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[Thomasasia]

Seeing as how miners often times reach legendary mining skill level, would it be a good idea to danger room them to raise their dodge skill, and send them out to kill goblins? Is the glitch with the woodcutters, miners, and hunters in the military fixed yet?

[StagnantSoul]

It hasn't been fixed yet. One workaround is keeping ten miners, going crazy on the dirt levels, until they're legendary. Remove their mining labour, and everyone elses' as well. Give them a squad, and each of them get the best picks you have. Activate them with a station order, and once they have their picks, turn mining back on. I keep legendary 50/50 miner and lasher squads back in reserve, or on cavern clearing duty, with normal soldiers up front.

[Melting Sky]

I find it difficult to balance both rolls at once so generally I hand pick a handful of legendary miners who would be well suited as soldiers and turn them into a full time elite squad. Give a legendary miner a nice masterwork steel pick and watch the heads roll. Picks are perhaps the most devastating native weapon dwarves have.

[Kuikka]

They just want to see the red stuff flowing from that precious goblinite.

[Thomasasia]

 

[Naryar]

War miners are awesome. Even with basic quality copper picks.

Basically, the pick is the dwarven answer to the whip. And it actually is more entertaining, because it severs stuff.

[McCautious]

My current fortress has 7 miners.
5 of them are in a squad called "Miners Pride".
These 5 wear Chainmail, Helmets and Masterwork picks.
The other 2 bear the nickname "Vet".
These 2 wear crutches.

Eversince my Weapon/Armorsmith who is also a retired legendary miner ended a neverending fistbrawl with a cave troll with a couple swings of his pick it is a holy tradition that Miners are enlisted. The only problems here are that everytime they change profession from miner to soldier or vice versa, they leave their picks lying around everywhere. And the actual mining has slowed down quite a bit because they constantly hang out in the barracks doing "individual combat drill".

[miauw62]

War miners are awesome. Even with basic quality copper picks.

Basically, the pick is the dwarven answer to the whip. And it actually is more entertaining, because it severs stuff.

Considering that whips are effectively lightsabers, what would a pick be?

[than402]

The thing with war miners is that while they have absurdly high mining skill, they lack all other skills that contribute to the military's longevity, such as dodging, shield user, fighter, armor user, et cetera so they still need military training in order to be effective

[Naryar]

The thing with war miners is that while they have absurdly high mining skill, they lack all other skills that contribute to the military's longevity, such as dodging, shield user, fighter, armor user, et cetera so they still need military training in order to be effective

Of course. Though i've found that simply armoring high-skill miners and sending them to kill some low-threat targets worked just fine.

[Thisfox]

Early on in a fort which never got anywhere, the whole fort stopped while everyone except the miner played slap-the-bat, the poor animal having somehow pathed into the fort and, surrounded, not been able to escape. It was like a game of tennis, or, I guess, cricket, it being a bat and ball all at the same time.... I watched for a while, then finally recruited the miner into a one man hit squad. He strode in, hit the bat a single impressive blow to the head (which spattered bat blood everywhere, including on every single dwarf in the fort) and then stomped off to continue his mining activities. He was startlingly effective.

"Bat and ball games are over. Everyone get back to work."

[utunnels]

Miners are strong. So if they are lucky, they are deadly killers.
My first FB was killed by a miner, copper pick in the brain. I didn't even notice until I check the combat log...

Woodcutters sometimes can do similar thing, because they always have their battle axes equipped.

[GavJ]

wow i had no idea, thats awesome! Miners sit around not doing anything a lot of the time anyway after awhile. Might as well drill on dodge and stuff!

[McCautious]

The thing with war miners is that while they have absurdly high mining skill, they lack all other skills that contribute to the military's longevity, such as dodging, shield user, fighter, armor user, et cetera so they still need military training in order to be effective

wow i had no idea, thats awesome! Miners sit around not doing anything a lot of the time anyway after awhile. Might as well drill on dodge and stuff!

Exactly. If you need, say, 3 Miners to do some actual mining you might want to give about 8 dwarves the mining labor. Draft 6 of these into a squad. Then the squad does engage in a regular training routine where I found it best practice to only have around 3 of them as minimum training requirement in the schedule. This way, when they are scheduled, 3 are training, another 2 are doing individual combat drills because they seem to prefer this over their actual job.
At any given time during an active training schedule, I rarely noticed more than 1 or 2 squaddies actually doing the mining job. This is why there is always the other 2 miners who are not even in the sqad, and who are of course the fresh recruits in need of building up the mining (=weapon) skill anyways.

The draftees are handpicked second grade soldiers: They don't quite have what it takes to become an Axelord or something but they also don't have any outstanding weaknesses. In terms of discipline, dodging-, fighting-, striking-, wrestling-, teacher- and student-skill they barely lack behind my "regulars". For some reason though, only 2 of them gain armor skill ... I don't know what is up with that. Maybe it's because only 3 need to train and whenever there is blocking practice everybody but the same 2 guys chicken out ...?

[Col_Jessep]

Miners are great to get rid of some early threats to the fort but the most important skill is dodging and shield user imo.

After I have 40 dwarfs I'll start setting up a proper military with swordsdwarfs. I don't know why but swords seem to work best for me. With hammers and axes I have my dwarfs kicking, punching and biting all the time but they do make use of their swords.

If you are worried about strength and stuff: Just build 20 "dry" screw pumps in a room and give your entire military pump operator as their civilian job. 2 months training, two months pumping and two months in the danger room and they look like this in no time:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(The kills are mostly wild life atm. I have the squads training outside the fort, next to the entrance. Giant dingoes and alligators make for good practice and they don't get cave adaptation! =D )

The nice part is that I can just put everybody into the military. Even if they start out weak and with bad endurance the pumping will give them decent strength after a year or two. All males, gay and asexual dwarfs are recruited unless they have a really critical job. The women get all the jobs that don't put them (and their babies) in harms way: craftdarfs, miners, farmers, haulers, nobles... all women.

I'm training one squad of female marksdwarfs for beasts with syndromes or fire. It's a pain to get them to train with their crossbows though. They empty one quiver and then they go on a break or something.