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[someone12345]

I am trying to train 2 peasants into swordwarves. While they are practicing swords, they have only dabbling sword skill but novice wrestler skill. I did not have this problem with the two hammerdwarves I brought on embark. Also, when do soldiers spar? I've noticed that before a certain point, they will rarely do it, but once they reach that point, sparring is basically all they do.

[Thisfox]

I've not had much luck with sparring, myself.

It's likely they're wrestling because of a quirk which prevents them from picking up their swords. Assign them each specific swords instead of saying "pick up any sword" and you might see more carrying of actual swords.

[OAOGigmaster]

Ho boy. Sparring. Oh my. You pick the hard ones, don't you? XD

In all seriousness, the science of sparring (really, the whole military system interactions overall) is not well defined, but there's a couple of things you can do to help sparring occur more frequently, and to increase their sparring gains.

1. Sparring only occurs if you have two dwarves in the same squad, with orders to train, whose skills are relatively close, and who can path to each other. If you pair up people that have a wider difference in their combat skills, you'll end up with one of them organizing a combat-related skill demonstration; not awful, but not as amazing as sparring is.

2. Because of what I said in #1, squads of two dwarves each might seem like the best - but my testing has shown that you'd be wrong. In truth, the ideal squad size is three dwarves, where the squad is issued training orders that require only two positions. This is because you almost always have one of your two dwarves doing some that is not training - eating, boozing, sleeping, socializing, experiencing !!Parties!!, you get the idea. Giving yourself three dwarves with only two set to train allows one of the three-man squad to go have Urist-time while your remaining two can actually get some shit done together.

3. Make sure that your dwarves train in the same place. This I HAVEN'T done testing on, but I always designate only one place for my dwarves to train - apart from marksdwarves - and I seem to get a lot of sparring out of them. It wouldn't surprise me if this has some kind of impact on sparring frequency.

4. Especially when starting out, do not over armor your dwarves! While a set of light armor might not help as much against larger opponents, remember that in our current version, armor penalizes not only their movement speed, but how often they can act. The more weighed down your new recruits are, the few times they're going to take swings at each other, and the slower they're going to level up. Your 'light' armor set should look something like this (make sure it is set to replace clothing!):

shirt
metal chain mail
leather armor
metal helm
hood
mittens
metal gauntlets
trousers
metal leggings
sock
sock
metal low/high boot
metal low/high boot
wooden shield
weapon of your choice

(Notes: the double sock/low boot helps with the bug you may have seen where only one foot gets protection. This solves that problem. I'm not entirely sure why. Also, make the clothing items out of leather, if possible, as they offer a slight blunt resistance advantage over cloth, which is what they're really for. Also, this getup gives your dwarves basic modesty with a shirt and trousers, so if your armorers are behind you don't end up with tantruming, naked dwarven warriors wielding silver maces.)

Even with this, you might still notice novice armor users moving a bit slow, but that's the price you pay for not needlessly slaughtering your new recruits.

5. Disable all labors for dwarven warriors (except for any on-purpose cross training you might be doing). I've noticed that, given the barest chance a dwarf, even a dwarf assigned on duty, will still occasionally go off to do a non-military job, ESPECIALLY HAULING. While I'm on the subject, make sure that the squad is active and has a designated training area. I've been playing for years, and I've still made this mistake.

6. DFHack includes a script called 'fix-armory', which seems to help equip bugs your dwarves face when engaged in the MENTALLY RIGOROUS DUTY of putting socks on before shoes. Try entering 'fix-armory enable' and see if it does anything to help.

As a final note, even dwarves with weapons will often train wrestling naturally, as your warriors will include grips, bites and similar un-armed stuff in the course of their training. To be fair, their weapon training should far outstrip their wrestling skill later on, but when starting out at dabbling and novice levels, strange gains in wrestling like this isn't uncommon.

Let us know what your results are like!

[Fleeting Frames]

Iirc demos were mentiond as actually faster than sparring with good teacher/student skill when they were improved. I've watched dwarf go from dabbling to competent in a skill in a single week-long demonstration, with merely great/adept/Professional? skills for Teacher/Student/Biter (was bit of time ago in Moonhome). That probably gets armor user to Legendary+5 faster than sparring with shield, armor and a weapon.

I think it has been mentioned before on this topic that it takes competent to start sparring. I haven't had any trouble with default settings and ordering dwarves to wear armor/shield/weapon, though I typically seed the squads with at least 1 more skilled dwarf due the demonstrated benefit.

PS: What version did you do your "ideal squad size" tests in, OAOGigmaster? And what other options did you test/use as control?

[OAOGigmaster]

My recent sparring testing and usage were in 0.43.03, though I also did of a bunch of testing in 0.34. My control groups consisted of groups of 2, groups of 3, groups of 5 and groups of 10 with the default 'train 10' order assigned. I noted that the groups of three with 'train 10' often had dwarves doing more solo training than sparring; I'm assuming this is the case because the moment a dwarf is free, they'll start an individual training task which will lock them out of sparring, causing the next freed dwarf to do the same, and so on. Giving them some leeway in position requirements seems to help.

I also did tests with 5-man and 7-man groups, where I assigned two separate train orders for 2 dwarves apiece. They seemed to spar slightly less often than the 3-man squads with sparring orders, but this might have simply been statistical noise.

