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[dornbeast]

...I've had 3 skeletal goats maim a legendary champion pretty badly.

You shouldn't send the poor guy out alone.  What're you trying to do, kill him?

[Iapetus]

When I started playing Dwarf Fortress, I would train my soldiers as wrestlers, and not start them on weapons until their wrestling and armour/shield skills were nice and high.

Now, however, once I have a reasonable sized population (i.e. all the important and useful jobs filled), I tend to draft my soapers and cheese makers (or an entire migrant wave), given them swords, axes, or spears, and no armour, and set them sparring.

Anyone who dies obviously wasn't good enough for my military, and the survivors should be properly hardened by the time I need to call on them.

[Rowanas]

Iapatus. I did the same thing but my elite wrestlers refused to use crossbows, so their wrestling skills were basically pointless.

[Muz]

I mean, on my current biome (terrifying woodlands) pretty much everything has a very good chance of at least injuring a non-military trained dwarf. I'd think it to be so in all evil biomes, since I've had 3 skeletal goats maim a legendary champion pretty badly.

That's odd. I had a legendary champion wrestler/sherriff rip around 3-5 of them to pieces with a martial trance. It was awesome, especially how the FPS dropped to show him massacring them in slow motion. Oddly enough, I never saw him rip a new recruit to pieces

[Aspgren]

I mean, on my current biome (terrifying woodlands) pretty much everything has a very good chance of at least injuring a non-military trained dwarf. I'd think it to be so in all evil biomes, since I've had 3 skeletal goats maim a legendary champion pretty badly.

That's odd. I had a legendary champion wrestler/sherriff rip around 3-5 of them to pieces with a martial trance. It was awesome, especially how the FPS dropped to show him massacring them in slow motion. Oddly enough, I never saw him rip a new recruit to pieces

I embarked on a terrifying chasm not too long ago. The idea was to populate it myself after cleaning it out.

I brought hammerdwarves and much to my disappointment they had no trouble crushing their foes. Skeletal antmen, ratmen, giant moles, giant rats, TROLLS, gremlins and even CAVE SPIDERS went down the drain ... granted I eventually lost two of the 3 soldiers.
1 died during sparring (fell into a well)
1 died during battle (fell into the chasm)

I'm thinking this has something to do with the hammer vs bone part. A lone hammerdwarf charged a troll (the others wanted to get snacks) and literally broke him to pieces. I checked the troll and all that remained was:
Head.
Broken upper body.
Lower body.
Left upper arm.
Right upper arm.
Right lower arm.

... so yes. Zombies are sissies and skeletons break if you hit them with a hammer. Terrifying biomes aren't very terrifying at all.
Your soldiers get the unique though "was attacked by the dead lately" but no one was depressed about it so I'm not sure if they were terrified or if they thought it was way cool!

[Meanmelter]

zombies make great training,unless they bite u

[Shrike]

Rowanas:

That problem is caused by dwarves not dropping what articles of clothing/armor they've ripped off their sparring partner. Check their inventory. If their left or right hand has anything but a shield or mitten/glove, mark it for dumping. Assuming you've set them for Crossbow use, have quivers, have a designated archery range, and bone or wood bolts, they'll go and start training. Otherwise, they'll pick up the crossbows and work on their hammerdwarf skill .
Not a bad thing, if your marksdwarves have the potential to wind up in melee.

[Meanmelter]

the quickest way to get your dwarf to change armor,weapons,arrows ETC.is to do this...

1.make him unarmed,carry no type of armor,and no shield.
2.set the gear for melting (dont litterly melt them,unless u intend to accualy melt them)
3.set any otehr gear you dont want them to equip to melt (but dont melt unless...well you know)
4.re-activate everything and he should equip the gear u awnt him to
5un-melt everything u listed to be melted(unless,u inted on melting it)

[XSI]

I am actually using a real danger training on an axedwarf with a grey spine injury, the idea is to get him to be a champion eventually using only real fighting. No sparring allowed.

He's up to 103 kills at this time, but I'm running low on goblins. During the times there are no goblins he works a pump for the stat boost. He also has a dog with a spine injury to get him legendary animal caretaker(Again, for the stat boost).

He's coming along nicely, good dwarven preferences as well, he likes steel, iron and axes.

