After The Great Werezombie Clone Massacre I've concentrated more on conventional combat training and fed the combat room anything that gets caught in the cage traps. It has been slow process but finally the first students have achieved that dwarven state of Nirvana, the fabled "doesn't really care about anything anymore." And I didn't even have to resort to puppy murder this time.
Some quick observations about various guest lecturers captured lately and their effectiveness in training:
- Hostile animal men: good training opponents, the students will attack on sight and their deaths will desensitize everyone around. Bit too weak for sustained training.
- Troglodytes: Usually not hostile against students unless they see some military behind a fortification, will then turn hostile immediately. They seem to love cage traps for some reason, so often plentiful. Will desensitize students.
- Invaders: plentiful after sieges; this fort has been getting some decent sized sieges which is almost unheard of. Will require a militia squad to actually take care of the fighting since students will touch them only very rarely. Suitable only for desensitizing.
- Blind Cave Ogres: as Troglodytes, will also require some provoking from militia members before lectures. Will not desensitize students; apparently they're not sentient enough for this purpose. Can withstand lectures a bit longer than smaller humanoids.
- Trolls: like Blind Cave Ogres, but aggressive straight away. Even tougher than ogres but still no challenge.
- Crundles: weak and will not desensitize students, but often plentiful, as they also seem fascinated by cage traps. Students will attack crundles on sight; I don't know what's their beef with them but I have no problem with that. Their smaller size encourages students to favor wrestling moves against them; I felt actually sorry for one of the poor monsters when seven students simultaneously practiced knot tying with its limbs.
During this process some of the students have accumulated quite impressive kill lists; I suspect the body counts will be astronomical by the time they'll graduate. To ensure they will not run out of opponents I have started a magma crab breeding operation with a pair I managed to catch since they reproduce quickly and the children seem eager to play with them. I just hope I won't experience fun of the !!FUN!! kind when I drop few crabs into the combat room.