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[Zigzom24]

How do you turn your children (both male and female) into men? How do you mold the young drunkard into the tough as stone dwarf of legend? What do you put your soldiers through to train them?

I personally capture an invader (Usually a white tigerman (Fortress Defense Mod)) then throw a lone soldier in a pit with them, both weaponless and naked. If they survive, I give them a weapon and then they go against five invaders.

Question: Is using a dry pump stack still used as training?

[Girlinhat]

It can increase endurance, toughness, and strength, so I always give my soldiers-in-training a long tour of the pumps.  Exhaustion is the #1 cause of dwarf failure.  A dwarf in full steel will eventually fall when exhaustion overtakes them and they collapse.  Then, I usually give my dwarves a shield and weapon for standard recruits, or a pair of shields for the elite guard, both with full armor.  Either way, they're then fed live training from usually captured sieges, sometimes from creative wild animal breeding projects and distribution boxes.  Once sufficiently high ranked, they're entered into back-line military duty and work their way towards front line.  Standard recruits usually get ~5 in shield/armor/dodge and ~7 in weapon before I pull them, usually using wooden training weapons if available.  Elite guard get towards 7 in shield/armor/dodge and up wards 3-6 in misc object, wrestling, and striking, depending on how the individual dwarves fight, before being given a weapon and put into active siege duty around mid-row.

Using numerous burrows, I line up my soldiers in formation inside a large "killing field" designed to contain and keep the sieges somewhat orderly, essentially a massive open air arena with creative locks and whatnot to ensure no escape while also allowing the entire siege to become trapped before the troops are set out.  Elite axedwarves are in front row, elite speardwarves and hammerdwarves directly behind, elite-in-training next, regulars-in-training after that, and finally some hodge-podge marksdwarves in the rear who mainly stay in place and provide additional flying chaos that doesn't contribute much.

In case of whips, I'm usually able to flood the combat zone, or more likely capture them, retrieve the weapons, and used the still-armored goblins as training fodder.

[King DZA]

Give them equipment.

Make them train in barracks.

Order them to kill invaders/annoying animals.

Any who don't die while fighting off their first siege are considered successfully trained soldiers.

[zubb2]

Sheild,wepon (i like spears)danger room.

[Eddren]

Well, it depends. If the militia in particular is made up of Crossbowdwarves, then I set them all to hunting and let them loose.
If they are melee, I give them mining duties, smoothing duties, and send them on periodic suicide missions.
I'm trying to remember; are silver arrows effective?

[Vehudur]

I'll use a danger room for an initial squad for initial defense, then train them legitimately.  After that squad is done, the room is re-purposed with steel spears for an execution chamber noble suite.

All of my soldiers get trained to legendary +5 pump operators and legendary +5 miner* to improve attributes.  Then they train conventionally.

*If I have enough unmined stone that is.  Useless stone is dumped and atom smashed.  I'll try to have them dig out stone at lower skill levels and then soil at higher to cut down on the amount of stone produced.   This is after veins and all the gems I find have been extracted by my normal mining team for an area.

[martinuzz]

It can increase endurance, toughness, and strength, so I always give my soldiers-in-training a long tour of the pumps.

Really? o_0

I thought that since the new military system was introduced, only military skill gains increase attributes. This is the exception to that rule?

I'm so gonna build an automated pump training center for all my dwarves:

1) build as many pumps as there are skill levels
2) use manager settings, so that the first pump allows minimal dabbling, maximum normal skill. Next pump, minimum novice, maximum competent,..., last pump, minimum level Grand Master, maximum level Legendary.
3) turn on pump operating on all your dwarves
4) profit

Ofcourse, you can do with less pumps if you cannot spare too many dwarves at the same moment.

[o_O[WTFace]]

I give them steel armor and wooden weapons and send them to kill large wildlife.  The downside is they sink like drunken rocks in water, so drain all murky pools first.  You can get a whole lot of training out of horses and elephants and such. 

[Flying Dice]

I turn my children into men and women by lowering the maximum childhood age to 6.



And then I hand them swords and tell them to go kill those buggers over the hill.

[Doughnut189]

I feed them luxurious dishes made from fresh fruits and vegetables and meat, and they drink exotic booze bought from the elves in one of my fortress' many cafés.