[Forumsdwarf]

I plan on having all of my dwarves occasionally wrestle so they can all sort of defend themselves.

I'm a strong advocate of the "citizen militia".

As soon as practical I set all dwarves in non-time-sensitive tasks to "Hunting" in addition to their regular duties.  They arm themselves with crossbows and will fire at all hostile targets.

Whenever an enemy appears (kobolds are best for this because they're hard to hit) every armed dwarf in range will start training their crossbow skills by shooting at it.  One of those hundreds of flying bolts will actually score a hit on the kobold, too, ending the productivity-crippling job interruptions before your military even clears the barracks.

The militia helps with ambushes, too.  If an ambush springs in a crowded area the ambushers will often be cut to ribbons before they inflict any permanent injuries.

The downside to maintaining a militia are several, notably keeping up an ammo supply, building enough crossbows, and having your workers waste time chasing game.  The worst problem is a bug when multiple hunters attack the same prey (not enemies, just prey).  The hunter that made the kill drags the body back to the stockpile, but the other hunters go catatonic and stand in place for a couple of months.  Once you deplete the game in your area this problem goes away.

[Graven]

Hmmm, I like the idea of militarizing the civilians, maybe that'll put an end to the torrent of "Urist McDumbass cancels life : interrupted by skeletal earthworm"s I get way too often. I need to try that my next fort, see how the undead bastards like it.

Meanmelter, in a somewhat related occurence, I had 2 legendary hammerdwarves suffering from obvious agoraphobia, because everytime I'd put them on duty, they'd run to the barracks and stay there. I just couldn't station them anywhere else, set them to train marksmanship or do anything useful. It still baffles me to this day (which is about 4 days after the accident, but, hey). I removed their gear several times, back when they were just refusing to train at the archery range, but nada. Oh well, they died in the magma anyway.

Dornbeast, I was actually trying to remove the skoats. Now, I know that was a really rare occurence, but it's still possible, so indeed, on some biomes it's not recommended to train your dwarves using actual wildlife (... is it still wildLIFE when it's undead? Oh, the dwarf-manity).

Aspgren, yeah, a trained military with nice equipment can deal with most threats on a terrifying biome, but your poor peasants can't, and it's beyond terrifying for them Especially with the damn skeagles, man I hate those things with a passion rivaling that of the Christ.

[Doppel]

Pffft, training is for wusses, i just recruit everyone close to where i'm being attacked, if dwarf dies then dwarf was probably crappy to begin with and would of probably died due to a stupid sparring accident just to spite you. If dwarf lives then dwarf might live to fight another day, unless dwarf is horribly but not deadly wounded, then dwarf also dies. Basically, i'm not going to train them in preventing death, because you know its going to come back to get you after all the work you put into it.

[Meanmelter]

Pffft, training is for wusses, i just recruit everyone close to where i'm being attacked, if dwarf dies then dwarf was probably crappy to begin with and would of probably died due to a stupid sparring accident just to spite you. If dwarf lives then dwarf might live to fight another day, unless dwarf is horribly but not deadly wounded, then dwarf also dies. Basically, i'm not going to train them in preventing death, because you know its going to come back to get you after all the work you put into it.

... do all the dwarf have combat skills in them,if not,then thats the stupidest idea ever,you must never gooten more than 50 dwarfs (unless u hax!)

[Doppel]

Haha, yeah, it really is a stupid idea. In all honesty though, i don't do this (often), but i also almost never put much work into creating a military, at least if i'm not 5 or so years in. So yeah, its kinda a suicide plan (unless you make use of too many traps, which i don't do, takes away from the fun of the game) and by the end of the second year the lands would be covered with rotting dwarf corpses, not even going to bother to store them then, unless, maybe, if you want to create the biggest freaking graveyard in dwarven history ever. (hmm, fun idea)

[dornbeast]

Dornbeast, I was actually trying to remove the skoats. Now, I know that was a really rare occurence, but it's still possible, so indeed, on some biomes it's not recommended to train your dwarves using actual wildlife (... is it still wildLIFE when it's undead? Oh, the dwarf-manity).

I figured that's what you were doing.  I used 1 dwarf to one skeletal goat, even when I had champions.  Why give the skelegoats a fair chance?