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[Sutremaine]

As a niche case, the 1000XP limit would mess up demonstrations with a skilled teacher. I've been following the progress of one dwarf, and his armour skill does very little for a couple of months and then suddenly jumps by over 1000XP as the teacher decides to do an armour demonstration instead of something else. I would imagine it'd be the same for other skills that are raised slowly by sparring or even actual combat.

[Escapism]

Some thoughts on rebalancing training:

-Teaching should be buffed a lot. I think a lot of the problem with teaching is that one dwarf that is very bad at learning is taught by a dwarf that is very bad at teaching, while in reality most people are at least somewhat decent at teaching/learning do to growing up as a child (this should hold true even in a feudal-style society).
-MMORPG grinding-style XP should be reduced
-It would make sense to have certain intervals wherein it is very hard to progress without teaching (for instance dabbling-> competent metalsmith, but maybe not dabbling->competent planting). This would the starting dwarves/immigrants more important, and could give a nice incentive for importing, for instance, a smith to better your dwarves.

[GreatWyrmGold]

What if you could gain the current amount of experience/use up until a ceiling is reached?  Then the XP rates drop dramatically.

How is this different than, say, increasing the amount of XP needed for higher skill levels?

[k33n]

I don't really see danger rooms as an exploit. I mean, its more of a mechanized dueling partner a la Dune.

[GreatWyrmGold]

The problem isn't the concept, it's the speed.

[dwarf_sadist]

Since the danger room puts the dwarf in an actual combat situation, the game treats it as if it IS combat, instead of a highly predictable, OH&S failing, automatic training room.

Then again, putting your dwarfs into life threatening situations for training purposes should probably be more dangerous then they are now.

[triato]

Even if they are an exploit, I find danger rooms to be interesting and fun to have. THey are present in the fantasy  literature too.

This sugestion balances danger rooms without making them useless.

Good idea.

[Hyndis]

DF is not a competitive game. Its a sandbox game. There is no "winning" DF, and you're not competing on high scores or anything like that.

If someone wants to cheese it by building elventy billion weapon traps full of giant adamantine discs, then they can go ahead. It doesn't impact my gameplay at all. If anything, the possibility of doing this improves my gameplay. The more things I have the option of doing, the better. Even if the things I want to do are completely absurd or cheesy. Options and choices are fun.

And fun is all that counts in a game.

[Hyndis]

-Teaching should be buffed a lot. I think a lot of the problem with teaching is that one dwarf that is very bad at learning is taught by a dwarf that is very bad at teaching, while in reality most people are at least somewhat decent at teaching/learning do to growing up as a child (this should hold true even in a feudal-style society).

I agree with this. Teaching seems to be done at an extremely slow pace. I've even made a custom reaction to make everyone into legendary students and teachers, and still it seems to take ages to teach a new recruit anything, even if the teacher is a multi-legendary mighty warrior.

The problem may be that organizing takes a very long time. Soldiers will eventually gain skill in organizing and this does appear to speed up the rate at which they can train new recruits, however there really is no way to train up soldiers with organizing aside from playing musical chairs with the manager noble position, which is tedious busywork.

To train soldiers from recruits to being passable warriors without the use of danger rooms can take a very long time indeed, and if you're playing in a hostile region full of undead, or under siege by many enemy civilizations you might not be able to wait 5 years or so to turn a peasant into a warrior able to hold the line reliably.

If you have a large, well trained military and are occasionally filling in the gaps with new recruits, then its less of an issue, as the new recruits will be surrounded be elites who will keep them mostly safe while they train up as well as get in on the action. Problem is that if you're starting off and not relying on traps or machines to do the fighting for you, its very hard to get a military going without a danger room. Particularly a melee military.

[expwnent]

DF is not a competitive game. Its a sandbox game. There is no "winning" DF, and you're not competing on high scores or anything like that.

If someone wants to cheese it by building elventy billion weapon traps full of giant adamantine discs, then they can go ahead. It doesn't impact my gameplay at all. If anything, the possibility of doing this improves my gameplay. The more things I have the option of doing, the better. Even if the things I want to do are completely absurd or cheesy. Options and choices are fun.

And fun is all that counts in a game.

Challenge and immersion are related to fun. I find it hard to believe that getting battered with blunt wooden spears for a few months would produce the greatest warriors of all time.

Fundamentally, that part of the game is broken. If you want to cheat, you should have to change something. You should have to mod the game, or enter a cheat code, or whatever. "It's a single-player game" is a poor excuse for not balancing the game properly. It's silly to just say not to use them. It's believable that they would work to some extent. They just work too fast, and that's the problem people are talking about here.

If the game is properly balanced, you can just go all out trying to win, or in the case of DF, survive. If there are serious problems with balancing, you have to constantly worry about whether a strategy is game-breakingly good. Danger rooms make it too easy. Well, what about using wild animals to train? Or using captured goblins for target practice? It's not easy to decide exactly where the "too easy" line is. Guess too low and the game will be boringly hard, guess too high and it'll be boringly easy. Ideally, a player shouldn't have to worry about that. Just play the game and look for interesting, effective, and creative strategies.

[Damiac]

I agree with some of what you say, exp, I hate having to hold myself back to avoid making a game too easy, it's a lot more fun when I can go all out trying to win and still be challenged.

I think danger rooms aren't really in that category though.  It's something unusual you have to go out of your way to set up and do.  Walling off your fort, on the other hand, definately falls under that category for me.  It's totally natural, and something that makes sense to do, but if you do it, sieges just aren't a problem anymore.

Your example of using wild animals or trapped goblins is a good one.  Equip your warriors with wooden weapons and let them go crazy on animals or goblins and they'll skill up way too quickly.  Maybe training weapons should only increase skill so much, that'd solve your danger room issue and wild animal training issues all at once.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I fail to see why training weapons should have a limit to skill they grant. Training is the point of training weapons.

The biggest problem is sparring, specifically that it's not done as often as it should and doesn't grant enough XP.

[goblolo]

I don't support this suggestion. These exploits are controllable (just don't make DR's, don't  drop items,don't create/remove orders.) and if you don't want to use them - you won't. Or you want others to stop using it?
Rate limits are bad. Just imagine: you have a gobbo siege and want your dwarves to train a bit. You dispatch 20 dwarves and they start killing gobbos. New gobbos arrive, stupid elves decide to join them in assault and your dwarves kills them all in a bloody massacre. Only heroes left, they are all covered in blood and scars, have from 30 to 50 kills and only raised their sword skill from 7 to 8. RRRAGEQUIT!!!!

[Rtyh-C]

If I were in charge of DF, I'd take a different approach. In my opinion, danger rooms are effective and should be effective, because they put the dwarves in an actual combat situation, where they have to be alert and perform different actions just to stay alive. However, danger rooms aren't all that effective at killing them, especially if they're carefully designed. Making them deadlier would solve the problem of aberrant skill gains, while still enabling players to attempt to exploit-train their dwarves, at a high risk.

Perhaps combining this approach with one of the ideas above would work even better...

[GreatWyrmGold]

What part of "training spears come out and hit you a bunch" implies a realistic combat situation? Goblins won't be stabbing along predictable paths.