I guess the men in the fortress are the ones that survive the eventual break through of a siege and death of everyone in the fortress. (Usually no one)

Oh I train my military by drafting useless dwarves and telling them to kill giant olms/crocodiles.

[Girlinhat]

It can increase endurance, toughness, and strength, so I always give my soldiers-in-training a long tour of the pumps.

Really? o_0

I thought that since the new military system was introduced, only military skill gains increase attributes. This is the exception to that rule?

I'm so gonna build an automated pump training center for all my dwarves:

1) build as many pumps as there are skill levels
2) use manager settings, so that the first pump allows minimal dabbling, maximum normal skill. Next pump, minimum novice, maximum competent,..., last pump, minimum level Grand Master, maximum level Legendary.
3) turn on pump operating on all your dwarves
4) profit

Ofcourse, you can do with less pumps if you cannot spare too many dwarves at the same moment.

You mean the "After 40d military"?  Yeah, all jobs that train skills will increase attributes or stats.  I ran a small test on engravers, noting an increase in endurance and strength on my engravers based on the time spent on a job - my thirsty, sad engraver who was smoothing floors at 1/2 normal rate, gained 2x stats per floor tile smoothed.

You can't assign pumps a skill limit like that, I tried.

[Sutremaine]

I thought that since the new military system was introduced, only military skill gains increase attributes. This is the exception to that rule?

Check out the wiki page on attributes. I recently had a trader gain a point of Agility during trading from doing comedy routines.

The problem with civilian attribute raising is twofold -- only one skill is being trained at a time, and time spent lugging materials around means no time working and improving. Attribute raises seem to be based not on the number of jobs done, but the time spent doing them. I need to do some testing with fast crafting (stone, wood, stuff that doesn't clutter) vs. slow crafting (yak parts) to compare attribute gains to number of items produced, but I'm pretty confident that a month spent on the same stack of large bones is going to give more gains than a month spent churning out stone crafts.

Edit: ninja'd, apparently.

[Girlinhat]

Yeah, I did some minor science on this.  Runesmith was used to give 4 dwarves identical stats.  2 were made legendary+5 engravers, while 2 were dabbling, and two were given 500 on all stats while 2 were given 1000 on all stats.  The 500's and the 1000's both gained stats at a similar rate, allowing variance for working speed the rate can be assumed identical.  The legendary gained considerably less stats, while the dabblers considerably more, because those dabbling took much more time to do the work and thus had longer to train.  Of importance, one dabbler became upset and thirsty of his inability to leave his burrow.  The other dabbler was conveniently beside the nearby river, while the angry one was not, and spent a while eating vermin as well.  Due to his decreased mood and lack of booze, he worked drastically slower - and gained drastically higher stats.

All 4 dwarves were given a 10x10 area of obsidian generated via DFHack, to smooth, check stats, and engrave, with another check.  All tests were conclusive - the longer time spent on a task, the higher the stat gain.  A highly cluttered workshop with a sober dwarf would produce the best stat gains, as in the case of crossbow dwarves you may want to train gem cutters for their stats, and doing so would be best to make several (dozen) statues, and have them all encrusted with common gems - a task made easier because you can now use stones - causing massive clutter as the large statues take up workshop space.  A burrow that excludes the booze stockpile will cause the dwarf to become sluggish, but they WILL leave the burrow to save their life from dehydration.  For melee dwarves all you really need are screw pumps, much easier to set up.

[Sutremaine]

A burrow that excludes the booze stockpile will cause the dwarf to become sluggish, but they WILL leave the burrow to save their life from dehydration.

To ensure sobriety you could cut the dwarf off from the booze physically, and then from food, water, and bed via the burrow. They'll stay hungry and thirsty and drowsy, but they should never be in danger of dying. Materials can be dropped in from above. Maybe living things too, if non-dwarven deaths are capable of traumatising a dwarf.

[Girlinhat]

Dropping living items from a suitable dropping height will allow the "doesn't really care" trait.  This is important for a soldier, a berserk axedwarf is the last thing you need, but I find that this comes about naturally.  Slaying goblins adds to the trait, so they get it upon themselves already by the time they're skilled enough to be a fortress threat.