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[Awessum Possum]

How do I get my military dwarves to pickup all the lovely training weapons I've crafted and spar with them? They're all sitting around do demonstrations and indv combat drills.

[melphel]

They don't need training weapons to spar.  As frightening as it may sound, they will spar with their real metal weaponry, but rarely, if ever, will you see them injure one another doing so.

Unless you want them to pick up the wood weapons for some other purpose, like beating a goblin prisoner to a pulp to gain more practical experience...then you need to change their uniform assignment to use those weapons particularly.  If you go to the equipment page in the military screen, you can set the material for their weapons (you may need to turn on exact matches for this), or you can assign them each a specific weapon and just pick a training weapon from the list.

[Awessum Possum]

Ok, but how do I get them to spar at all?

[Garath]

use (q) to designate a room from a cabinet, coffer or chest, armor stand or weapon rack as a barracks and select the squad you want to train there and press (t)
from now on any training that squad does will be done there. They wont always spar, but a grandmaster dodger could really teach them recruits in a demonstration too

[Finn]

There isn't any way to force them to spar.  All you can do is schedule training, specify a barracks and hope that they spar. 

For what it's worth, they train much faster on live targets.  So reading the wiki pages on mass pitting, cage traps, and working out a system to capture the next siege group of training partners that come by is well worth the effort.

[Awessum Possum]

Ah... Thanks.

[nomad_delta]

I think the commonly accepted wisdom at the moment for maximizing sparring time is to create melee squads of three dwarves each and put them on a year-long training schedule with a "minimum of two dwarves" on duty at all times.  As best I can tell the "minimum" is a misstatement because the squads actually use whatever you set at the *exact* number of dwarves to have on duty at all times.  Doing this ensures that there will always be 2 dwarves training together, which seems to cause them to spar more frequently rather than waste a lot of time organizing demonstrations.  Also this always allows one dwarf to rotate out for sleep, drinks, breaks, etc so they don't get upset about training 24x7 forever.

I currently have several squads of sword, axe, and hammerdwarves that I have trained up to Master/Elite status using only this for training.  Plus occasional live combat during goblin raids, of course.  I don't use danger-rooms 'cause I find them to be... exploity.

--nomad_delta