Usually you keep seeing statements that sparring is the best. There was some !!SCIENCE!! earlier that teacher5/some military skill 5 dwarves, teaching another dwarf in squads of 2, was even faster (the 2nd dwarf could be unskilled, or also a dwarf with 5 teach and another military skill - in the latter case, it doesn't even matter which one holds the demonstrations, something useful is learned anyway). The catch here is that teacher levels up pretty slowly, if you don't start with it. I've already set up my next fort, it's going to have 4 dwarves going into military training ASAP: all have teacher 5, and 1 each with a skill of 5 in axes, dodging, fighter and shield using (iirc). I'm going to rotate them so that 2 get everything, and 2 get everything but axes, and then they'll be training other dwarfs later (in the 2nd or 3rd year).
from my observations on teacher, it really doesn't actually add much, several posts up, i talk about how having a teacher in a sparring pair would give some improvement to the unskilled dwarf but their constant sparring lvled up both dwarves consistently. so my gut feel is that you don't even need 5 teacher, maybe not even 5 weapon skill.
But I now have several legendary dwarves with almost zero armor skill. Those that started with armor skill have seen it go rusty despite the constant sparring???
yes, i have noticed this as well, but my dwarves are naked zerkers. they wear cloth and in the recent siege, decimated goblin spearmen without a scratch. they didn't even have shields in the first 2 years until i started producing them and now they are lvl 10 shield users in the last yr.
so i can't comment on the armor user skill as i still haven't gotten around to making them and i'm in my 3rd, beginning 4th year spring.
So with regards to the experiment (it has been a year), i've had to cut it short, due to some unforseen circumstances and some bad control on my part.
Here was the initial setup
Test subjects:
Axe recruits, 10 dwarves, 5 orders of pairs
Controls:
2 squads of: 1 hammer lord + 1 hammer recruit with no weapon skill
a squad of 2 spear recruits, no weapon skills
One of my hammer lord got drained by a vamp that slipped through my filter... *VERY* annoyed about that. he was a 15+5 with extremely high attributes in str, agi, tou and end...
so the recruit he was training stopped at weapon skill 5 after a year of training, from 0.
The other hammer squad, the student got badly injured in the recent siege, he was on weapon skill 3 after the same period.
the two spear recruits... one of them dead, the other has lvl 1 spear.
As for the group of 10 axes, very marginal improvements, 7 of them are at axe lvl 1, one on 0. 2 who started on lvl 3 now half way though lvl4.
Halfway point conclusions:
Multiple paired training orders in a 10 dwarf squad vs 2 dwarf squad:
The 10 axes lvled to 1, the 2 spears lvled to 1 so there doesn't seem to be much difference putting just 2 of them in a squad, i.e squads of 10 with 5 paired train orders could still work, i need to run this more to see the effects and i also need to create a new control set as half of these dwarves are dead or dying...
Sparring with a master:
The two hammerers who started at 0 and trained with lvl15+5 masters are now on 3 and 6, so training with a experienced master seems to be faster than training with a novice as in the case with the two spears who started on 0 are just lvl 1 in the same time frame.
Training from lvl 0 vs training from some skill 1+:
From observing the axes at lvl 3 who only gained 1 lvl vs axes at lvl 0 who also just gained 1 lvl, there doens't seem to be much difference in rate of training. (this assumes 1. exp requirements increase linearly and 2. sparring gives constant amount of exp)
Role to skill correlation:
If you use spintermind's DT, then you get a % match (100% being perfect match to the role) of dwarf to role. From looking at the axe dwarves role match and exp gained, there seems to be no correlation
30% 800xp
30% 1000xp
80% 1000xp
13% 1200xp
etc etc