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[Shoku]

Having someone beyond dabbling skill level speeds up the training noticeably.
I intended to do one where I just set up a bunch of no skill recruits but haven't gotten to it.

[Jacob/Lee]

I arm all my soldiers with weapons and armor, drop goblins/whatever prisoners I have down an 8 z-level drop right on top of some steel spikes, impale them a few times via same spears, then I send in my military to train on them before the prisoners die.

Be careful with thieves though, if they escape while all the other prisoners are being pitted they'll start a massive prison riot because the terrified dwarves will let go of whoever they're pulling also.

[schussel]

just lock the pit with a retractable bridge over the ramp/stair down into it and dump some food and drinks beforehand .. then you can lock the squad in and have fun afaik thieves arent able to surpass bridge blockage assuming you build the cages beforehand inside the pit and open via lever or dump them from the ladge of the closed pit in to the fray

[Shoku]

It ends up a little more complex than that. Although they can't get past bridges at the same time you don't want the squad sitting at the bottom of your pit- a fall of any height causes no damage if they land on a creature.

If you can pit them a few levels onto a retractable bridge and then open that up-

Well anyway, in case anybody would like to get to it faster than me here is how I set up my test:
Embark with all of their equipment from the get-go. Copper weapons and armor shouldn't train any differently than steel ones but you can grab whatever by changing the embark points during world gen.
Wall off the wagon and the hole you dig into the ground and set up a barracks right away.
Make note of whether you are doing squads of two or three (with 2 minimum active.)
Then when they have a barracks to train in just record their skill changes. Once a season is reasonable but if you'd like to do monthly go for it.

I used Dwarf Therapist to just get numbers for their skills. It seems like training approaches a speed people would think was more reasonably after about 10 points in fighter.
Additionally you could use runesmith to set all of their attributes equal if you'd like to gauge what effect those have on early training.
There is also a little hex edit job done over in the modding forum that allows you to embark with 10, 15, or 20 dwarves. Bigger pools of data are more useful but I don't think he has done that for the latest version.

[Nilik]

Ok, so maybe someone can answer this. First of all I am not using a danger room and never will so don't bother suggesting it.

I have 6 military dwarves:

Embark dwarf, "Miyagi": Skilled teacher, adaquate organiser, competant fighter, adaquate axe
3 immigrants with novice in most military skills
1 immigrant, "Captain Hammer" with competant/skilled everything including hammer
1 immigrant, "McBadass" with skilled everything including axe

Currently I have Miyagi teaching the 3 noobs, and the 3 experienced fighters in a seperate squad. The experienced fighters seem to be training well enough, as they mostly spar. The noobs do ok when Miyagi is teaching, but occasionally a noob will surpass him at doding or shield use and decide they are going to give a demonstration, with their dabbling teacher and organiser skills. This slows things down considerably.

Would I be better off putting them all together in one squad? I'm hoping what would happen is one of the veterans would teach the noobs, with Miyagi taking over when one of them steps out. Eventually Miyagi would become awesome himself, and would become the squad leader of a new squad of noobs. Would this work? Would it work better than keeping the squads seperate? And will Captain Hammer try to train anyone in Hammerdwarf if everyone else has axes?

Oh, and I also have some captive mandrills. Do you think a novice everything noob with an axe and no armor can take one down by themselves? I'm considering this as their "rite-of-passage".

[Nilik]

*Ignore this*

[Shoku]

Edit button, top right of your post.

So first off, nobody is going to be able to tell you that. I have done the most thorough training test so far as I know and it was a single trial.

But other than that my understanding is that just having a higher skill level at what you are demonstrating gives greatly increased xp. I only got about five skill ups for teacher on any particular dwarf during my trial and about three levels of student. This didn't have a particularly strong effect on how they gained skills but like the others teacher might be significantly more potent at level ten or so.

I can say though that having an experienced dwarf training inexperienced ones makes a big difference. A few squads were comparably stagnant until I broke up my high skill squad to make new leaders for the other squads. Additionally I recommend squads of size three. Very large ones run into the problem of lots of demonstrations and the big drawback there is that they have to wait for everyone to show up. Given that some jerk is going to go take a nap and Sergent Grumbles is gonna have his head in some barrel in the food stockpile this basically means gigantic delays, especially if some no skill recruit is leading the demonstration. With the three person squad and training orders demanding a minimum of 2 dwarves you get two of them sparring almost non-stop while the third goes off on his bio break and maybe hauls some junk around for you. The part of I haven't confirmed myself is that only a pair of dwarves in a squad will spar at a time- but even if that's totally false the waiting for demonstrations thing is still a big time sink.

Now there's another line of thinking: demonstrations suck at low levels so you should avoid them. Presumably 5 counts as a low level here in which case you don't want to try sticking dwarves with different skills together- it just creates a time buffer before any sparring skill ups occur. Based on my own observations they are just flat out going to level fighter first and doing so gives them attribute increases that speed up training overall so maybe a 5 teacher and 5 fighting is worth embarking with. Now, given armor, a weapon, and a shield the weapon skill will just lag behind fighter by six or ten levels and by the time it is legendary they will have around 7 levels in shield. Armor use didn't level at all early on and then only very slowly toward the end and dodger never improved faster than just slowly. As such those may be desirable skills to bring along just so you can seed some of your recruits with them and let them infect the rest of your army through demonstrations.

However these slow leveling skills are not all that important. By the time fighter and (weapon) are master or above they should be fit to go out and actually bash in goblin skulls. Dodger and shield user seem like they would only be important for maybe getting through arrow hail. When you've got all of the skills around legendary you should be ready to take on anything so long as you outnumber them by one (and that's just for opponents that can knock the dwarves down.)