A lot of my inspiration came from this thread right here, which I believe is still pretty relevant to our current version (all laud and honor to NCommander and Urist da Vinci): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=150534.0

Of note, is that having three-man squads is a good way to organize your military dwarves. Use squad labels to sort them by weapon and level of expertise, and you have more immediately available information on-hand for when you're panicking because that minotaur snuck up on you somehow.

[Fleeting Frames]

What about room size?

Perhaps a claustrophobic 3x3 would be more effective than large 11x11 rooms, as when two dwarves in a squad spar, they'll bump into other ones - perhaps interrupting any task that is not a spar?

I know that they can get "the dog is sparring" with nearby animals, which might be interesting way to boost meat yields. (Testing needed.)

And that's neat, good to hear about some post-DF2014 research being done. What were the differences in your results between train 2 minimum and train 10 minimum with 3-man squad?

[anewaname]

I am trying to train 2 peasants into swordwarves. While they are practicing swords, they have only dabbling sword skill but novice wrestler skill.

Give them a little time and their sword skill will become the higher skill and then start to race ahead. They will do fewer wrestling moves as they gain in weapon skill and in the more general fighting skills.

[someone12345]

One of them became a sworddwarf, the other became novice sword/skilled wrestler.

[callisto8413]

I sometimes have Squads share a barracks/training area.  Is that an issue? 

[OAOGigmaster]

I sometimes have Squads share a barracks/training area.  Is that an issue? 

That's perfectly fine. I usually make a moderately large barracks (say, 10x18), tell all my squads to train in it, then bling the ever loving bajeezus out of it. Gold armor stands, statues, weapon racks, glitzy gem windows, obisidan floors, go nuts. Ideally, you should also make it an above-ground construction, so you can avoid inflicting a high level of cave adaptation on your dwarves (where going above ground makes them dizzy and nauseated). This keeps your dwarves from dying while they're puking up their guts, and keeps them happy by giving them good thoughts while they train.

One of them became a sworddwarf, the other became novice sword/skilled wrestler.

Huh. I wonder if the second guy is actually wielding the sword. I can't recall seeing a dwarf wielding a weapon before that's trained up wrestling that high before dinging legendary in his weapon skill. Still, that's awesome! Wrestlers are a great addition to a military force.

What about room size?

Perhaps a claustrophobic 3x3 would be more effective than large 11x11 rooms, as when two dwarves in a squad spar, they'll bump into other ones - perhaps interrupting any task that is not a spar?

I know that they can get "the dog is sparring" with nearby animals, which might be interesting way to boost meat yields. (Testing needed.)

And that's neat, good to hear about some post-DF2014 research being done. What were the differences in your results between train 2 minimum and train 10 minimum with 3-man squad?

I don't think the size of the room matters. It's like a work zone - if they're both in the appropriate area, they'll meet up. Of course, you don't want to make it too big, especially if they aren't moving very quickly. The main reason I make them train all together is so that I know all my military dwarves can path to the same place without any problems. Also, so that when they start sparring, they don't have to meet up somewhere; they can just get right to business.

On the difference between orders, I rarely saw sparring with train 10 minimum with a 3-man squad. Averaged among test groups, they seem to spar maybe three times in the year with the 10-man order, but more importantly, they do not spar for very long. It had perhaps a fifth of the results I got from 2-man train orders in terms of frequency, and was far outstripped in duration.

Also, on demonstrations: in the thread I linked to you, they showed that highly skilled teachers demonstrating to highly skilled observers AND students (I believe) causes faster gains then sparring, but only in that incidence. Arguably one of the best things about getting the monarch of your civ to arrive, is that they do so with a brace of legendary warriors in tow. If Armok smiles on you, they'll arrive with a high skill in teaching; otherwise, you have to assign them to their own, individual squads, mixing them with your rustic, plebian warriors does nothing but force demonstrations upon your lower-skilled warriors.

[Fleeting Frames]

Well, that linked thread, while great in many respects, certainly doesn't seem quite accurate on demonstrations/default training speed - you certainly don't need to wait a whole year to get to novice with train, 10 minimum atm.

I suppose the monarch band does have neat members, though by the time you get monarch to arrive you probably already have legendary dwarves to teach of your own.

[anewaname]

I sometimes have Squads share a barracks/training area.  Is that an issue? 

I always do this. Usually there are only two barracks in my fort. The barracks near the trade depot gate is 'T'rain for the profession military squads who have active orders to 't'rain and the barracks near the meeting hall is 'T'rain for militia squads that have no active orders to 't'rain. This second barracks is used by all the dwarfs that are crafter/farmers/smiths for individual combat drills (some get happy about training military skills, some never train because they disdain military skills, but they always wear their weapon, shield, helm, and maybe a mail shirt).

One of them became a sworddwarf, the other became novice sword/skilled wrestler.

Huh. I wonder if the second guy is actually wielding the sword.

Yeah, he might be gaining sword skill from a demonstration of sword skill. Also check if he has a uniformed civvy job like hunter/miner/woodcutter enabled. Maybe he is not equipping his sword for that reason.

I suspect that wrestling skill gains are self-perpetuating. One opponent "gets a hold" on the other, so the other tries to "break the hold" instead of attacking with a weapon.

[OAOGigmaster]

If he truly isn't wielding his sword, you can use DFHack commands to remove whatever else he might be 'wielding' on his inventory screen, then force equip a sword into his inventory. I've done that from time to time when I'm sick of the shit my military dwarves are putting me through.