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[Yaotzin]

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.

I actually totally disagree with this, as it is incredibly unrealistic. You don't become brilliant at something after a year, not even close. It should take more like a decade to get to legendary in anything. Just balance things around this so you don't get smashed by the first attack.

Think of something like a doctor IRL. One year of learning medicine and you're still in your diapers, not an expert.

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.

You must be training badly. A well training, small military, can obliterate attacks in the first couple years, with a copper weapon and wood shield.

Once you have masters/lords in steel armor, you can destroy entire sieges with a couple soldiers taking no wounds at all.

The payoff to using military feels wrong because traps are so overpowered, that's all.

[Mushroo]

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.

See my SCIENCE post from yesterday. Even under the worst-case training scenario (a 1-man squad with no training partner) I brought totally unskilled dwarfs to Skilled axedwarf/fighter in less than a year. Legendary is easy to achieve in under a year, with slightly more effort, using tried and tested methods. The results are not "tentative" as I can assure you from the goblin limbs littering the ground.

Also you forget that an army is only part of a good fortress defense strategy. If you are not using archers, drawbridges, tricks, traps, moats, and MAGMA then your dwarfs deserve what's coming to them.

[Loud Whispers]

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.

It's quite easy to get a professional army by the first year with legendary Dwarfs attached if you have a good grasp of the military interface... Plus, the whole squad shuffling thing is really not necessary at all.

[Mushroo]

Agreed; you don't need to "shuffle" your soldiers, just put them in squads of 2 or 3, permanently, and have 1 legendary squad perma-training at each entrance or choke-point of your defenses. If someone dies, then recruit whatever migrant arrives with the best skills to replace the fallen.

[krenshala]

Agreed; you don't need to "shuffle" your soldiers, just put them in squads of 2 or 3, permanently, and have 1 legendary squad perma-training at each entrance or choke-point of your defenses. If someone dies, then recruit whatever migrant arrives with the best skills to replace the fallen.

Squads of four work nicely for me.  At worst I have one pair sparring, and the other two either doing individual drill or goofing off (food, sleep, etc).  At best I have a demonstration for all four, or two pairs sparring.  Competent to Skilled in their weapon after 9 months, Professional by 18.  This with randomly selected migrants with zero starting skills.

After my first engagement I split my starting squad into four (promote the former recruits to be the three new militia captains) and draft a dozen more migrants so i'm training four squads of four.  This goes faster.  Once they reach competent, I take the best teacher and put him in charge of a full squad to train up replacements and fill the other four squads up to 10 each.  I stopped playing the fort at the "pick the best teacher part" when 34.01 came out, so I don't know for sure how effective it is, but based on how everthing else has worked, it should be very efficient at training new troops.  It also should work using non-combat effective soldiers as training cadre while those still capable of grasping and standing without assistance "man the walls".

[Poindexterity]

Okay lets just be blunt. Melee squads larger than 3 are simply a waste of time except in limited circumstances*. Squads of 2 or 3 are truly excellent investments, producing an excellent ratio of slaughter to investment. If you don't understand this, just try it out. Embark with two proficient weapon users (no secondary skills needed) and put them in a squad together and give them no time off. The results will impress and amaze. Squads of 2 are more powerful than squads of 10. That is, the 2 dwarves thoroughly trained by sparring have more kill-power than the whole squad of 10 crappily trained dwarves. So it's not more work or anything, it's less work, because you only need 2 dwarves and equipment for 2 dwarves, and you get more out of that investment.

* Embark embarking with multiple dwarves as proficient teachers + proficient weapon skill, and putting them into a single large squad, works fairly well. Not nearly as well as putting them into separate squads of 2, but it's respectable enough to be worth mentioning.

what this guy said, except the two i start with have 5 in teacher, and 5 each in a different non-weapon skill. They level up the weapon skill faster than anything else anyways, and will probably still hit legendary in weapon BEFORE any of the skills they started with.

