Bay 12 Games Forum

Not sure what would cause your marksdwarves to not shoot at viable targets outside of the fortifications. I've had plenty of success stationing archers on top of parapets that are 5x5 internal. Once gobbos show up, the marksdwarves all crowd to the outer edge, up against the fortifications, and begin to shoot.

As for weapon choice, it seems that letting your dwarves choose their own will have them grabbing the nicest weapons rather than the ones they have skills for. I always manually set up uniforms for each of the weapon-types.

I've seen this happening as well. My guess is that they only do target practice for a small portion of their training time. Setting up a weapon or armor rack for them should have them organizing sparring or demonstrations when they aren't interested in shooting at targets.

I've recently been playing around with the difference between three-dwarf squads and two-dwarf squads. I'm finding that two dwarves, set to train constantly, will train each other up through sparring quite rapidly. With my three-dwarf squads, letting one of them always be off-duty, I never managed to get Legendary combat skills over the first couple of years. However, two dwarves with a weapon and shield have been consistently able to become Legendary fighters within the first year. There does seem to be some slow down once you start producing all the armor components as your soldiers will run out of training to grab their new gear, but I imagine once my armory is stocked, they should begin training optimally again.

Edit: They do have some negative thoughts about long patrols, but once they hit Legendary they don't care any more, so I haven't had any problems with tantruming combat monsters.

Ahh, that does make sense. I haven't often run into the problem of having too many items to haul to the depot, but I have seen a friend's fort where he was unable to move even a quarter of his many, many items to the depot before the merchants packed up and left.

...efficient way to remove excess stone is to make rock crafts/instruments (not mugs!).

I was curious about this. Why not mugs? You often get 3 mugs per job, so have more product to decorate and sell.

Or just stick it in a meeting hall and watch all the drooling dwarves crowd around it. Oh, and put it over a pit for dropping the most illustrious of your foes. Let them watch.

As far as I know, you just got -really- lucky with the craft rolls. However, my knowledge of the skill code is minimal and based mostly on observation.