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[RenoFox]

I'm having the same problem I have always had in every one of my fortresses: Soldiers wasting time in demonstrations held by the least skilled members. In my current fortress the main military squad consists of generally skilled soldiers, but every single demonstration has been a dabbling striking/dodging demonstration from a dwarf who considers skill mastery a waste of time. How do I make my proficient dodger/fighter/teacher do his job, or in general make the military do something useful with their time?

[sal880612m]

I know in the past it was considered more efficient to have squads of only a couple dwarfs to increase the likely hood of sparring.

[greycat]

In my current fortress the main military squad consists of generally skilled soldiers, but every single demonstration has been a dabbling striking/dodging demonstration

Do the dwarves watching this demonstration have higher striking/dodging skill?  It's very common for your proficient axedwarf to be less than adequate in striking, and therefore she might actually have something to learn from the new guy.

Especially since dwarves now use striking, kicking, biting, etc. about 3-5x as often as they use their weapons in real combat, having them learn striking is not a waste of time....

[cikulisu]

the way military training works is probably the most broken part of fortress mode IMO. it should probably be rewritten to work better. obviously i don't have any insight on how hard that would be, but i imagine it wouldn't be too difficult a task; should just be a process of adding in a few checks to make so that the guys doing demonstrations are the most skilled, maybe boost the experience awarded for watching demonstrations of high-skill warriors, and making sparring more common. as it is training is horribly slow and trying to give low-skill warriors combat experience is basically throwing them into the thresher; recruits go in and shattered corpses come out the other end, esp. with how morale works (and even before that, a few goblins would massacre a higher number of recruits, in my experience)

needs fixing IMO

[greycat]

the way military training works is probably the most broken part of fortress mode IMO. it should probably be rewritten to work better. obviously i don't have any insight on how hard that would be, but i imagine it wouldn't be too difficult a task; should just be a process of adding in a few checks to make so that the guys doing demonstrations are the most skilled, maybe boost the experience awarded for watching demonstrations of high-skill warriors, and making sparring more common. as it is training is horribly slow

I won't claim that it's perfect, but there are a few wrong or exaggerated statements in that quote.

1) I've never seen a demonstration led by a lower-skilled dwarf compared to the skill levels of the watchers.  Just because someone who is Dabbling or Novice is leading a demonstration doesn't mean there is a bug.  The guys watching may be even worse.

2) The amount of XP given by a demonstration is a function of the Teacher skill of the guy leading the demo, and the Student skill of the guy watching.  The teacher's relevant combat skill may also matter -- I don't know that part.  (Upshot: demonstrations do not totally suck.)

3) The amount of XP gained by training in 0.40 right now is IMMENSELY higher than it was in 0.34.  This may be a side effect of the entire 0.40 skill-gain system being totally different, because all skills are going up faster now, not just military.  In which case, if Toady "fixes" overall skill gain, this may have the negative side effect of returning military skill training speed to 0.34 levels.  But for now, training is very effective.

4) Once they start sparring at all, sparring becomes extremely frequent.  You get literally dozens of pages of sparring combat reports per season.  There is no shortage of sparring.

[guitarxe]

You shouldn't worry too much about demonstrations. Keep your training squads to 2 dwarves and eventually they will get to sparring, and will soon mostly spar and you will get military skill gains pretty quick.

[Skullsploder]

Yeah, squads of two always works best. First time I noticed it was better was when my 2 macedwarves were suddenly legendary a few seasons after I assigned them to squads, while my starting militia captain was nowhere near their level, despite them having only been adequate when he was an expert. The difference? they were in a squad of two, he was in a squad of six.

Stick to the small squads. It's also useful to be able to micromanage your legendary fighters, rather than just ordering a blob attack always.

[EvilBob22]

Squads of two are not necessary, you can give five sets of "train, minimum 2 dwarves" per month instead.  Then, you can make the squads any size you want.