I forget who/where/when, but someone on the forums mentioned this strategy and I love it. What you do is build either an animal stockpile and a hole in the ground with a forbidden hatch and mark it as a Pit. The Pit drops 1 or 2 z-levels into an arena. Between the arena and the entrance back to your fortress are your Barracks. In order to "escape", your prisoners will have to path through your Barracks and the bearded jaws of your waiting infantry. Should the prisoners somehow succeed, it's best to place a row of cage traps between the Barracks and the main fortress. Since starting this method, the skill level of my military has skyrocketed compared to sparring alone.
Some notes:
Non-hostile creatures will be ignored, so it won't work with most surface animals. 1st Caverns animals and Troglodytes make great training fodder.
It's not a fantastic idea to make the Arena and the Barracks be the same area, because there will be Miasma. A layer of Fortifications followed by a layer of Windows can allow your dwarves to see their victims while preventing them from getting in or destroying the Windows.
There is a risk of death and dismemberment for your own dwarves. Start with easy creatures and work your way up to stronger ones. Make sure you've got armor to go around, especially shields.
Make sure your military dwarves are actually in the barracks when you pit and your engravers and haulers are not. To avoid having to wait hours for some schmuck-dwarf to finally get around to pitting your important guests, you can set up a Burrows for your Pit Master.
You can make different Pits for victims that need a little softening up first. There could be a single Z-level drop pit, a 2-Z-level drop pit, a 2-Z-level drop onto wooden spikes pit, a 3-Z-level drop onto steel spikes pit, and so on.
It's important to have a FORBIDDEN hatch cover over the pit. Otherwise, some victims will manage to strike the dwarf that pits them before falling. Forbidden hatch covers also allow you to dispose of flying prisoners.
A variation of this technique is the Crundle-Ranch-Arena. Instead of dumping dangerous prisoners, capture some crundles and pasture them in the arena. Add some nestboxes and wait for the crundle eggsplosion. Crundles are born as adults, so they cannot be domesticated. As the training-timer on each batch of crundles slowly wears out, they will revert to their wild states in the presence of your military dwarves (and friendly crundles). You could do this with any kind of animal, but crundles are easy to find, easy to catch, easy to breed and easy to kill.
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Topic: I <3 Pit-Barracks (Read 835 times)