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[Hummingbird]

The fact that bolts can kill and stun is all good! We want that, but think about how long it would take to load a crossbow... If crossbows could fire like a Garand semi-auto, there would have never been a need for spears, maces, swords or any sort of melee weapon. Indeed that is WWII technology.

*ahem*

Very cool link! I still don't think those things can do 2 rounds per second.

I don't think most any of us could carve three mugs from stone in 10 seconds, or grow plants in 3 minutes either.

Nor does a year normally only take half an hour to pass.

DF is not normal scaled time.

You raise an interesting point there, but the problem remains that marksdwarves are able to fire at the same rate as swordsdwarves can swing swords, as each takes only one action to execute.  I'd imagine that operating a crossbow would take several actions, each of which would take as long as swinging a sword. 

I'm by no means an expert, but don't you have to load the bolt into the crossbow, crank a handle to cock it, then aim, before you can even take one shot?

[Sir Finkus]

The fact that bolts can kill and stun is all good! We want that, but think about how long it would take to load a crossbow... If crossbows could fire like a Garand semi-auto, there would have never been a need for spears, maces, swords or any sort of melee weapon. Indeed that is WWII technology.

*ahem*

Very cool link! I still don't think those things can do 2 rounds per second.

I don't think most any of us could carve three mugs from stone in 10 seconds, or grow plants in 3 minutes either.

Nor does a year normally only take half an hour to pass.

DF is not normal scaled time.

You raise an interesting point there, but the problem remains that marksdwarves are able to fire at the same rate as swordsdwarves can swing swords, as each takes only one action to execute.  I'd imagine that operating a crossbow would take several actions, each of which would take as long as swinging a sword. 

I'm by no means an expert, but don't you have to load the bolt into the crossbow, crank a handle to cock it, then aim, before you can even take one shot?

Not with a repeating crossbow, this one is kind of crappy but you'll get the idea.  I imagine you could fire one pretty fast if you really tried.  Admittedly, they weren't very powerful and were usually used in conjunction with poisons or against unarmored targets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjmuc5IBv2Q

[Neonivek]

Rapid fire Crossbows that didn't work with chambers (basically a crossbow ontop of another crossbow so to speak) tended to have issues with power.

At least that is what I was told.

[HatfieldCW]

I was just playing a little Mount & Blade, and two things occurred to me:

First, if the corssbows in DF get a slower rate of fire, they'll need a range boost such that you can get off three or four aimed shots on a guy while he charges through your effective range.  With the range being what it is, I think that's about what we have now.

Second, if you're headed out there with a crossbow, it's not the only thing you're carrying.  Smashing the thing into a guy's face is okay, but why not have a shield on your back and a mace on your belt (assuming belts get introduced), allowing marksdwarves to also serve as melee units once the distance is closed?  It would justify a reduction in crossbow deadliness without devaluing the units and their training, and it would be sweet to equip them that way.

[Shoku]

Massed archers and crossbowmen are to be feared indeed, but currently even a single markdwarf/marksgoblin is to be feared, almost more than any other creature in the game. Yes, I have read the dev logs over the past year, and I remember some stuff was said about it but it is difficult to search for. I'm not convinced at all that the tissue layers etc. will protect against bolts, nor should they.

A crossbow bolt can kill a heavily armored enemy, no doubt about it, but at 2 rounds per second, even if you miss half the time, the kill ratio for ranged vs. melee is seven to one at 10 meters. Clearly, it's the firing rate that is way out of whack, and that has to be the easiest thing in the world to fix.

I'm not seeing it in the to do list, and that's why I'm asking. I know it has been discussed but not recently.

They fire as fast as a melee unit swings their sword. Given equal crappy skill or legendary skill this isn't that far off.

The thing about arrows has been that they just had the hit or miss calculation and then hit some organ, internal or external, mostly randomly. Now if you're wearing a breastplate an arrow in the heart has to penetrate your armor and still be on a straight path to get through all the connective tissue and then finally slash open your heart. 20,000 wooden bolts from novices are not going to do that. An artifact crossbow in the hands of a legendary crossbowdwarf with super-fine crafted steel bolts? Maybe.

