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[Galactor123]

Alright, so I know that currently the military is pretty bugged in a lot of ways, but this one doesn't seem to be touched upon much here.
Individual Combat Drill seems to have gotten 'nerfed' in the latest couple of updates. I'm cool with that, but what is the alternative? I keep getting my military dwarves doing demonstrations on things they have no idea how to do, and never just, you know, sparring. How do I get them to spar, or how do you all train your dwarves effectively, I guess is my question.

[Zaik]

Barring the obvious danger room response, If you pick dwarves with ABSOLUTELY NO military skill at all, they will do some brief individual combat drills and then quickly start sparring because none of them know crap to teach each other, and then generally they will all increase at about the same speed.

I recommend squads of 3 maximum, generally you'll have two come up about even and one will lag behind a bit.


You can also disarm goblins in cage traps(mass dump(d-b-d) the cages, then individually undump the cages specifically, bonus points for using the stocks screen to undump the armor so that they just lose weapons), then throw them into a hole in the floor into another room by designating the hole a Pit/Pond with i, then using P at the zone to dump in prisoners/animals.

[Galactor123]

Hmm, I didn't think to have a military of completely untrained people. Although once one of them learns a little bit about whatever it is they are learning, wouldn't they go back to doing infinite demonstrations? And I do actually have my squads set up so there are only two dwarves in each squad, and even still they either both go in uniform (labeled as "recruit" or whatever) and do individual combat training, or do demonstrations.

So I guess in other words, I don't think that will work for me. My workaround thus far has just been for the majority of my military to be miners, as a legendary miner with a pick can kill a good amount of goblins. But I'd like to do it somewhat legitimately.

And what is a danger room? I know there is something about it on the wiki, but I didn't really understand what its real purpose is, or how to set it up. It seems like its just a bunch of spear traps that are nonlethal that they have to dodge and stuff? But how would that increase their combat skills (besides, you know, dodge).

[drkpaladin]

My current military is the most effective one I've ever had in the current version, and all I did was group them into squads of just two people trying to match their relative skills to each other.  It works with completely skilless dwarves.  (Just make sure the dwarves on the same two man squad are wielding the same weapon or they will be teaching each other useless skills)  Edit their schedule to train 2 dwarves at a time, activate the squad, and they'll go nuts sparring.  When they will still do demonstrations when one advances higher than another, which is all good.   Eventually, I had my best two teams switch partners, and they spent some time teaching each other skills that the other group happened to not get (armor user and wrestling), which is all good.  Now I have 16 dwarves broken up into two man teams all legendary in their weapons and shield using.  I didn't use the danger room myself, but thats just setting a room full of training spears attached to a lever on repeat.
Before this I was frustrated enough trying to get my military to train that I would accomplish it by capturing a grimeling and having 7 dwarves wrestle it for several months straight until one managed to die.  (grimelings are immune to wrestling or even blunt damage)  Eventually after almost an entire year wrestling the grimeling... it would gain experience going from small and weak in the description to Massive and muscular.  A woodcutter was generally sent to help at the end. Afterwards I would have 6 elite wrestling drwarves with high attributes and one corpse.  Then I would slap a weapon in their hands and sic them on captured prisoners for a while.  It was very messy

[AngleWyrm]

And what is a danger room? I know there is something about it on the wiki, but I didn't really understand what its real purpose is, or how to set it up. It seems like its just a bunch of spear traps that are nonlethal that they have to dodge and stuff? But how would that increase their combat skills (besides, you know, dodge).

If they have weapons, they parry attacks and build up weapons skill from that. If they have shields, it also increases shield usage, a good skill to have. I don't remember if it increases armor usage, but it might.

[Shoku]

Demonstrations are very nice because dwarves gain skill ups from these faster than they would gain the level from sparring. There are only two problems with this:
If you have a lot of dwarves in a squad there's a lot of sitting around time waiting for all to show up for the lesson.
They gain skill levels faster the higher their skill level gets.

So yeah, unfortunately it slows down the build up of skill. This doesn't matter very much once they are at higher levels but because the first few levels are so slow anyway it makes those first few levels drag on forever. If you can manage to engineer a situation like wrestling a grimeling until they get to, say, the 10th skill level then from that point on sparring and demonstrations will work great but getting past those first few levels- well, chasing deer across the map to down in one blow almost seems like a better use of time. Hell, if you have someone with high agility it's probably a much better use of time.

*The student and teach skills don't seem to play a big role in this. My guys only gain about 5 levels in teacher by the time they're reaching multiple legendary skills. Once teacher reaches legendary you may actually want situations like having them do demonstrations for 9 recruits but for setting things up in the first place I don't think it matters.


A danger room is a barracks where most of the floor space is covered in upright spear traps which are linked to a lever. The spears used for these traps are training spears and are thus easily blocked by armor and often times even by things like cloaks. With the lever set to repeat they are subjected to a "real" attack and gain experience in practically most military skills. Notable is dodging because that particular skill would otherwise level really freaking slowly, even lagging far behind skill increases in shields.
*I'm confident that this increases armor skill. If they have a weapon they will not learn wrestling but maybe they'd gain skill in striking if they were unarmed.

**About two years of training (or maybe less if you can make sure they have little down time) should just about increase all of the strength type attributes as far as they'll go. Learning mainly from legendary demonstrations probably does not have this benefit.

[BurnedToast]

'Danger room' is really sort of cheating IMO. If you don't think so, or you don't care, then it's probably the best/quickest way.

If you do it the 'right' way, your best bet is to check immigrants carefully and throw ones with good military skills into the military. They will teach your other dwarves much quicker then starting everyone from scratch.

