Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Jacko13]

Very interesting topic!  I have been experimenting with 2 dorf squads to gain skills by sparring and been impressed with the gains on fighter and weapon skills.  However mine dont seem to be gaining any armor skill?  I started everybody off in leather with a metal helm and planned to add armor as they skilled up so as not to lose too much speed.  But I now have several legendary dwarves with almost zero armor skill.  Those that started with armor skill have seen it go rusty despite the constant sparring???

[mordrax]

Usually you keep seeing statements that sparring is the best. There was some !!SCIENCE!! earlier that teacher5/some military skill 5 dwarves, teaching another dwarf in squads of 2, was even faster (the 2nd dwarf could be unskilled, or also a dwarf with 5 teach and another military skill - in the latter case, it doesn't even matter which one holds the demonstrations, something useful is learned anyway). The catch here is that teacher levels up pretty slowly, if you don't start with it. I've already set up my next fort, it's going to have 4 dwarves going into military training ASAP: all have teacher 5, and 1 each with a skill of 5 in axes, dodging, fighter and shield using (iirc). I'm going to rotate them so that 2 get everything, and 2 get everything but axes, and then they'll be training other dwarfs later (in the 2nd or 3rd year).

from my observations on teacher, it really doesn't actually add much, several posts up, i talk about how having a teacher in a sparring pair would give some improvement to the unskilled dwarf but their constant sparring lvled up both dwarves consistently. so my gut feel is that you don't even need 5 teacher, maybe not even 5 weapon skill.

But I now have several legendary dwarves with almost zero armor skill.  Those that started with armor skill have seen it go rusty despite the constant sparring???

yes, i have noticed this as well, but my dwarves are naked zerkers. they wear cloth and in the recent siege, decimated goblin spearmen without a scratch. they didn't even have shields in the first 2 years until i started producing them and now they are lvl 10 shield users in the last yr.
so i can't comment on the armor user skill as i still haven't gotten around to making them and i'm in my 3rd, beginning 4th year spring.

So with regards to the experiment (it has been a year), i've had to cut it short, due to some unforseen circumstances and some bad control on my part.
Here was the initial setup

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

One of my hammer lord got drained by a vamp that slipped through my filter... *VERY* annoyed about that. he was a 15+5 with extremely high attributes in str, agi, tou and end... so the recruit he was training stopped at weapon skill 5 after a year of training, from 0.
The other hammer squad, the student got badly injured in the recent siege, he was on weapon skill 3 after the same period.

the two spear recruits... one of them dead, the other has lvl 1 spear.

As for the group of 10 axes, very marginal improvements, 7 of them are at axe lvl 1, one on 0. 2 who started on lvl 3 now half way though lvl4.

Halfway point conclusions:
Multiple paired training orders in a 10 dwarf squad vs 2 dwarf squad:
The 10 axes lvled to 1, the 2 spears lvled to 1 so there doesn't seem to be much difference putting just 2 of them in a squad, i.e squads of 10 with 5 paired train orders could still work, i need to run this more to see the effects and i also need to create a new control set as half of these dwarves are dead or dying...

Sparring with a master:
The two hammerers who started at 0 and trained with lvl15+5 masters are now on 3 and 6, so training with a experienced master seems to be faster than training with a novice as in the case with the two spears who started on 0 are just lvl 1 in the same time frame.

Training from lvl 0 vs training from some skill 1+:
From observing the axes at lvl 3 who only gained 1 lvl vs axes at lvl 0 who also just gained 1 lvl, there doens't seem to be much difference in rate of training. (this assumes 1. exp requirements increase linearly and 2. sparring gives constant amount of exp)

Role to skill correlation:
If you use spintermind's DT, then you get a % match (100% being perfect match to the role) of dwarf to role. From looking at the axe dwarves role match and exp gained, there seems to be no correlation
30% 800xp
30% 1000xp
80% 1000xp
13% 1200xp
etc etc

[Snaake]

Here's the previous thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=97090.0

Page 3-4 start seeing some conclusions, the one I was thinking of was: "So there's a couple of interesting points here. The Unskilled squad, who had no prior military or academic capability, attained Legendary +2, a result only bettered by two other combinations so far, namely Axe/Teacher + Student (Sqd 1/Exp 1) and Axe/Teacher + Unskilled (Sqd 1/Exp 2)." (the test period was 1 year)

Sadly, I did neglect to give my 4 student skills, but that's because I wanted to get as many military skills included as possible. Also, an important conclusion already earlier in the thread was that the weapon skills train by far the fastest anyway, so you'll get the biggest gains out of teachers with stuff like dodging, which usually trains much slower.