Arrow-hail is still getting hit a whole lot of times but if you've got one unit that can do that alone with the same experience it could flash it's sword around just as much and dice it's enemies up into cubes before they started to fall apart.
As the dev log shows the place the arrow hits comes first so if 99% of your forward facing side is plate steel then 99% of the arrows or bolts don't matter. I don't think the plate Dwarves wear covers quite that much (take the joins into consideration,) but that's more the tune of the new mechanic we'll see.

See...I never noticed this problem.  Legendary axe lords are FAR superior to marksdwarves.  In my fortresses marksdwarves die off early.  Axe dwarves do too, at first, but once they get legendary wrestling and shield user they start becoming WAY superior to the marksdwarves.  Any legendary axelord can take down an entire invading army all by himself.  Even if they have bolts.  Ive never had a marksdwarf who could do that...unless he was on top of a wall sitting next to a bolt stockpile, and the only entrance to the fort was right under him.

Thats a lot of conditions that need to be met to make these guys uber.  Meanwhile, you can throw axe lords right into the thick of things repeatedly and never take a scratch.

A legendary axe lord owning the field vs. the usual goblin rabble is fun. However, I have also seen a recruit with a crossbow get ambushed and still kill the whole party of ambushing goblins if it has no bowmen. The usual result of getting hit with a bolt is to double over in pain, and that gives the marksman another shot.

I bet your legendary axelord in steel armor would die if an elite goblin bowman showed up. In fact he might take out a couple of your legendary axelords if you let him take a few shots.

Your legendary melee guys aren't good with shields then.

I have indeed seen stories about goblin kings getting huge skills in world-gen that were able to wipe out whole dwarf armies, and that's very rare unfortunately, but all of that is completely beside the point. The problem here is that a single novice marksdwarf can machine-gun down a large number of similarly skilled melee enemies without being touched in the open field, all without protection of any kind, even armor, due to the extremely fast reloading time.

The fact that bolts can kill and stun is all good! We want that, but think about how long it would take to load a crossbow... If crossbows could fire like a Garand semi-auto, there would have never been a need for spears, maces, swords or any sort of melee weapon. Indeed that is WWII technology.

Novices don't fire at machine gun speeds. Do you have any idea how many times these units swing an axe in the time it takes them to move from tile to tile or have you just been guessing?

Crossbow rate of fire does need work. I'm ok with them being remarkable accurate at close range, and able to kill a creature with one shot. That's what crossbows do.

But in-game I think they fire way, way, WAY too fast. Not just a little too fast. Not like I'm arguing that they take 3 seconds when they should take 4. No. I'm arguing that maybe a wait of at least a second between shots isn't unreasonable, as opposed to 5 or so shots per second.

Like second you're watching or per second with you having paused and using keypresses to advance the game one turn at a time?

A decently skilled miner can dig out enough space for a siege workshop in two seconds the first way. Do you want combat to go at a completely different time scale than everything else?

Champion vs. army of goblins = easy win
Champion vs. army of bowgoblins = many arrows = at least ONE will come up on the freak chance of mangling champion's entire body and killing/maiming him for life

Seriously, last siege, I had some bowgobs show up, sent out my four champs (the entire military at the time) and one died, another got hideously wounded and is still in bed.

Of course, they were only wearing leather, as I was still training up my armorsmith on copper.

Oh how few the people are that have seen the damage formulas.
They aren't going to be relevant much longer though with how Toady is totally reworking things though so don't fret~

No, that throw giant serrated discs.

You could create shurikens, but there would be no way to make them a strictly throwing weapon.

When I was new to the game I thought I would have to set up pressure plates to trigger a hallway or traps of that sort n_n

Pressure plates that could trigger something similar to a ballista would be neat. You'd want the enemies to have the capacity to recognize that the trap couldn't aim at them like manned ballistas though, so it wouldn't massacre legendary and otherwise uber units as effectively.

