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[Urist Imiknorris]

It would have ridiculous turnover, as your soldiers will die very quickly. Trust me, I've tried.

[Mickey Blue]

Eh, I guess one could argue that it would add more 'danger' to it (so higher potential cost), however the exploit is that the way the coding works allows it to make them raise stats extremely fast with virtually no risk to your dwarves, even increasing their weapon skill and fighter.  If it only helped with dodge/block related skills it would be slightly better but it doesn't, it creates legendary trained fighting forces in no time.

That said, again, to each their own, its a single player game and everybody should play in the way they find to be the most fun.

-MB

[Rex_Nex]

As for crossbow dwarves, I cant get them to train at all. They may shoot a few bolts into a target, but then they go back to "individual training" for a year or so, making them quite useless. Is there a fix?

Just in case the new page stops people from answering this.

[shlorf]

You know i kinda wanted to add this to the other post but anyway:
To get them to train you should set them to inactive since archery practice is the marksdorf equivalent of ind. combat drill and will be done in 'civilian mode'. You should not assign a barracks to their squad as this will make them do demonstrations or ind. combat drills.
Create individual archery ranges from as many targets as you have dwarves in your squad (be sure to set the firing direction properly), and enable training for your ranged squad on all archery ranges.
As usual disable their civilian labors because archery practice is a very low priority job (which also means they will still idle a bit in between practices).
Assign them an ample supply of bolts of your material of choice and make sure these bolts are not put into bins. You might even not make an ammo stockpile and leave the bolts in the craftdwarfs workshop/forge as dwarves will sometimes bug out and refuse to take bolts out of bins or stockpiles (this has the added chance of abusing a bug that allows dwarfs to stock more than 25 bolts in a quiver).
Sometimes the (invisible) arsenal dwarf fucks up and assigns forbidden bolts to your squad (check with m-f) - delete the bolt item and create a new one, unforbid the bolts via the stocks screen and have your dwarfs run around outside collecting single bolts, dump the single bolts, make more bolts and increase the assigned bolts number (use any or all methods to work around this bug).
Assigning different materials for combat and training doesn't work properly in 3.18 so I usually just let everyone train to legendary on bone bolts and put them in a new squad which is assigned metal bolts afterwards.

[Jake]

4. Equip the dwarfs via uniforms and make sure they all have flasks/waterskins and backpacks (disable woodcutting,mining,hunting for soldiers or you will run into a nasty bug). This will reduce the time they spend eating and drinking to very brief trips to fill their containers.

Could you elaborate, please? I assume you just mean backpacks and waterskins, because forming hunters into a squad seemed to work alright for me.

Oh, speaking of which, doing this is a good idea if you want to force hunters to wear armour all the time thanks to the setting to make them stay in uniform when inactive. I don't suggest setting this for other dwarves, incidentally; it gives them a minor unhappy thought for no particular benefit, since one dwarf versus a whole squad of goblins is screwed if they try to stand and fight.

[Korva]

Oh, if you are frustrated (or bored) with the finicky and slow military, you can always rely on good old dwarven ingenuity: water, magma, retracting bridges and cave-ins can all be fun to experiment with in trap design.

[Girlinhat]

Every good Fort God (what is a player referred to as, in game?) needs a few good embarks of [INVASION:OFF] and magma Fun.  Get a feel for the power that the almighty pump stack wields.  And with all the exacting precision of an untrained child swinging a silver hammer at a flying buzzard, that pump stack spews forth the most vile of magmas and, if you're lucky, magma creatures pulled straight from their natural habitat and into your dining hall full of diamond encrusted blue-metal tables.

[shlorf]

4. Equip the dwarfs via uniforms and make sure they all have flasks/waterskins and backpacks (disable woodcutting,mining,hunting for soldiers or you will run into a nasty bug). This will reduce the time they spend eating and drinking to very brief trips to fill their containers.

Could you elaborate, please? I assume you just mean backpacks and waterskins, because forming hunters into a squad seemed to work alright for me.

The three named labors all rely on an invisible uniform to make the dwarf pickup their tool(s) (pick, axe, crossbow and quiver). If you put a guy with an active labor of this in the military he can fail to equip the uniform and thus fail to equip a backpack (requires you have free backpacks at the time of drafting i think so you might not run into this every time). The game somehow still thinks he has a backpack and will reserve food for him to store it in his (not equipped) backpack. If this goes on for a while you end up with lots of owned food items in all your stockpiles that will just lay there  until it rots as no other dwarf may touch owned items.

[Girlinhat]

I don't use backpacks myself, since I've heard of several bugs that can result in owned food.  Flasks, yes (or rather, wolf leather waterskins) because they get thirsty every other step and I've never heard of waterskin bugs before.