[mordrax]

Page 3-4 start seeing some conclusions, the one I was thinking of was: "So there's a couple of interesting points here. The Unskilled squad, who had no prior military or academic capability, attained Legendary +2, a result only bettered by two other combinations so far, namely Axe/Teacher + Student (Sqd 1/Exp 1) and Axe/Teacher + Unskilled (Sqd 1/Exp 2)." (the test period was 1 year)

Yeah i based my current research on those findings to see if i can reproduce the untrained to legendary results with a squad of 10 on multiple training orders.
But it seems that even my squad of 2 untrained spears hasn't even attained lvl2, let alone legendary status by end of first year.

i'll be happy with lvl10 or even lvl5 in 1-2 yrs if it means less micromanagement. this way i can setup 3 squads and effectively train 30 dwarves with minimal clicking/typing.

So when i said teacher doesn't add much, i should have added, my priorities is more on ease of mass training than on speed of in-game training so lagging a year behind is fine if it means no teacher and no creating 15 squads of 2 and assigning all of them to barracks, uniforms, schedules etc vs 3 squads setup,
 
w.r.t dodging, it's taken me 3 years to get to ~lvl 3 if i remember correctly. shield user went from 0 to 10 in one year after i got my smithy working. so i'd agree with starting out with the dodge skill higher and having it taught to everyone, but if i have to set a teacher with one pupil each year, i'm not going to do that to 30 dwarves unless there's a macro for it

[mordrax]

Ok, end of experimental time, 2 years in total, here's what i have to say about it.

The Experiment:
10 axes in a squad with multiple training orders. Only 6 made it to the end of the experiment, but the 4 that died were all in different preference pairs so basically only 1 pair survived. Inconclusive results. Fail.
2 squads of teacher/novice hammer dwarves. Both teachers and a student died. Fail.
Two novice spear dwarves. One died, left the other without a training partner. Fail.
So the experiment was a general disaster, half my test subjects were casualties in sieges and ambushes. Bit disappointing.

Multiple training orders:
For a whole year, i had 10 dwarves in a squad training in pairs. After that, I had 6 dwarves in a squad with one pair still setup correctly. At the end of the two years, all those dwarves only leveled up 1-2 weapon levels.
I rarely saw them spar, mostly demonstrations because they would spar sometimes, and then one dwarf would gain some more xp in some useless skill and demo to 2-3 dwarves, leaving the partnered ones to do individual drills and their skills would diversify meaning alot of dwarves with alot of different skill levels which caused MORE demos...
Therefore: This method does not work well (contrasting to 2 dwarves in a squad left for a year who gain 5-6 weapon lvls)

Demonstrations:
Demonstrations happen all the time in those two years. At the end of the 2 years, I setup a hammerlord with a novice. The hammerlord did a hammer demo and i thought, !GREAT! he's going to impart a % of his 30,000xp to the 0xp novice. He imparted 3xp to the novice. that's 0.01%.
Demonstrations just doesn't work without Teacher skill. If you don't have teacher skill, it's best not to setup squads for demos.

Sparring:
The same hammerlord and novice then sparred, the novice gained 250xp, halfway to lvl 1 hammer. Then the novice taught the lord how to fight... blind leading the blind. (The lord came with the king and had no fighting skills)
The soldiers that sparred the most were my starting spear pair and starting axe pair. They are also the soldiers that have almost identical military skills which leads me to this conclusion about sparring.
When picking for sparring, it's critical to pick two dwarves with the exact same skill set. That way, because they gain exp in the same areas, they spend less time demoing to each other.

Teaching:
The *only* time i had success with teaching was on embark when i had a teacher with weapon skill impart knowledge to a novice (neither dwarf had any other skills). Straight after a sparring session when the novice gained a couple more xp in fighting than the teacher, the novice would demo how to fight to the teacher.
So my conclusion is, teaching *only* works if you have a teacher dwarf with high skills in one or two areas demoing to dwarves that have no skills. As soon as the teacher gains 5 or 10xp in a crappy skill, he'll try to demo that skill to the students. Waste of time. This will always happen because as soon as the teacher spars, they'll gain skill elsewhere.
The exception to this is a extremely skilled teacher that has high skills in all aspects of fighting. Then every demo they perform will be gold.
The micromanagement and randomness needed for this path means i'll never use teacher again.

Conclusion: (To train a good military in a couple of years with little? micromanagement)
1. Create n squads when n is half of the total melee soldiers you want in a fort.
2. Pick out pairs who are the same in military skills (this is pretty easy as most dwarves come with either no skill or one weap skill + the same lvl of fighting skill)
3. Pick dwarves based on their recuperation and disease resistance. Sparring raises str, agi, tou, end by 3-500/yr so all my 1st yr dwarves in the 4th yr at least have 2 attributes over 2000. Recuperation and resistance does not get trained.
4. Build a armor stand, set them to active/training. Do not touch schedule, it defaults to train all year, 10 minimum in a squad. In two years when they reach lord status, they'll be happy.