The fact that bolts can kill and stun is all good! We want that, but think about how long it would take to load a crossbow... If crossbows could fire like a Garand semi-auto, there would have never been a need for spears, maces, swords or any sort of melee weapon. Indeed that is WWII technology.

*ahem*

Very cool link! I still don't think those things can do 2 rounds per second.

I don't think most any of us could carve three mugs from stone in 10 seconds, or grow plants in 3 minutes either.

Nor does a year normally only take half an hour to pass.

DF is not normal scaled time.

You raise an interesting point there, but the problem remains that marksdwarves are able to fire at the same rate as swordsdwarves can swing swords, as each takes only one action to execute.  I'd imagine that operating a crossbow would take several actions, each of which would take as long as swinging a sword. 

I'm by no means an expert, but don't you have to load the bolt into the crossbow, crank a handle to cock it, then aim, before you can even take one shot?

Have you see how far off a lot of novice shots go? They're not aiming very hard.
Of course, someone picking up a sword for the first time would largely swing it down so it hit the ground and then have to struggle to lift it again for another swing. I expect this to take about as long as it would take me to cock a crossbow and someone who had been practicing shooting for several months (like my father has been doing) could do it much more fluidly, again at about the rate I think someone with about as much practice with medieval swords would swing it.

NOW, what I would like to see is aiming that takes longer at greater distances. The arc of your viewfield they take up is very important for how precise your aim needs to be to hit them. A mile away and I probably couldn't hit a target even if I did have a machine-crossbow firing manically. Close enough to reach out and grab it and I'd only need a split second to point the thing away from myself. Legendary marksdwarves would largely just do this step faster as several seasons is about as long as it would take to get close to as fast as you would ever be at cocking your weapon.

[Footkerchief]

I expect this to take about as long as it would take me to cock a crossbow and someone who had been practicing shooting for several months (like my father has been doing) could do it much more fluidly, again at about the rate I think someone with about as much practice with medieval swords would swing it.

I would be amazed if you could provide some non-anecdotal evidence for these claims.  Note that we're talking about crossbows without magazines.  This source says 2-4 bolts per minute, this one says 2.

[zwei]

When you consider power of crossbowmen, you also have to consider economics:

They are fairly expensive.

First, bolts are one of most expnesinve items that caravans currently bring. You basically burn at least ~1000* per encounter.

Even training is quite expensive. You just activate regular melee unit, equip it and let it wrestle for one year and traing its weapon of choice in next year. Bam, champion, just do not forget to swap out training weapon for real one.

You do same with marks dwarves (Wrestling and Hammer mastery), but then you continue with Marksmanship, for which marksdwarves require steady supply of training bolts and still take up years to train, it usually ends up requiring dedicated crafter (or two). Each training bolt is bone/wood that is not used for anything else.

You want to set up way more industries and it sucks more resources and also fairly diverse resources.

Granted, Df economy is not ballanced yet and you can easily traing em up on competelly renewable resources, but it might not be case forever.

---

Actual real history is bad paralel, because it is nearly exact opposite of DF, in real history, crossbowmen were fairly cheap (next to no training required, inexpensive equipment.)

[HatfieldCW]

Off topic, if you skip the wrestling/hammer training for a marksdwarf, does that make him train his shooting more slowly, or reduce his eventual skill level?  I'm thinking about watchtower dwellers here, who'll never find themselves in a melee situation.

[Footkerchief]

Actual real history is bad paralel, because it is nearly exact opposite of DF, in real history, crossbowmen were fairly cheap (next to no training required, inexpensive equipment.)

DF prices are not canonical.  They're just numbers that Toady made up in half a second cause there needed to be a number, and the Caravan Arc will blow all of that away.

[nil]

Off topic, if you skip the wrestling/hammer training for a marksdwarf, does that make him train his shooting more slowly, or reduce his eventual skill level?  I'm thinking about watchtower dwellers here, who'll never find themselves in a melee situation.

