Archer Dwarfs Jumping Off Towers Fix?

[Dry Eyed Seraph]

I just lost an entire archer squad because they jumped over the fortifications on my archer towers and decided to melee.

The towers are 3 z levels above their ground floor, and the fortification blocks were made from walls built before, so they have roofs over them. I had the archers on a patrol order inside of the tower on the 3 z floor with the arrow slits.

Does anyone know of a fix or is it regular bug?

Thank you any help.

[Fel]

Double-check that the floor above has a floor (or wall) directly above the fortification as well, diagonals work fine when climbing.

[Haethei]

archers are insanely difficult to work with, most of the time they will happily throw themselves at the enemies in melee combat long before throwing any bolts at them. you have to do a really good job making sure they cannot CLIMB or JUMP or SWIM over anything between them and their target, make sure their ONLY option is to shoot

that's assuming you can get them to equip ammo properly... im currently waiting for more fixes before i play more, and the main bug fixes im looking for are ranged military problems

the post above mine is probably correct in your specific instance (fortifications might look like they have a floor above them by default, but they do not, you have to build one)

[Other]

In addition to the floor on the tile above the fortifications, you probably need to roof over the entire tower/pillbox they are in. They can (and will) climb up the side of a wall or fortification, walk across the top of it, and climb/jump down the other side to get to enemies.

[AlP]

Originally posted by Haethei:

that's assuming you can get them to equip ammo properly... im currently waiting for more fixes before i play more, and the main bug fixes im looking for are ranged military problems

You can just make axedwarves instead...

[Haethei]

Originally posted by AlP:

Originally posted by Haethei:

that's assuming you can get them to equip ammo properly... im currently waiting for more fixes before i play more, and the main bug fixes im looking for are ranged military problems

You can just make axedwarves instead...

True, but I think it's kinda boring. Especially since you can't reasonably make dwarves equip two-handed weapons, pretty much your entire military consists of dwarves wielding one-handed weapons and a shield. That gets even more boring once you realize the battleaxe and warhammer are your only two strong options, but i typically let my dwarves wield whatever weapon matches their skills

Game would be considerably more fun for me once the ranged dwarves get bugfixes and the two-handed equip bug gets fixed as well

[Fel]

The fix of ranged units is planned apparently but we have absolutely no idea when it will be sadly.

Spears and hammers are the weapons that scale the best with armor and/or size of the enemy, axes are great against smaller and unarmored (but they leave a whole lot more body parts to clean up).

Not sure I heard anything about two handed stuff sadly.
I prefer spears and hammers with shields for survival but since you more or less need to remove the shield to level up armor skills it would be nice to have stronger weapons to balance the much lower block chance.

[Haethei]

Originally posted by Fel:

The fix of ranged units is planned apparently but we have absolutely no idea when it will be sadly.

Spears and hammers are the weapons that scale the best with armor and/or size of the enemy, axes are great against smaller and unarmored (but they leave a whole lot more body parts to clean up).

Not sure I heard anything about two handed stuff sadly.
I prefer spears and hammers with shields for survival but since you more or less need to remove the shield to level up armor skills it would be nice to have stronger weapons to balance the much lower block chance.

I tried making mods to force the two-handed weapons to work, but it just causes problems elsewhere until they fix it up. You can modify the block chance of shields and the effectiveness of any weapon, but the code for equipping two-handed weapons is too messed up right now to beat with the limited modding access we have