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[Professor Dimplescoops]

So I can finally get my fortress up and running and protected with traps, and I need to form a military. What is a good way to start up my military and training for best results?

[GhostSade]

I would like to know this as well...

[XXSockXX]

I usually start like this: Take two dwarfs, preferably ones that come with some combat skills, and put them in a squad. Equip them with whatever weapons and armor I can produce or buy. Set them to active/train. Order them to kill wild animals to speed up skill gain. After a while they will begin to spar, this is easier for squads of two, 3 or 4 does also work or in a squad of 10 5 orders of "train minimum 2". Then I let them execute cagetrapped prisoners whenever I catch some. After a while they should be capable to deal with at least ambushes. This method should make them legendary fighters/weapon users after about a year or two of training.
Danger rooms are much faster, but I find them too much of an exploit and never use them.

[Professor Dimplescoops]

Thank you, I think im going to have to try that

[goblolo]

Also use marksdwarves!
1. They are easy to create. Wooden crossbows shoot as hard as if they were made from steel. The only downside is the bashing damage. But who cares, it's for shooting! And wooden/bone bolts can cripple enemies quite effectively.
2. They are easy to train. Archery targets require too much bolts to level up, you better order them to attack wildlife. And while melee's will run 2-5 time across all the map before they land 3-4 strikes on turkey, slicing it into steak, archers can cripple enemy from distance without letting it move more than 20 tiles away and then perforate it with dosen of bolts until it dies from bleeding (or from lucky headshot). It is much more experience in little time.
3. They are easy to mantain. While your melee soldiers require armor to kill badger (or you can occasionally get a dwarf with torn tendon in his leg/hand from lucky animal counterstrike), archers can do it from safe distance. Just watch for aggressive elephants/alligators/etc. Also you can easily use crippled dwarves as rangers because they don't require fast movements in almost every cases. Ofc., bones from killed animals can be used to enlarge your stock of bone bolts, and it usually ends up with constantly growing ammo supply (if you are not too unlucky to get only man-like animals).

[Slyjoker87]

When your first ambush comes and gets caught in your traps, mass pit them and use them as live target practice for your marksdwarves. You can also do this with trained and armed soldiers.

[urmane]

Separate the drop zone from the marksdwarves with channels (don't forget to remove the ramps ) instead of fortifications.  Insufficiently expert marksdwarves will need to be adjacent to shoot through fortifications, and it's actually kind of annoying to get them there.

I do something like landing area/channel/20 tiles of distance/channel/patrol route points to shoot from.  Bridges that raise sideways to provide access or turn into walls.  Non-flyers only

[i2amroy]

A few notes.

Take two dwarfs, preferably ones that come with some combat skills, and put them in a squad. Equip them with whatever weapons and armor I can produce or buy.

If you equip both of them with the same weapon then they will learn a fair bit faster. In a worst case scenario you can give them both training weapons made of wood until they are able to get real ones.

Danger rooms are much faster, but I find them too much of an exploit and never use them.

An easy way to nerf your danger rooms so they are a much more realistic training mechanism is to attach them to a pressure plate in a high traffic area instead of a lever. Danger rooms set up in this way can only have a maximum rate about 2.2x slower then a normal danger room, and as your population increases they will slow down even more. As such they are a nice way to start up a military but will actually become slower then normal training methods once you have skilled dwarves and a large fortress.


If you don't mind changing your starting build a little bit there is a very easy way to set up a very powerful military very quickly.
1)Give 5 of your starting 7 dwarves 5 points in a military skill (such as armor user, dodger, fighter, or a weapon skill) and 5 points in the "teacher" skill.
2)As soon as you can put the 5 dwarves in a single squad and let them train with each other. They should very quickly learn since demonstrations are one of the fastest teaching methods out there short of a danger room (assuming that there is a high skill difference in the taught skill between the teacher and student, and the teaching dwarf has a high "teacher" skill).
3)Once the dwarves have reached the point where they are all skilled in all 5 skills then you can break each of them apart into 5 different groups (or less if you don't have that many dwarves). Fill each group up with new recruits which should begin to gain skills extremely quickly.
4)Once the recruits near their teacher's skill level then break them off into the normal squads of 2-4 to encourage sparring.
In this way you can easily set up a very skilled military almost as fast as if you use a danger room without actually needing to "cheat" as some deem it.

[Sutremaine]

1)Give 5 of your starting 7 dwarves 5 points in a military skill (such as armor user, dodger, fighter, or a weapon skill) and 5 points in the "teacher" skill.
2)As soon as you can put the 5 dwarves in a single squad and let them train with each other. They should very quickly learn since demonstrations are one of the fastest teaching methods out there short of a danger room (assuming that there is a high skill difference in the taught skill between the teacher and student, and the teaching dwarf has a high "teacher" skill).
3)Once the dwarves have reached the point where they are all skilled in all 5 skills then you can break each of them apart into 5 different groups (or less if you don't have that many dwarves). Fill each group up with new recruits which should begin to gain skills extremely quickly.

