I rarely if ever see much improvement in squad training in my typical games. I just tried the 2-man squads for a year, and wow, VERY noticeable improvements. Thanks for the tip.
yeah, the first time i did it too, very exciting to get a working military!
I quite often do the 6 military 1 civilian embark. It's quite a lot of fun actually. Initially I have the military dwarves chop some trees, dig out some space, produce some furniture, and smelt, forge and create their own gear. Typically the civilian will be a herbalist or farmer, and will be doing his thing. Otherwise the civilian will be a weapon or armorsmith - that depends on what the preferences are like.
Typically there is no need to bring food. Just slaughter the pack animals and cook some seeds from brewing and/or do some booze cooking (since I incline more to herbalism than farming, seeds are expendable, but even if you farm, if you bought some plump helmets for brewing, you'll have plenty of spare seeds).
The 6 will be training within the first season, and the 7th will be pretty busy until the migrants arrive, usually doing things like finishing off the furniture, completing uniforms for the military dwarves, producing soap, farming, brewing, cooking etc.
I also do 4 military and 2 military embarks. With 4 military, you have enough civilians left over to pierce an aquifer if need be. With 2 military, once you're used to 6/4 military starts, you almost wont know what to do with all the spare hands. Even 2 military is enough to absolutely demolish vanilla ambushes and sieges. But if you're playing Fortress Defence mod you'll want 4, and if you're playing FD Challenge and/or Bonus, you'll want 6 - at least if you're planning to fight the sieges with pure military.
... that's... hardcore... dude. i mean slaughtering embark animals to get food and using a herbalist to get plants rather than growing it.. and COOKING seeeeeds... i'm not at that level of play yet but i can see the reasoning behind it.
i'm happy to have 6 soldiers for my non-evil untamed wilds fort
a Kea took out 3 digits of one of my axe zerker, i don't think i could handle any more.
7th dwarf for producing soap? now that's just bragging. isn't there a million more important things to do before soap?
Having the military dwarves do setup gives them some civilian skill, which is good for avoiding bad thoughts if they turn back into civilians. I've seen military dwarves rapidly switch to civilians and then back again at month changes, and there probably isn't an exception to the 'military -> peasant = bad thought' rule for this situation.
yep, i've seen that too. but i don't think it mattered much, their grand bedrooms and satisfying sparring session and kills way override those bad thoughts
On attributes: time spent on a skill-related task raises attributes, number of skill-related tasks raises skills (tested this in .31 with normal dwarves and uberfast dwarves, found that with rooms of equal size the normal dwarves had raised more attributes by the time the last tile was dug). The new changes to direction-picking mean less walking than before if digging a large room, but the nature of mining means that the individual jobs will often be done in locations far away from anything else in the fortress. This means lots of walking, especially since miners can't carry waterskins, and walking doesn't teach a dwarf anything*. Mining also doesn't raise Agility. Did you use DT to look at the dwarf stats, or did you just use the descriptions of each dwarf?
I did some tests in .31 with Pump Operating, and found that it raised some stats far more than others. See here.
*maybe the Observer skill. Nobody seems to know anything about that, or really care.
i use spintermind's DT. (Aside: I've noticed that if you assign dwarves to squads using DT, it doesn't apply the uniform sometimes? equipment screen shows they have the uniformed item but i check their inventory and they dont!! so i re-mass assign uniform and they immediately go pick it up. took me a while to work that out)
using descriptions to look at stats is like using the audience's reactions to watch a movie... however, having said that, one of my axelords 15+5 legendary is now on max str, agi, tou and very high endurance (max meaning diamond, lvl 15?).
your research into pump operation is very interesting since that was the 40d's recruit job of choice (that and stone detailing) but pumping is more automatic. when i ask about attributes, i got alot of qualitative answers but no quantities. everyone would say, yeah job X improves your strength and toughness and agility but no one knows how much. however, i've shown that sparring improves it 100 fold!
So i conclude from your tests that pump operation isn't good for attribute training, in fact, i've pretty much come to the conclusion that sparring is the fastest attribute training strat. However, it doesn't train healing or disease resistance.
So now, my military consists of male, regenerative and disease resistant dwarves.
i'm about a month into my current experiement:
Test subjects:
Axe recruits, 10 dwarves, 5 orders of pairs
Controls:
2 squads of: 1 hammer lord + 1 hammer recruit with no weapon skill
a squad of 2 spear recruits, no weapon skills
The hypothesis is that the test subjects will gain in weapon skill as fast as the squad of just 2 spear recruits.
I'll observe the hammer dwarves to see if training with a superior skilled dwarf makes any difference.