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[Shad0wyone]

Also, don't let your recruits train with your legendarys. Not because the legends will kill the recruits only, but because of the way training works. A training military dwarf when training attempts to get a "sparring hit", this does almost no damage. A recruit is more likely to NOT get this hit, and therefore more likely to damage the others. However on the opposite end, a legendary will do more damage if they don't get a sparring hit, and they will most likely turn your recruits into cripples fortress guards. The legends can actually survive this.

TL;DR Make legends train with legends, and recruits with recruits.

[Stargrave]

again you cite another great way to seperate the wheat from the chaff.

[Kietharr]

Do like me and have all of your migrants duel to the death while naked with adamantine spears. The survivor of the migrant wave gets to join my cadre of elite champions who all 'don't care about anything anymore'.

Barring that, make a bunch of crappy silver and copper weapons and armor with copper or iron if you have a lot of it while your recruits train wrestling. Once your armorsmith hits master start making full plate with caps and chain body armor, and make a stockpile nearby that accepts only armor of that material, and only of high qualities.

Then, once you've got enough to armor your men up station them on the stockpile and tell them to wear chain, they'll put on the caps and body pieces, then tell them to wear plate and they'll put everything else on over it. Then send them to a weapon stockpile that accepts only crappy material low quality weapons and arm them there. Let them spar with that until they've gone legendary then tell them to be unarmed, station them on a stockpile of high quality good material weapons then choose the weapon type you want. With good armor and legendary skill champions will seldom maim each other, though you'd best make a separate barracks area for recruits. While accidentally killing a worthless migrant is no big deal to you it can give your good soldiers bad thoughts, and a berserk legendary champion in full adamantine is not pretty.

[Demetrious]

I'm going to go AGAINST the grain here and say: do NOT train your military in wrestling before giving them weapons! The problem is, any kind of combat will train wrestling up (a little bit,) but because wrestling trains up fast already, if you have a "talented wrestler" and you decide it's time to let him have something pointy, then he'll get to about "great swordsdwarf" when his wrestling skill hits "legendary," and then he's a legendary wrestler forever. He'll drop his weapon and go about killing people with his bare hands.

Now dressing soldiers in good steel armor and giving them weaksauce copper weapons is a good way to train; but if the enemy comes calling there's no time to re-equip them with serious weaponry. There's one other way you can give them all steel weapons with little worry- train their stats up first! The wiki has plenty of suggestions for it, but I like the "dwarven gym" the best- just set up four or five un-linked pumps and have your recruits crank away until they are "tough" and "agile," (agile especially,) and as long as they're in steel armor and not training with weapon wielding champions, they'll be safe.

[MoatMan]

 I'm surprised no one has suggested the training weapons mod.

 I find traps a garunteed way to make sure they're not using good weaponry that doesn't require micromanaging. Just put all the weapons you don't want them to train with in a trap and they'll default to whats left, then do the reverse when they are trained enough to use the real thing.
 

[Shiv]

Well this is kind of counter to what most people say but, what I do is simple:

Start having everyone wrestle.  Recruits get chain armor, legendary get plate; all get shields.  Then tell them to start using weapons when they hit legendary.  Done. 


Haven't had a single sparring fatality on my current save and my military is 30 strong with several new recruits surviving the process. 

In most games I'll have a fatality or two using the same training method, but nothing major.  And as someone else said, it separates the Dwarves from the elves.

I'm going to go AGAINST the grain here and say: do NOT train your military in wrestling before giving them weapons! The problem is, any kind of combat will train wrestling up (a little bit,) but because wrestling trains up fast already, if you have a "talented wrestler" and you decide it's time to let him have something pointy, then he'll get to about "great swordsdwarf" when his wrestling skill hits "legendary," and then he's a legendary wrestler forever. He'll drop his weapon and go about killing people with his bare hands.

You're doing it wrong.  Have them hit legendary, THEN assign them a weapon.

[Lord Dullard]

Bah, I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

I give 'em weapons/armor from the get-go. I prefer the 'let God sort 'em out' approach. I've never had a highly skilled dwarf die from sparring injuries (just wimpy newbies).

When you get 200+ dwarves in a fort and 60+ of them are military, you don't really mind the casualties so much.

[SenorOcho]

Yeah, I also give my guys their weapons from the beginning.  Granted, most my military is equipped with the Dwarven Machine Gun, so the majority of my sparring injuries are amongst the Fortress and Royal guards... 

[Sensei]

There's a mod with training weapons. They're just like the normal ones, except they all do 1 blunt damage with zero crit modifier. The only problem is making sure they don't carry them into battle.

[Psychoceramics]

I'm going to go AGAINST the grain here and say: do NOT train your military in wrestling before giving them weapons! The problem is, any kind of combat will train wrestling up (a little bit,) but because wrestling trains up fast already, if you have a "talented wrestler" and you decide it's time to let him have something pointy, then he'll get to about "great swordsdwarf" when his wrestling skill hits "legendary," and then he's a legendary wrestler forever. He'll drop his weapon and go about killing people with his bare hands.

Where did you get this nonsense? It's not true. I always train my soldiers to legendary wrestling and then give them weapons that they use perfectly fine.

Don't get confused because the Elite Wrestler and Champion icons are the same. A legendary Sworddwarf is a Champion and gets the white military icon.

[random51]

My method:

1.  Any candidate for military service spends his time in the gym(screw pumps)until he has near max stats.
2.  After maxing their stats, I equip them in very good steel or adamant plate.
3.  Then I give them crappy silver weapons and let them spar.
4.  I don't train wrestling.  Wrestling is for creatures who don't have forges.
5.  Once they finish training I give them real weapons.

I lose very few dwarves with nerve/brain damage, at least those I stop training once they've mastered their primary weapon.  I usually don't bother mastering armor/shield after they've mastered whatever weapon they specialize in.  Perfectly agile dwarves who chunk enemies on the first hit don't need much armor skill.

[Grendus]

Arm your dwarves with steel.

Go into the raws and mod the damage of steel to 50%, or else mod the damage of your weapons to 1.

Problem solved. I consider this the proper thing to do seeing as Toady hasn't given dwarves the intelligence to seek out the lowest quality weapon when sparring yet. Just like modern soldiers train with paint rounds, so dwarves should train with blunted wooden weapons.