[Jake]

The three named labors all rely on an invisible uniform to make the dwarf pickup their tool(s) (pick, axe, crossbow and quiver). If you put a guy with an active labor of this in the military he can fail to equip the uniform and thus fail to equip a backpack (requires you have free backpacks at the time of drafting i think so you might not run into this every time). The game somehow still thinks he has a backpack and will reserve food for him to store it in his (not equipped) backpack. If this goes on for a while you end up with lots of owned food items in all your stockpiles that will just lay there  until it rots as no other dwarf may touch owned items.

Thanks for the clarification. Backpacks and waterskins are somewhat redundant now that squad leaders can leave someone else in charge when they go on their break, but I'll keep that in mind if I send a squad down to explore the caverns.

[Urist Da Vinci]

A "killing room" full of green glass windows placed in a checkerboard pattern, where creatures to walk on the diagonals, allows melee fighters to see and close the distance to an invading siege squad of archers without getting shot.

There are flanking bonuses in the combat system. You can see "from behind" or "from the side" in the combat logs. This applies to archers as well. If you deploy a distraction (high defense) squad first, a killer (high-damage) squad can approach the gobbos from the side or rear to do more damage. OR in an underground "killing room", put snipers above and behind the goblins while a melee squad gets their attention from in front.

If your industry can produce lots of surplus ammunition, you can assign crossbows to "reserves" dwarves that are NOT trained as military and are always "inactive". "Reserve" squad dwarves will act like regular civilians, except that they will open fire rather than running away. You do not assign them to barracks or archery ranges. You can put them behind safe fortifications during a siege. Who needs accuracy when you have bolt spam?

[Girlinhat]

For full ambush effect, lure gobo in with shield veterans, and then lower a 1 tile wide drawbridge to reveal your archers on the floor above, letting them rain fire down onto the goblins' backs.

[Tryble]

If a dwarf does individual training exclusively, or spars regularly, his combat stats will go up somewhat slowly, but consistently.  After a year or two they'll be relatively combat ready.

Alternatively, you can go pick up the Higher Learning Mod, which adds Training Dummy workshops.  I've taken to assigning each new recruit to their own dummy, and training their weapon and shield until they're skilled enough to go into a squad.  I feel it's a little faster than normal barracks training, but it isn't by any means as fast as a danger room.

[Girlinhat]

Danger rooms can be balanced if the experience gain is proportional to the damage inflicted.  As it is, a wooden speartap counts the same as a dragon's claw.  If wooden spears give fractional experience, then it'll take time to train, or people will start using copper spears, and it'll be a bit less exploit-y.

That's all good in they, but I've felt the game could really use training dummies.  You wouldn't think that the combat training style of "hit it with yer axe!" would be so complicated, but apparently dorfs can only swing their weapons at live targets.  Even at slow exp gain, a training dummy would do wonders.

[thijser]

OK I don't use a militia very often so I will advice for traps/passive
1 It's often wise to make shure you have a way by which you can close off your entrance.  (a bridge will probably be best)
2 cage traps are usefull but you risk running out of traps to quickly. Weapon traps with spears or spikes on a repeater are both very good at taking enemies down enemies with minimal need for maintaince. bonus points for digging out channels instead of walls and letting your enemies walk back everytime they dodge (be warned trough this is a kind of danger room for your enemies use metal weapons or else you will train them very high). If you have a bit of extra time avaible consider digging down a bit deeper. That way your enemies will fall to their death.
3 Combined this means that you will probably want to make a narrow entrance. It's probably easiest to make your fort underground because of this (trough you can build above ground aswell).
4 More complex traps are fun but it's probably best to start with these.
5 If you build the steep way down from 2 remember that you can also use that dissapear in order to make them fall down.  (but don't forget to add some traps for the flying creatures).
6 Cought attackers can be stripped of their weapons which can be used in traps.
7
Spears(and corkscrews) do internal damage and will make creatures that bleed bleed out quickly. The annimal that is hurt will probably die a few squares futher and therefor won't jam your trap. Using spike traps (upright spear) you can link them to a lever which can be pulled by a dwarf which will make them hit enemies with [trap_avoid] aswell.
Hammers will break bones and slow down enemies but it's unusual for them to kill. This means that they will rarly jam but they won't kill either (but they do weaken). Works best if you are going to send your army after them aswell.
Giant sawblades jam easily and do a lot of damage. Remember that they will jam quickly and that they may even jam the surrounding traps because of the body parts flying around more effective agains the undead.
Cage traps are instead traps for anything that doesn't have [trap_avoid] be warned trough as they require a cage for each enemy they trap. Remember that killing a enemy will allow you to reuse the cage.