A lot of this information I have gleaned from Darkmere's post here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=62422.msg1431006#msg1431006I've referred back to what that post when setting up my military a lot. I haven't embarked with any military dwarves, but I often get migrants with good military skills. I felt like his original post was fundamental Science than a HOWTO and I've spent time fiddling with military setup to really "get" the things he worked out in that post and how to implement them.
I've also added things I've picked up from reading other military posts and I'm trying to jam as much stuff in here as I can. The military overhaul seems to be one of the most frequently troublesome aspects of 2010. The new military system
does work. It's also a lot more complex than it's ever been. My idea is to make this a practical "do it like this" description that can help people who have been have trouble getting their military up and running, summarizing everything I've read and tried that's been most effective.
I will admit up front I'm no expert. I don't have 50 legendary soldiers running around my fort one-shotting Forgotten Beasts. I have however gotten a pretty good-sized, well armed and trained military up in a couple of years using only migrants with halfway decent military skills, which is probably going to be what most people wind up doing - setting up their military as an afterthought after embarking. I'm also not talking about every single aspect of managing your military, just the things I've read and tried and found works for
starting an effective military program. Also this works for me. Insert standard "Your Mileage May Vary" disclaimer.
So let's begin shall we.
Unless you immediately embark with military squads ready to go, rely on traps for the first couple of years. Stone traps work great if you lay out enough of them. Once you get any kind of industry up and running, cage traps are your friends. I'm especially partial to the Goblin Grinder idea here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=62798.0It's very easy and quick to set up, and it's virtually hands-off. All you need are a few mechanisms and a couple of floor hatches - things even a brand new fort can make very quickly. Stack enough traps in it and you can easily hold off ambushes for the first couple of years with little effort. Once you have a better industry you can enhance it with all kinds of other deathtrap concepts.
Once you get a couple of migrant waves and see a few dwarves with military skills you can start setting up a military.
Set your dwarves in three-dwarf squads, making sure to put the ones with the highest skills as a squad leader along with two complete amateurs. Although if you happen to get a few dwarves with complimentary skills (i.e. one has good Fighting/Dodging and another has good Axedwarf/Armor skills) by all means put them in the same squad! They will teach each other the skills they are best at and pretty soon they will be all be closer in skills on everything.
Set up a minimum of two training at a time in the schedule. Mine are virtually always sparring with the off-duty member doing individual combat training. Squads of three with two required on duty seems to be the ideal setup for the best training.
Make sure you set your squads to "Active/Training" (or whatever you decide to call it) rather than Inactive. In earlier 2010 releases dwarves wouldn't always train when set to train, but would practice on their own when left Inactive. This is no longer (.31.12) true, and they will actually follow your orders when you tell them to Train.
When my squads got larger from adding more dwarves (I was being lazy and just adding new dwarves instead of taking the time to define specific uniforms and look at everyone's skills to see how to divide them up the best) they stopped sparring as much and did more demonstrations, which isn't entirely bad since it means that the more knowledgeable dwarf is teaching the other ones skills, but in three-dwarf squads there are still demonstrations anyway. More than that and it seems like they spend most of their time waiting around for their squadmates to show up for a demonstration than actually doing anything.
You don't need to worry about training weapons - give them real weapons and they will do just fine. During sparring you can see in the combat reports that they will "Tap" each other with their weapons. You don't get sparring injuries (or deaths) like you used to.
Once you get the first few dwarves in the military just because of their skills, you can pick the noobs by their physical attributes. I now have an awesome Hammerdwarf who came in as a migrant Peasant with no military skills at all, but she was "Virtually indestructible, mighty, indefatigable and incredibly agile." Now she's pretty much the best dwarf I have.
Enlarge your military by periodically breaking up your squads once they are well-skilled. Take the two non-squad leaders and make them squad leaders with two more noobs. They will then teach the noobs up to similar levels. Rinse and repeat and you can build a fairly large military training up very effectively. (It's like Amway!)
I
very strongly recommend taking the time up front to define all your uniforms. Instead of just saying "Metal" make a specific "Hammerdwarf" uniform with exactly everything your hammerdwarf will use, including what materials. Also "Speardwarf", "Axedwarf", "Archer" etc. Yes it's a pain because you can't copy uniforms the way you can with orders in the schedule screen so it has to be done by hand. But it's more than worth it in the long term as you start splitting up and building new squads.
I went so far as to build uniforms like "Leather Archers", "Mail Archers", "Cheap Axedwarf", "Good Axedwarf", "Steel Axedwarf" etc. Use the cheap armor & Iron/Copper/etc weapons for noobs. As you make better gear, give them the better uniforms. This is partly to satisfy my OCD since they still will try to grab the next-best piece of kit if you don't have exactly what you've assigned them. It does however prevent your Dabbling Axedwarf from being kitted out in all-steel while your High Master Axedwarf is wearing copper and using a wooden axe without having to go through the even bigger headache of micromanaging equipment for each dwarf.