Point 3 is always the sticking point for me. Dodge demonstrations happen quickly, but even with almost a whole year of constant training I rarely saw any Armour User skill on the dwarves that didn't embark with it (same for Biter and Kicker, which are rather slow to train by themselves). Weapon skill is really easy to pick up -- they'll get some every time they attack with their weapon, and as they get better at parrying they'll get even more.

So now I just default to Teacher/Armour User on everyone. To a certain extent this means they're starting from scratch, but they'll be able to start with full metal armour and still be fast enough to chase down wildlife, and when they've built up enough skill to be separated into squad leaders they'll be really fast at teaching the new recruits.

[goblolo]

An easy way to nerf your danger rooms so they are a much more realistic training mechanism is to attach them to a pressure plate in a high traffic area instead of a lever.

I thought they would be more realistic if you use steel spears instead of wooden ones.

[toomanysecrets]

I thought they would be more realistic if you use steel spears instead of wooden ones.

If you use anything in your danger room other than wooden training spears (not spikes) then you no longer have a training room you have a Futurama style suicide booth.

[Damiac]

A few notes.


If you don't mind changing your starting build a little bit there is a very easy way to set up a very powerful military very quickly.
1)Give 5 of your starting 7 dwarves 5 points in a military skill (such as armor user, dodger, fighter, or a weapon skill) and 5 points in the "teacher" skill.
2)As soon as you can put the 5 dwarves in a single squad and let them train with each other. They should very quickly learn since demonstrations are one of the fastest teaching methods out there short of a danger room (assuming that there is a high skill difference in the taught skill between the teacher and student, and the teaching dwarf has a high "teacher" skill).
3)Once the dwarves have reached the point where they are all skilled in all 5 skills then you can break each of them apart into 5 different groups (or less if you don't have that many dwarves). Fill each group up with new recruits which should begin to gain skills extremely quickly.
4)Once the recruits near their teacher's skill level then break them off into the normal squads of 2-4 to encourage sparring.
In this way you can easily set up a very skilled military almost as fast as if you use a danger room without actually needing to "cheat" as some deem it.

I tried something similar to this, but the problem I had was that they didn't usually seem to do demonstrations for the skills they were good at.
The other issue was that, although they were in one squad together, there would be 2 or 3 seperate demonstrations, with random dwarves watching each one.

And I never see them training armor user.  In the end I just gave up and gave the squads 5 seperate train 2 orders, and hoped for plenty of sparring. 
I'm considering trapping and pitting for live practice, it's hard to draw the line between valid practice and exploiting, but I suppose that's for each person to define for themselves.

[Dwarfotaur]

Easiest, vanilla but kinda cheaty way:

Change embark points so you have loads. Embark with a steel sword and a full set of steel armour. Randomly select a dwarf once you've embarked to become your legendary warrior (no need to set the skills on the embark screen, use those 10 points for something useful to your fort). Craft 10 wooden training spears, 3 mechanisms, 2 doors and an armour stand.

Make a very crude danger room:

Code: [Select]

W = Wall
D = Door
A = Armour Stand
S = Upright Spear Trap

WDW
WSW
W W
WAW
WWW
Use the armour stand and make the room a barracks. Then place a D in the gap and lock it. Equip your dwarf with the steel helm, mail shirt, breastplate, left/right gauntlet, greaves, left/right hightboot and the sword. Link a Lever up to the Spear trap and pull it continuously. Set the dwarf to active so he goes and stands on the spears. Within 60 seconds he'll be a legendary sword user/fighter. Unequip the sword and equip a shield, another 60 seconds you got a legendary shield user. Unequip the shield and he'll train Armour/Dodging.

Within the first in-game season you can already have a dwarf with Legendary Weapon/Shield/Fighting/Dodge/Armour user skill. You can multiply this as needed. Increase the size of the room for everywhere dwarf you have and repeat the process. You'll soon have as many dwarves as you can equip as legendary+10 in all fighting stats.

It's a little bit cheaty but it takes 0 mods and makes embarking in Terrifying biomes a bit easier as you've got a bad ass dwarf to protect you.

[Damiac]

Isn't that just a regular old danger room? You don't need to cheat and give yourself extra embark points for steel, any armor will work fine.

But I think the OP was asking about the more... legitimate means of training up a military.  However, if the OP wants to jsut get a good military and doesn't mind using exploits, the danger room is definately the way to go.

[Akura]

A few notes.

Take two dwarfs, preferably ones that come with some combat skills, and put them in a squad. Equip them with whatever weapons and armor I can produce or buy.

If you equip both of them with the same weapon then they will learn a fair bit faster. In a worst case scenario you can give them both training weapons made of wood until they are able to get real ones.

Get rid of the training weapons the moment you've got real ones. Otherwise, a dwarf may become attached(emotionally, physically, in DF there's no difference) to it, and it can be a pain in the ass to make them drop it.

If necessary, bring some copper with you on embark, and make some copper weapons at least. Even if they become attached, copper is still a million times better than a training weapon.