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[Rhas]

Hi there,

I've been playing dwarf fortress for some time now without any problems (ok, lots of problems, but nothing the wiki and copious amounts of fun couldn't fix) But now I'm kinda stuck.

My Military consist of a full 10 dwarf squad, thats set to train all year long. They don't have any actual combat skills, but instead of sparring and getting any actual experience, they just sit on their asses all day and try to teach each other their dabbling fighting skills. I have used dwarf therapist to look at the xp levels, and after one year, there has maybe been a 10xp increase in dodging, despite them doing dodging and combat training all the time. Presumably because their teacher doesn't know **** about dodging either and just falls on his face alot. All their weapon skill remain at "dabbling", no matter what weapon I give them.

How do I transform my military from a bunch of loudmouths with no skills into the fighting machines that they (being dwarves) should be?

[Darkmere]

Sounds like your squad is too big. If it's 10 with 10 minimum training orders everyone will stand around waiting for the full group to get there, train for a few minutes, then get hungry/thirsty/see a bug and wander off.

Split the squad into smaller squads of 3 or 4 and change the training schedule to minimum 2 dwarves training at a time, so one has the chance to eat, sleep, and booze. Optional: have each squad use the same weapon type to minimize demonstrations. Make sure they all have shields/armor to get those skills trained up as well.

Once you get a few legendary fighters you can recombine squads into mixed groups.

[Satarus]

Make a danger room.  Wooden training spears in an upright trap will give lots of shield user, armor user, and dodging experience.  Also raises weapon skills, but not as fast.

[Naryar]

Actually fighter and shield user are (usually) the more easily trained when in a danger room, as well as the weapon skills. Dodger, armor user are more difficult to train in a danger room.

But yeah, definitely use a danger room.

[Girlinhat]

Danger rooms are the hax solution.  Place 10 wooden spears in an upright spear trap, then link it to a lever, and set the lever on repeat.  Have your FULLY ARMORED soldiers stand there and deflect the wooden spears, quickly gaining skill in dodging, armor use, shield use, and parrying with weapons, at a rate of about 10 hits per ~75 frames.  Insta-legendary.

Lowering squad size helps a lot too, as previously mentioned.  They tend to wait for everyone to show up, so if "everyone" is just 4 dwarves, it's easier to get everyone together.  The other 6, you can usually leave 3-4 off duty to let them rest, eat, drink, etc, and I usually set 1-2 patrolling the walls, just to give them something to do and perhaps notice an incoming ambush.

Personally though, I always prefer live training.  Capture anything using cage traps, build the trap, station your military at it, and then release it.  You can disarm goblins by d-b-d their cage, which causes the dwarves to haul everything to the dump, separating the clothes and weapons from the goblin, but you'll need to reclaim the cage afterwards.  Live training is the most effective, non-cheaty method at training up to ~level 5 or 6.  After that, they don't gain much exp because they kill too quickly.  A soldier slapping a goblin with a wooden sword will take a while to kill it, and gain a lot of skill.  A soldier who takes one well-aimed blow and cracks a skull, will only gain 1 hit worth of exp.  So, you can easily get them up to killing speed with live training, but real warfare turns them from 5's to 18's.

Also, pump operating.  I make all my melee soldiers pump operators, and place pointless pumps.  They must be actually moving water to function, mind you.  They skill up in pump operation, so all your soldiers are in nice orange clothes and easy to notice even when civilian, and it adds to their "tough", "strong", "slow to tire" and other important military traits.  They'll be more likely to hit for a kill, less likely to sustain injury, and fight longer without becoming exhausted.  Just keep in mind that anyone operating a pump will act as if under military orders, and will become very thirsty before they take a break, so you can get bad moods from this at times.  3-4 training, 3-4 pumps, and 2-4 inactive is pretty good.  This ensures that someone is always training, someone else is getting better stats, and a few are left to tend to personal needs.

[EveryZig]

Do you still get stats from lvling skills? I thought the 'legendary bookkeeper' thing was taken out. (And if you do get stats from pumps, what stats?

[Girlinhat]

Yes, but the documentation for these isn't clear.  Strength-related jobs, like masonry, carpentry, woodcutting, pump operating, etc, will give more strength, toughness, agility, etc.  Craft skills, like gem cutting, sewing, and other skills normally related with trade goods, will increase things like memory, spatial sense, and those other "soul traits" which will aid archers.  Unfortunately, gems are a lot more rare than water, so it's much much easier to train the stats on a melee fighter than a marksdwarf.

Danger room experiments show that when a dwarf gets to super-legendary skills, they tend to gain super-legendary attributes.  All danger roomed dwarves will be Might, Nigh-Indefatigable, Extremely Agile, etc.  Dwarves who train by live training or barracks will increase these as well, but much slower.  The boost gained from attribute training may not be a great deal, but it should be extremely easy for anyone to set up a 1x4x2 pump area that simple pushes water in a loop and trains soldiers cheaply in their off-time.  Dry pumps will train the pump operating skill, but will NOT train attributes.

[Quietust]

Also, pump operating.  I make all my melee soldiers pump operators, and place pointless pumps.  They must be actually moving water to function, mind you.

No they don't - my 0.31.12 fortress had an exercise room full of iron pumps with no inputs or outputs (input was a floor tile, output was a solid wall) and my off-duty soldiers trained up just fine as pump operators.