He'd have lower attributes, so technically a little.  Mostly, though, people train hammer for melee combat and wrestling for both melee and especially for the dodge bonus.  If they're gonna be behind walls at all times, you need wrestling at most.  Bringing them up to legendary with a civilian skill like pump opperating first would probably be a better use of your time, too, since they should only need to dodge the occasional master bowgoblin.

DF prices are not canonical.  They're just numbers that Toady made up in half a second cause there needed to be a number, and the Caravan Arc will blow all of that away.

I think he meant they're more expensive in game terms, since you need practice bolts to train them up, while sparring requires training weapons at most.

[zwei]

Actual real history is bad paralel, because it is nearly exact opposite of DF, in real history, crossbowmen were fairly cheap (next to no training required, inexpensive equipment.)

DF prices are not canonical.  They're just numbers that Toady made up in half a second cause there needed to be a number, and the Caravan Arc will blow all of that away.

Exactly, and since part of unit ballance is their cost ... numbers that are going to change dramatically, talking just about how marksdwarves can clear goblin squads is not talking with full picture in mind.

I'd like to see more realistic ecomony first: Economy where marksdwarf with steel crossbow, stack of steel bolts and wearing steel armor pieces is luxury reserved for wealthy fortresses, and where you generally end up with fairly reasonable 'historically correct' marksdwarves that have wooden crossbow, wooden pavise, stack of wooden bolts and maybe iron cap and with lucky ones sporting leather armor pieces. Ecomony where quality armor will be strictly reserved for dwarves that need it: dwarves that already got enough training to become 'nonexpendable', where cost of training new recruit would overweight cost of armor set for champion.

[Hummingbird]

On an off-topic note (but not off-topic enough to warrant a new topic), did Toady ever say that he would change the throwing system so that throwing bolts or arrows in Adventure mode wouldn't be exactly as powerful as firing them with their respective ranged weapon?  I think he talked about that, but I'm not sure.

[Neonivek]

On an off-topic note (but not off-topic enough to warrant a new topic), did Toady ever say that he would change the throwing system so that throwing bolts or arrows in Adventure mode wouldn't be exactly as powerful as firing them with their respective ranged weapon?  I think he talked about that, but I'm not sure.

Well whenever you have a question related to combat just say Combat Arc

[Shoku]

I expect this to take about as long as it would take me to cock a crossbow and someone who had been practicing shooting for several months (like my father has been doing) could do it much more fluidly, again at about the rate I think someone with about as much practice with medieval swords would swing it.

I would be amazed if you could provide some non-anecdotal evidence for these claims.  Note that we're talking about crossbows without magazines.  This source says 2-4 bolts per minute, this one says 2.

Your first source is talking about crossbows that you had to wind for 400 pounds of pressure. In DF arrows and bolts are about equally deadly so we're just talking a similar pressure to what you could do drawing a bow, and that's not going to take 30 seconds or even 10 to cock. The picture with the single lever to push down should give you a better idea of what these are.

Now, with the way they stab organs you'd think some of those bolts had 400 lbs of pressure behind them but as has been said that's not going to work the same way anymore. Damage has been entirely single digit random number rolls up into the current version but it's grossly improved based on what I can see from the devlog.

Off topic, if you skip the wrestling/hammer training for a marksdwarf, does that make him train his shooting more slowly, or reduce his eventual skill level?  I'm thinking about watchtower dwellers here, who'll never find themselves in a melee situation.

The only speed advantage mastering one skill gives to other skills is any agility gains. You'll need several skills at legendary for top stats but they can be things like conversation or swimming.

[zwei]

The only speed advantage mastering one skill gives to other skills is any agility gains. You'll need several skills at legendary for top stats but they can be things like conversation or swimming.

Not really, Dorf that only trains marksmanship+noncombat skills to legendary is marksdorf glass canon that is guaranteed casualty when (if) melee reach him.

Training wrestling, armor and shield proficiency makes him much more survivable than just high toughness, and training hammer mastery makes him actually continue killing stuff even if he is in melee range and/or runs out of bolts.