Catching invaders and letting them loose in your barracks is A Good Thing. Dwarves seem to level up a little better from actual combat versus sparring. Deploy lots and lots of cage traps. Use the hide/dump trick to relieve them of their weapons, but keep their armor on so they will live (slightly) longer during "training" with less chance of injury to your squads. This has generally worked better when the military has low skills. It doesn't do a whole lot of good with high-level dwarves, since I regularly see "practice combat" sessions where an axedwarf takes the head off a troll with a single swing and a hammerdwarf pulverizes his friend then "training" is over.
Armor/Shield skills don't seem to be as easy to train up through sparring and practice. There have been more than a couple posts where people have put spike traps in their barracks set to a lever on repeat, or some similar setup, which causes your dwarves to dodge and block while they are training. Use
a single wooden training spear in the spike trap to minimize the amount of potential damage they could take while sparring and avoiding spears. (I have yet to set this up, but from other threads it seems to be extremely effective. I wish I could find the thread that went into a much more in-depth research on this and had legendary armor and shield skills within a couple seasons from this technique.)
Archers will grind through an assload of ammo while training. The good news is that they get a little bit of XP with each shot so will skill up quickly. Hide them behind fortifications and shoot wooden bolts at invaders and kill two birds with one stone. First you're killing invaders, which is always good. Second, wooden bolts do less damage, letting your archers take more shots at real targets, giving them more experience, leveling them faster. Just like your other dwarves you can catch training goblins for your archers. Let 'em loose in a sealed room with fortifications, assign your archers to defend a burrow
immediately adjacent to the other side of the fortifications and let them have fun.
(At a certain point it doesn't seem to matter kind of ammo you give them for actual combat. I have a champion marksdwarf who regularly headshots enemies with a single bolt of any material. Seriously, he's got like 24 kills that are all single-shot kills through the brain out of like 100 total kills. I thought the game was bugged when I would position him and see enemies "disappear" from sieges. But I would look at the combat log and see things like "the wooden bolt pierces the skull and hits the brain. it severs an artery in the brain. it severs a tendon in the brain. The (...) has lost consciousness." He's just that awesome I guess.)
Marksdwarves don't seem to need as much micromanagement as melee training, since they get their experience from "shooting at stuff." I add new marksdwarves to the same squad and they all sort of hang out at the range and shoot at targets and they have all skilled up very quickly. Depending on what you decide to do with them it might be worthwhile to also train them up as hammerdwarves since that is the skill they will use if they run out of ammo and wind up in melee combat. Personally I just try to keep them out of melee combat to start with.
Assign your soldiers quarters near the barracks so they don't travel far to sleep. Also put some food and booze stockpiles near the barracks so they don't have to travel so far to eat. That way they will spend more time in the barracks sparring and training. I like to give them slightly larger rooms with a couple of cabinets and nice beds that my legendary carpenter makes, but that really is mostly for aesthetics although they do occasionally get a happy thought from looking at stuff in their own bedroom.
I've got one big barracks room with a bunch of armor stands & weapon racks in it. I define the whole room as a barracks for each stand/rack and assign only one squad to train at each one. I have no idea if this has any bearing on anything at all and I haven't really done any testing to find out. I also put some statues and an animal or two in there so they get good thoughts from seeing a sublimely arranged statue garden or a favorite animal while they train. I also smooth the whole thing and engrave the walls for the same reason. As many happy things you can put in the room will help for the dwarves who will inevitably get ticked off for being left on duty too long or get ticked off for being released from duty. (You got pissed off for being on duty too long, so I sent you on leave. Now you're pissed you're not on duty. Go say hi to mister magma lever...)
Give your soldiers something to do when they aren't actively training. They are less likely to get a bad thought at being relieved of duty if they have another job they can go do.
The biggest problem I've run into: If you don't embark with a dwarf with any specific military skills, you might never see a recruit with a good rating in that skill. For instance, I have had Skilled Hammer/Mace/Spear/Sword, Armor User, Dodger and Fighter dwarves show up, but so far nobody has had good Shield skills. So none of my squads have very good shield skills, even with sparring. I have Professional/Accomplished weapons users who still have lousy shield skills. Similarly it can be bothersome if you only ever get, for example, skilled Speardwarves migrating in. I don't know if I've been lucky or if it's just more common in 2010 to get a range of weapon skills the way I have.
So that's pretty much the basics on getting started. Please do reply with your opinions, complaints, additional information, etc etc.
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Topic: (Another) practical guide to military training (long) (Read 9973 times)