I thought the question raised in this thread was the fact that training and sparring seems to be less broken in this version than it was in 2010.
We all know most people consider 2010 "horribly broken" and want back to the olden days of having half your military incapacitated by training accidents, but that is not the crux of this discussion.
!!Science!! must be done to determine wether or not the 3 man squad is the only way to train or if just putting a bunch of dwarves in the same room together have similar results.
I think we should also determine why one is more effective than another, and if we can lobby to have that changed to something more fitting and realistic. A year of training in a group or in pairs should theoretically increase your skill by a large margin either way. I mean, it's a YEAR of straight training. If I spent an entire year just eating, drinking, and fighting; I would be damn good at all three.
It's kind of irritating that our year old military can be so quickly dismembered by a bunch of sociopathic kneecappers or treehugging wooden-sword users. The payoff to using a military is so little now, and it's further exacerbated by the fact that they can very easily die even if well-trained. I understand the realism behind getting arms lopped off and various other traits inherent in attrition, but damn, our military isn't 3000 strong. It's often less than 40 dwarfs, which is still a large percentage of our population NOT contributing to development.
They do NOT train fast enough or efficiently enough to justify their fragility. Our first invasion is often 2 years from the start, which means we have two years to get a decent
standing army (not just a few dwarfs to patrol for baby-snatchers). I don't feel like we need our dwarfs to be stronger; I just real like it should be realistic to expect them to be really good at fighting after a year of training,
without having to game the system by separating squads out, then reforming them later. Even then, the results are tentative at best.