Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[NCommander]

That's incredibly genius on handling them dodging, but won't them falling down a level cause them to stop sparring, and ultimately slow down their development?

[TheFlame52]

From what I've seen, dwarves gain plenty of armor user just sparring. What's the point of your design?

[Skullsploder]

They gain armour user up to around expert, and then basically stop gaining it. Their other skills provide enough defense from other dwarves that they never receive hits once they are legendary dodgers and shield users and weapon users. So basically they initially receive loads of armour user but then less and less until it hits a rate of practically zero gain. This forces hits so they keep on gaining armour user. And now that I've filled the bottom layer with water, they've all become novice swimmers in under a year. Basically it's  a good way to get your dwarves into water deep enough to train swimming, which raises tons of attributes. Increasing the pit depth to 3 z levels resulted in a vast increase in bruises and pulped ears. This may be a good thing though because injuries increase detachment which decreases stress drastically. Also I've heard (anecdotally) that receiving injuries can affect toughness and heal rate positively.

Oh and I mentioned earlier that this doesn't interrupt the sparring session, they run back up and keep at it. They reach legendary in a matter of a couple of years in weapon, discipline,  shield user, amd dodgerr, so this is just to take away some of that xp and put it into armour user.

[Zachski]

...Once I get my Fortress up and running, I'm definitely gonna try that design out, but with wrestlers, to see if it ends up deadly for them, or if it ends up helping them even more.

I'll probably also have a clinic/shrine right next to the sparring arena so that I can gain some medical skill for my dwarves.

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

If dwarves are falling, use wooden floors. Lighter floor does less damage.

[jvj_]

For some reason, my dwarves seem to be falling a whole bunch, but they rarely generate hit reports when they hit the bottom. I'm also only seeing their armor skill raise when that happens - any clue what could be going on? I've got them falling 2z levels, but perhaps that's not enough?

:edit: Furthermore, out of the four dwarves training under what seems to be exactly the same circumstances (in accordance with the OP) - only two of them are generating a few hits when falling, the other two are just too bouncy, I guess?

[Eldin00]

Are the dwarves gaining in climbing skill? They could be catching themselves on the wall instead of hitting the bottom.

[jvj_]

I thought that might be a possibility, since one of the only differences I can find in the setup I've made is that my second layer isn't partly smoothed like SkullSploder's is, but I can't find any indication that they're becoming climbers.

[NullForceOmega]

That is a pretty cool design skullsploder, it reminds me of my favored .34 design for a 'mega-training area', which combined pair sparring with a three z-level fall onto upright spear traps with training spears.  effectively fusing normal training with the 'shaft of enlightenment' and a danger room.

Yay compliments And I have been thinking about doing something similar at the bottom, like filling it with 4/7 water so they train swimming skill as well at the same time. In fact, you know what, I'm gonna go make a pond zone right now. I could probably put repeating spears at the bottom as well, but then I might as well make a danger room, and I think of this as a non-exploity way to train armour skill.
I am very interested in seeing what sort of results you got with that megacombo of hyper-training techniques. Just the pair sparring for me got me legendaries from raw recruits inside of two years; I imagine with your design you got legendary +17 in a few months.

More like legendary +150 in a season, and I wasn't even using repeating spikes, just deployed.  The only problem was that after my militia commander fell the first time, none of the others could ever knock him back down, so his armor user ended up much lower than the rest of the force.  Didn't matter, he was a living serrated blade trap, nothing survived.

[Ravendarksky]

Dwarfs will path ~12 squares through water but not more than that. If you really want them to train swimming then make a 10 square long watery area they fall into which they have to path through to get back to the barracks.

I'm having trouble training armour skill... I'm training only strikers/kickers/biters/wrestlers (leather armour) and it just doesn't seem to generate armour training at all... Not sure how to do this or what the best way to train armour user is!

I'm also having trouble coming up with enough leather to sustain uniforms for my dwarfs. It seems to wear fairly quickly which I wasn't expecting (I didn't even realise leather armour would wear out). We embarked with 30 leather and took all the stuff from the trade caravan but that seems to have only provided enough uniforms for 10 dwarfs.

For a basic squad of 10:
- 10 leather tunics
- 10 sets of gloves
- 10 sets of boots
- 10 helms

Then there is optionally:
- 10 waterskins
- 10 backpacks
- 10 quivers

So that's 40-70 leather needed per squad. It just doesn't seem like a good idea. The wiki seems to suggest that a metal helm/chainmail shirt/metal high boots and metal gauntlets won't encumber an untrained dwarf much so I might just go with that instead.... First I will experiment with fishing and bone/shell armour as an alternative... but I can't off the top of my head remember what you can and cannot make and how much extra work it's going to be.

On the plus side I discovered that if you make the barracks super small and set training to a minimum of 1 they seem to do loads of demonstrations (counter intuitive?). By doing this I've gotten all of my starting 7 dwarfs to level 5 striking/kicking/wrestling pretty darn fast. Now if only my mayor would hold more biting demonstrations! (I embarked with each dwarf having 5 points in an unarmed combat skill, 3 points teaching, 1 point observing, 1 point discipline and 1 point armour user). I'm going to do some more research and see if small barracks size is stopping them sparring. My hypothesis is that perhaps some combat training works similarly to conversational skills and relationships in that it requires the dwarfs to be in adjacent tiles to happen.

[Ravendarksky]

Having holes to train armour/climbing/swimming is killing my recruits even with a 1z drop onto wood / 3/7 water

[oasis789]

Having holes to train armour/climbing/swimming is killing my recruits even with a 1z drop onto wood / 3/7 water

maybe leather cloaks would help?

[Nagidal]

Did anyone try to equip them with training grade weapons? E.g. a wooden training sword? Although these weapons are ridiculously bad for real fights, they may give special xp boosts while used in training. I never bothered with making any Trining weapons, much less than having a control group with real weapons, but maybe someone did already do some science with whis.

[arbarbonif]

I'm also having trouble coming up with enough leather to sustain uniforms for my dwarfs. It seems to wear fairly quickly which I wasn't expecting (I didn't even realise leather armour would wear out). We embarked with 30 leather and took all the stuff from the trade caravan but that seems to have only provided enough uniforms for 10 dwarfs.

For a basic squad of 10:
- 10 leather tunics
- 10 sets of gloves
- 10 sets of boots
- 10 helms

Tunics, boots and possibly gloves are not armor.  They are clothing, which would be why they wear out.  You want leather armor, high boots and gauntlets.

[Skullsploder]

Having holes to train armour/climbing/swimming is killing my recruits even with a 1z drop onto wood / 3/7 water

maybe leather cloaks would help?

Oh Armok. Did I not mention that you HAVE TO HAVE TO HAVE TO equip them with full armour? Mine do this only with a breastplate, mail shirt, greaves, gauntlets, high boots, and helm. I'm also working on getting the clothing industry running so they can have silk robes too. Thus equipped, the 1z drop is ineffective but the 2z works great with next to no injuries. I'm in the process of patching mine up to raise the level back up to 2 from the 3z I turned it into when I first started training swimming. Adequate swimmers after two years, so it's slow, but still it means they'll git gud one day. I have had two random bleedouts so far, and that's only after lowring it to 3z, so I can fairly confidently say that 2z is safe. BUT YOU MUST EQUIP THEM WITH METAL ARMOUR.

Anyway, dwarves are a very expendable resource. If your training isn't killing off a few in the process well then it's just not goddamned Spartan enough.