[Nan]

I believe that any effort to level up anything other than weaponskill is kind of false economy - weapon skill enhances parrying - it's actually a really good defensive skill itself, having a high weapon skill also seems to enhance the growth of all other skills, especially as the weaponskill becomes legendary+. I speculate this is because a dwarf with higher weapon skill attacks at a higher frequency, meaning the sparring partner parries, blocks, dodges, and takes hits more. So basically go full-tilt maxing out weapon-skill, their high weapon skill will keep them safe through parrying/deflecting, AND, all their other skills will develop faster. Another factor is the "a good offense is the best defense" principle, the quicker your dwarves wipe out the enemy, the fewer hits they have to take. This again favors weaponskill.

With that said - I have found dwarves who don't start with weapon skill can still do respectably. But what I'm interested in is what works most reliably. It seems that an investment in weaponskill is the most reliable and robust.

In terms of embarking with a large teacher squad, there is a benefit in making them all weaponuser-teacher, if you then add new recruits to the squads, the teachers don't waste a bucketload of time teaching striking, kicking, biting etc to the newbie, instead the relevant teachers can focus on teaching the relevant weapon skills. For that matter they also don't waste a bucketload of time teaching each other those relatively useless skills, instead they can start sparring with each other sooner. Sparring is still a very important part of teacher squads so the sooner they get to it, the better. It's probably worthwhile having them teach each other shield user and perhaps dodger, but even then everything I said above about the benefits of a maxed out weapon skill still applies. Of course doing other things is okay for flavor, it's nice having a bunch of kung-fu biter axelords, but I think in terms of cold hard efficiency, weapon skill is king.

[Yaotzin]

I believe that any effort to level up anything other than weaponskill is kind of false economy - weapon skill enhances parrying - it's actually a really good defensive skill itself, having a high weapon skill also seems to enhance the growth of all other skills, especially as the weaponskill becomes legendary+. I speculate this is because a dwarf with higher weapon skill attacks at a higher frequency, meaning the sparring partner parries, blocks, dodges, and takes hits more. So basically go full-tilt maxing out weapon-skill, their high weapon skill will keep them safe through parrying/deflecting, AND, all their other skills will develop faster. Another factor is the "a good offense is the best defense" principle, the quicker your dwarves wipe out the enemy, the fewer hits they have to take. This again favors weaponskill.

No one is saying weapon skills aren't they most important - they are. However, having armor skill and such is also really nice. The best way to get both is to embark with the non-weapon skills, then train weapon skills by sparring. Because sparring increases weapon skills insanely fast, but increases the rest really slowly.

Embarking with only weapon skills will make it painfully slow to get your defensive skills up to, well, anywhere.

Also I'm not sure high weapon skill will help increase defensive skills. Yes, you'll attack more, but the other sparrer will also parry more. In the end you still won't be using armor/dodge etc much.

[Carnes]

Also I'm not sure high weapon skill will help increase defensive skills. Yes, you'll attack more, but the other sparrer will also parry more. In the end you still won't be using armor/dodge etc much.

I have noticed this effect in dangerrooms.  A 1 spear trap will produce high weapon skills but a 5-10 spear trap will produce more rounded high weapon/dodge skills.  It's probably the same with sparring.  One partner = high weapon and low dodge.

[doublestrafe]

I believe that any effort to level up anything other than weaponskill is kind of false economy - weapon skill enhances parrying - it's actually a really good defensive skill itself, having a high weapon skill also seems to enhance the growth of all other skills, especially as the weaponskill becomes legendary+.

I've got five sparring-trained legendary axedwarves with freshly mace-crushed skulls that all say otherwise.

[Mushroo]

Agreed; in my latest fortress, I've instituted a "boot camp" of 6 months weaponless training in a no-uniform squad. This gives them at least Competent in basic skills like dodging, fighting, etc. before they even pick up a weapon.

[krenshala]

I do six to nine months of training with just weapon and shield (no armor).  This gets them to at least Adequate in the weapon and shield, usually much closer to Skilled.  When you do this, they can block/dodge volleys of arrows without much problem (though it is much easier when the elven bowmen are focused on killing the poor defenseless cat).  Sometimes they do both ... dodge the arrow, then block it because they dodged backwards (I considered that showing off, however).

This does have the drawback of the dwarf being a bit slower once in armor (hasn't learned Armor User unless he started with it), but I haven't noticed any real problems with this yet.  I will be able to do more serious !!science!! once i get a few more dwarves in my current fortress (no militia yet due to low fortress value and having received two migrant waves totaling 9 dwarves but not yet seeing the first caravan).