[Girlinhat]

In .19 (or was it .18?) I had a dwarf running a dry pump.  He skilled up into a legendary+5 pump operator, but was still Very Weak and Slow and other lame traits.

[krenshala]

Hi there,

I've been playing dwarf fortress for some time now without any problems (ok, lots of problems, but nothing the wiki and copious amounts of fun couldn't fix) But now I'm kinda stuck.

My Military consist of a full 10 dwarf squad, thats set to train all year long. They don't have any actual combat skills, but instead of sparring and getting any actual experience, they just sit on their asses all day and try to teach each other their dabbling fighting skills. I have used dwarf therapist to look at the xp levels, and after one year, there has maybe been a 10xp increase in dodging, despite them doing dodging and combat training all the time. Presumably because their teacher doesn't know **** about dodging either and just falls on his face alot. All their weapon skill remain at "dabbling", no matter what weapon I give them.

How do I transform my military from a bunch of loudmouths with no skills into the fighting machines that they (being dwarves) should be?

I haven't used a danger room yet, but still get decently trained troops in under a year.  It definitely sounds like you are running into the "we don't have everyone here to train" issue.  As other said, reduce the training number to fix that.

My recommendation is to make two squads of 5, set them to train with 5 members required, and provide them with at least a training weapon (if you don't have their "real" weapons ready) and wooden (or better) shield.  Do not wait until you have all the weapons/shields ready to start the squad training.  Sparring without a weapon will still give them useful skills, not to mention the fact that at the lowest skill levels they tend to do more demonstrations than sparring, while sparring tends to become more common once the weapon skill reaches 3 or more.

Within a season of steady training your military dwarves should go from zeros to at least 1 or 2 in weapon, shield, dodge, and possibly others.  If any of your dwarves have military skills (assuming you are drafting migrants for this) then the speed at which the group improves will increase.

The best results I've had were drafting eight the autumn migrants, and when the elven ambush arrived in mid-spring those eight ranged in weapon skill from 1 to 5, with 3 to 5 for armor and shield use.  Those eight killed 15 of the 16 elves with only bruises to show for it while armed with iron spears and shields, and whatever clothing they had arrived at the fortress in.  My results aren't normally that good (I start a lot of forts  ) but if the group is sparring at least through the winter, and have actual weapons when the fight starts, they are more than ready for thieves or elven ambushes when they first arrive.  Additional training just improves things and, as Girlinhat mentioned, once they hit about level 5 then actual live combat is the only effective way to level them further (without using a Danger Room, at least).

[Girlinhat]

Actually I said just the opposite.  If you drop a naked goblin and a fresh recruit with a wooden spear into a room, the dwarf will bash on him, and run away, and wrestle, and punch, and accidentally kill him.  After a few pages of fighting, he'll gain skill for those few pages.  When he gets some skill, then he'll just walk in and bash his skull into the brain!  Skill gain is based on time spent fighting, not killshots, so using nerf weapons will train a soldier faster than using steel, simply because their punching bag will stay alive longer and they'll get more use.  However, once the reach the point that naked goblins aren't much good (around level 5) they should start sparring regularly, and sparring is basically slowly paced combat, so it counts as combat and the pages and pages of sparring reports are pages and pages of exp, give to two soldiers.  One is training axe-use and the other is training shield-use.

Also, bonus points if you flood the barracks and train their swimming.  Nothing sucks like having your first axelord dodge into a 2x3 waist-high murky pool and drown while fighting a macaque...

[metime00]

Yes, but the documentation for these isn't clear.  Strength-related jobs, like masonry, carpentry, woodcutting, pump operating, etc, will give more strength, toughness, agility, etc.  Craft skills, like gem cutting, sewing, and other skills normally related with trade goods, will increase things like memory, spatial sense, and those other "soul traits" which will aid archers.  Unfortunately, gems are a lot more rare than water, so it's much much easier to train the stats on a melee fighter than a marksdwarf.
*snip*

Actually, dodging and shield user skills raise:
kinesthetic senses
spatial senses
agility
endurance
strength(dodging doesn't)
toughness(dodging might not, unconfirmed)
willpower(dodging doesn't).

The senses are used for marksdwarves, I believe, so danger rooms are a completely viable solution for marksdwarf attributes.

The consistency of the core mechanics between adventure and dwarf mode are so awesome. You can use the arena mode to test all of the skill:attribute correlations!

[Girlinhat]

orly?  Then again I haven't paid much attention to my archers, since I've considered them a lost cause.  Haven't tried them in .21 yet, supposed to be fixed less broken but just haven't gotten around to using them.

[EBannion]

Also, danger rooms will train armor user but only if the spear makes it to hitting the dwarf's armor. If they have a shield and block with it, they get shield user instead, and if they have a weapon and they parry with it, they get weapon skill instead.

If I am going to do danger room training, I will try to have my dwarves start training without weapons or armor until they get Armor User to a middling level, and then give them weapons until they get them reasonably high, and then give them shields and forget about them.

[Girlinhat]

I just toss in a single soldier for about a season, and then toss them against sieges and ambushes solo.  The armor user skill only increases speed, which helps but isn't a -huge- bonus.  What counts, is slapping them in steel/candy with enough skill to block a few hits, then go martial trance, slaughter them all like a lawnmower on a warm summer's day, and calm down with legendary skills.