archery targets, you probably don't have enough bolts.
I suspected that, awhile back, but it still doesn't seem to be working for me.
OK, so for a two-man marksdwarf squad, can I set them to 50 bolts - 25 for each? Well, 50 wood, for training, and 50 metal, for fighting? Won't they pick up new bolts when those are used up?
And if they need to train defensively, I should set them up in 2-dwarf squads, shouldn't I? Wouldn't that be the same as my melee dwarves?