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[Sutremaine]

tldr: Beating up giant armadillos can give you ridiculous amounts of Armour User XP, and is good for raising stats quickly.

I caught a giant armadillo and decided to use it for live training. The results were quite interesting, so I started taking notes. Each of the five dwarves was clad in iron helm, gauntlets, leggings, high boots, and mail shirt, with no weapon or shield, and every attack they made against the curled-up giant armadillo glanced off its crunchy exterior. The dwarves were allowed to beat on the giant armadillo for a season, though each one was relieved in turn at the start of the season for self-treatment of drowsiness and dehydration. This cost about ten days each, with some dwarves perhaps getting in a little individual drilling.

This was an opportunistic observation, using dwarves with modded skill gains.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[SKILL_RATES:50:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:DIAGNOSE:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:SURGERY:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:SUTURE:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:DRESS_WOUNDS:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:SET_BONE:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:EXTRACT_STRAND:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:KNOWLEDGE_ACQUISITION:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:TEACHING:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:LEADERSHIP:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:BITE:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:STANCE_STRIKE:119:0:0:0]
[SKILL_RATE:PLANT:119:NONE:NONE:NONE]

In short, most skills are at 50% gain and no rust, with biting and kicking being at 119% and no rust.

Minor XP gains:

Biter: 0, despite dwarves making bite attacks.
Dodger: 1 average.
Fighter: 24 average.
Kicker: 0, despite dwarves making kick attacks.
Striker: 12 average.
Wrestler: 4 average.

Attribute gains and major XP gains:

Strength: 469 average, with one dwarf excluded due to reaching max strength.
Agility: 455 average, with one dwarf excluded due to reaching max agility.
Toughness: 554 average.
Endurance: 149 average.
Willpower: 478 average.
Armour User: 5,534 average. Actual results were 3210, 4887, 4956, 5687, and 8930.

Other combat-relevant attributes were not monitored.

Armadillo-bashing is perfectly safe, as the creature rolls into a ball before a dwarf gets in striking range and makes no counterattacks while curled up. I may try it with unarmoured "civilians" next.

[krenshala]

What was your squad sample size for this training testing?

[Sutremaine]

Looks like I either forgot to add that or deleted it and didn't replace it...

Sample size was five, with three dwarves being in one squad and two in the other. Added the number to the OP.

[Tomcost]

If you can use them on civilians, then we will be able to train children!

Call Girlinhat, tell her that the answer were not turkeys, but giant armadillos!

[ORCACommander]

hmmm i have armadillo men on my map...

[Sutremaine]

Armadillo men probably aren't large enough -- if a dwarf can knock the shell off (which can happen), then that's it for the creature beneath. The armadillo I have is size 214,830 (extrapolated from blood volume), and armadillo men are an average of 38,759 according to the wiki. Dwarves are an average of 60,000, and size is an important combat modifier.

[itg]

What exactly is it that causes dwarves to gain armor user experience here? Are they learning by example, or what?

[Mr. Palau]

What exactly is it that causes dwarves to gain armor user experience here? Are they learning by example, or what?

first, lol, second, I think the armadillo fought back or they might just gain armor user experience from fighting while wearing armor. Probably a little bit o' both.

[Oaktree]

I noticed that rolled up pangolins were almost totally immune to wooden bolt fire.  Just taking bruise damage.

[Sutremaine]

No fighting back, the combat log is over a hundred pages of attacks glancing off the shell.

Trading XP works by distributing a fixed amount of XP among selected skills. Perhaps in this case the game is doing the same thing, but due to the lack of shield or weapon and the inability of unarmed attacks to get through the XP has only one place to go. That's just a total guess though. I really have no idea why Armour User is putting on thousands of XP a season (with 50% skill gain as well!) and everything else is getting next to nothing.

[BoredVirulence]

I assume if they had real weapons they would kill the giant armadillo? Try training weapons, and see if they still get gains?

My best guess would be that dwarves do learn by example. Or maybe they normally gain some experience in armor user when fighting (in armor) but the gains were overshadowed by other skills? I'm really out of my element here though, so I've got no idea.

[Akura]

I'm pretty sure they just gain armor skill from fighting while in armor. It's possible they're not gaining the other skills because they're not making any significant hits(not 100% certain on that).

If the attack glances off, then it's probably not a true hit(and thus no skill gain), even if said true hit is a minor bruise. Which wouldn't apply to armor user since it's merely the act of making an attack in armor is what gives skill. But that's just conjecture on my part.

[Drazinononda]

I'm pretty sure they just gain armor skill from fighting while in armor. It's possible they're not gaining the other skills because they're not making any significant hits(not 100% certain on that).

If the attack glances off, then it's probably not a true hit(and thus no skill gain), even if said true hit is a minor bruise. Which wouldn't apply to armor user since it's merely the act of making an attack in armor is what gives skill. But that's just conjecture on my part.

That doesn't seem to apply in general though. For example, firing a crossbow at a wall, or indeed at thin air, gives Crossbow and Archer experience. Holding on to a struggling creature, even if you're not performing any wrestling moves, gives Wrestler and Fighter experience.

[Thuellai]

Hmmm

Looking purely at these attribute gains, the big increases in agility means that having your civilians do this as part of a rotating reserves program should result in things speeding up across the fortress in general, because as their agility goes up, won't they go faster as well?  For that matter, being stronger/faster/etc should mean they work faster overall

Might be a great new form of civvie cross-training.  At the very least, civvies will be a bit more dangerous if they're all superdwarvenly strong.

[Gargomaxthalus]

The thing about Armor User is that it is simply about learning how to move more easily while using armor. It has absolutely nothing to do with taking hits and should actually go up every time that an attack is successfully avoided. All this having been said, it also sounds like there are some weird interactions between the sets of code that are involved in this, since that does sound somewhat extreme for just using a punching bag. Of course I have no experience with crunching the games numbers, so it could simply be a matter of my perception creating an expectation.