Once you have a good military, the training sessions work really well. New recruits will be brought up to speed with the demonstrations and high quality sparring very quickly. It's just getting the first few guys to legendary that's the hard part.

[Galactor123]

Yeah, my problem at current is that I am throwing people who either have no skills, or very small amounts of skills, into a two man squad together. They don't spar, they just do demonstrations, and the demonstrations are stuff like "dodging" or "fighting" even though they are both novice at both of them. Even the one guy I have who is a competent hammerdwarf does fighting demonstrations, as he is better at fighting than hammering things. I really wish there was just a way to -force- them to spar, or just have them automatically spar until one of them is at least adequate level.

[Shoku]

For forced fighting you've simply got to make them beat up a real opponent, unless you're ok with danger rooms.

Now, I've come to the realization that I don't really need to put any points into a lot of the embark skills I had been. Everything farm related benefits much more from simply having someone go over and doing it than from having some single person reserved for it in order to get high skill levels. Seeing as I've also stopped putting points in mining and just toss everyone a pick at embark I've got quite a lot of options left. Fighter seems to be the first skill to take off once training actually starts going well so it stands to reason that having two dwarves with five levels of this at embark should lead to a much improved start. The two smiths for armor and weapons seem like a logical pair to set to it and later train the recruits. Your squads can probably suffer these two taking breaks to make better equipment for them, which doesn't really eat up that much time compared to smelting the bars in the first place.

Having someone I can take out of work later grab 5 levels of dodge to inject into the early military seems like a good idea as well. I tend to embark in low vegetation areas so my carpenter is often lacking logs but a leather worker seems like a better candidate for most (if you even embark with one.)

Injecting armor use into the squads is kind of a late enough concern that you'd waste two or three of the points anyway and I really doubt it helps them along any faster. Shields are the same story as they're irrelevant prior to real combat and level just fine after a weapon skill tops out.

So that leaves a weapon skill. I'm pretty sure this is one of the fastest skills to grow and it might have only lagged behind fighter as much as it did because fighter was one of the skills my best pair (that I watched) started with.
As this means that you probably only have good reason to embark with 3 dwarves who know military skills you could still keep two skilled miners in your embark. After that you'd have room for five other professions and a doctor, or four professions if you want to give your first dwarf enough social skills to help him out as a low noble position holder.

[BurnedToast]

Yeah, my problem at current is that I am throwing people who either have no skills, or very small amounts of skills, into a two man squad together. They don't spar, they just do demonstrations, and the demonstrations are stuff like "dodging" or "fighting" even though they are both novice at both of them. Even the one guy I have who is a competent hammerdwarf does fighting demonstrations, as he is better at fighting than hammering things. I really wish there was just a way to -force- them to spar, or just have them automatically spar until one of them is at least adequate level.

As far as I can tell, people won't train outside their squad, so two man squads is probably the worst thing you can do to get them to train quicker (since one man squads will always do individual combat drills it's better then two).

If you want small squads for flexibility then you should try having one big training squad and once they are highly skilled splitting them up. Be sure to leave a few skilled guys in the training squad to train new recruits!

[Akura]

'Danger room' is really sort of cheating IMO. If you don't think so, or you don't care, then it's probably the best/quickest way.

If you do it the 'right' way, your best bet is to check immigrants carefully and throw ones with good military skills into the military. They will teach your other dwarves much quicker then starting everyone from scratch.

Once you have a good military, the training sessions work really well. New recruits will be brought up to speed with the demonstrations and high quality sparring very quickly. It's just getting the first few guys to legendary that's the hard part.

The thing about danger rooms is that they can be, in fact, dangerous. There's always the (very remote) possiblity of "The spinning -alder training spear- hits the Axe Lord in the head, shattering the skull, and jamming the brain through the skull!". It is quite actually dangerous for mothers and people with pets, as well as anyone without any kind of armor(like babies and pets).

[Zaik]

'Danger room' is really sort of cheating IMO. If you don't think so, or you don't care, then it's probably the best/quickest way.

If you do it the 'right' way, your best bet is to check immigrants carefully and throw ones with good military skills into the military. They will teach your other dwarves much quicker then starting everyone from scratch.

Once you have a good military, the training sessions work really well. New recruits will be brought up to speed with the demonstrations and high quality sparring very quickly. It's just getting the first few guys to legendary that's the hard part.

The thing about danger rooms is that they can be, in fact, dangerous. There's always the (very remote) possiblity of "The spinning -alder training spear- hits the Axe Lord in the head, shattering the skull, and jamming the brain through the skull!". It is quite actually dangerous for mothers and people with pets, as well as anyone without any kind of armor(like babies and pets).

This is why you always need to make sure that you cover every gap in the armor with something.

Your best bet is to make a shitton of either dresses(best), robes(effectively the same), or hoods, socks, and mittens(only if you can't make dresses or robes).

Even masterwork wooden training spears linked with masterwork mechanisms can't penetrate cloth clothing, so using something like a robe or dress with [UBSTEP:MAX] and [LBSTEP:MAX] covers all the gaps that are left exposed by armor(face, ears, fingers, toes, neck, etc.)

As long as you use one of those, your dwarves will never get an injury from wooden training spears. Using anything else is just asking for trouble though.

[Shoku]

BurnedToast:
A 2 man squad will train all of the time except for food, drink, and sleep. A 3 man squad can have 2 training near constantly with the only down time coming from when they switch out. Larger squads are very big time wasters as anybody not involved in sparring runs off to do something else but then somebody wants to do a demonstration and suddenly they can't even start until 1 recruit wakes up and runs over to watch. This is probably still ok at the speed of skill gain from champions teaching but definitely don't start with it.

I'll have to test how fast individual combat drills give early skill ups though-