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[Girlinhat]

Thinking about this, it might be worthwhile to add [NATURAL_SKILL:STUDENT:5] to the dwarven raw, until Toady adds schools/daycares for children.  If children can go to school and learn a trade, or go to military school and learn Student (not military skills), then they can become adults and start their masonry careers or go to boot camp with a skilled teacher who will quickly rank them up.  If this is done, then children will actually have a value instead of a liability.  Children of soldiers could also watch training, gaining some skill from Bring Your Daughter To Work Day.

Either way, very interesting results, but mostly useless because there's not a huge way to actually utilize the data.  Getting a good student is good, but unlikely, and therefore training by demonstrations is difficult at best.

[utuki]

Thinking about this, it might be worthwhile to add [NATURAL_SKILL:STUDENT:5] to the dwarven raw, until Toady adds schools/daycares for children.  If children can go to school and learn a trade, or go to military school and learn Student (not military skills), then they can become adults and start their masonry careers or go to boot camp with a skilled teacher who will quickly rank them up.  If this is done, then children will actually have a value instead of a liability.  Children of soldiers could also watch training, gaining some skill from Bring Your Daughter To Work Day.

Either way, very interesting results, but mostly useless because there's not a huge way to actually utilize the data.  Getting a good student is good, but unlikely, and therefore training by demonstrations is difficult at best.

Schools wont change much if all migrants still arrive with random skills.
For now there are (if they arent broken) schools as workshops.
As it is now biggest problem isnt lack of student skill but randomized training.
As i see it perfect longterm embark is weapon skill 5 and teacher 5. Teacher 5 and defence skill(s) take long time to train to good weapon skill so you will probably be forced to use those dwarves in combat (including first sieges) and they will gain bad skills since they will do most fighting.
In my current game i started with 6 dwarves with sword 5 teacher 5 and they trained recruits resonably well, i had ~15 legendaries in year 3. Then massive hard sieges happened and after everyone gained unarmed skills training became really slow.

[Girlinhat]

The point isn't for migrants to improve, it's children.  Migrants will arrive with whatever skills they want, but children arrive with zero.  If you could send children to school and train their Student skill, then they would make amazing soldiers, as they'd learn very quickly from instructors.  Children could change from a burden to a resource.

[Psieye]

Concentration is high on the training dwarves too, but I'm not sure where that comes from.

It gets used and goes up exactly like Student does. You could say it's a duplicate of Student as it has the exact same effects and is trained in the exact same way.

Thinking about this, it might be worthwhile to add [NATURAL_SKILL:STUDENT:5] to the dwarven raw, until Toady adds schools/daycares for children.  If children can go to school and learn a trade, or go to military school and learn Student (not military skills), then they can become adults and start their masonry careers or go to boot camp with a skilled teacher who will quickly rank them up.  If this is done, then children will actually have a value instead of a liability.  Children of soldiers could also watch training, gaining some skill from Bring Your Daughter To Work Day.

Either way, very interesting results, but mostly useless because there's not a huge way to actually utilize the data.  Getting a good student is good, but unlikely, and therefore training by demonstrations is difficult at best.

Knowing the results are useless is worth the time getting them. I'd say the main point is that demonstrations are good for training up the defensive skills which are much slower to learn in live combat compared to offensive skills. Indeed, rather than adding [NATURAL_SKILL:STUDENT:5] I think it'd be worth more to just remove the tags for punch, kick and bite so dwarves cannot dilute their training with useless martial arts skills (wrestling still is useful for dealing with charges).

Once schools are in to train children, forts that raise up lots of children (maybe with a lower age of adulthood) will have a powerful pool of dwarves who learn skills quickly. Best would be if you could tell dwarves to attend 'university' even when they're adults.

As i see it perfect longterm embark is weapon skill 5 and teacher 5. Teacher 5 and defence skill(s) take long time to train to good weapon skill so you will probably be forced to use those dwarves in combat (including first sieges) and they will gain bad skills since they will do most fighting.
In my current game i started with 6 dwarves with sword 5 teacher 5 and they trained recruits resonably well, i had ~15 legendaries in year 3. Then massive hard sieges happened and after everyone gained unarmed skills training became really slow.

You may have a point, but not because training weapon skill is slow. What you'd get is suppression of sparring since dwarves don't like to spar when there's a massive skill difference. Given drills also raise weapon skill, you've got a system for focussing all training on weapon skill through a marathon of demonstrations. It could work I guess if you leave defence to good armour.


The alternative in my view is to embark with Teacher 5 and Defence 5 (be that Dodge, Armour or Shield skill) dwarves. Let them do a bit of demonstrations to each other at the start and then equip them with training weapons and go kill some wildlife (hope you have Agile dwarves). A year of killing wildlife with training weapons can get you from Lv 0 to Lv 8-ish in weapon skill. Capture and strip ambushers and snatchers too for more live training. By the time the first siege comes, you'd have a small core group of legendary weapon skills who also have some key defence skill to teach when the demonstration subject happens to land on defence.

Problem with this plan is that you can't let migrants into this core squad as it'll dilute the training - you want the core dwarves to be training each other not newbies at first. It'll probably be many sieges before they're ready to teach any skill to any recruit. Therefore it's best to have migrants train as marksdwarves instead of melee. So you'd eventually have 30~70 marksdwarves and like 4~6 hardcore melee dwarves. Given there's no friendly fire, this could take down any siege. In the long term you can now train up more melee dwarves as your core soldiers have lots of teaching experience and can teach any melee combat skill.

[utuki]

You may have a point, but not because training weapon skill is slow. What you'd get is suppression of sparring since dwarves don't like to spar when there's a massive skill difference. Given drills also raise weapon skill, you've got a system for focussing all training on weapon skill through a marathon of demonstrations. It could work I guess if you leave defence to good armour.

As far as i tested it works ok with weapon parry used as defence. I am not sure how much worse it is then shield, both tend  to miss hits when overpowered (squad or several of mounted archers focusing on one dwarf usually hits him regardless of defensive skills)

The alternative in my view is to embark with Teacher 5 and Defence 5 (be that Dodge, Armour or Shield skill) dwarves. Let them do a bit of demonstrations to each other at the start and then equip them with training weapons and go kill some wildlife (hope you have Agile dwarves). A year of killing wildlife with training weapons can get you from Lv 0 to Lv 8-ish in weapon skill. Capture and strip ambushers and snatchers too for more live training. By the time the first siege comes, you'd have a small core group of legendary weapon skills who also have some key defence skill to teach when the demonstration subject happens to land on defence.

Problem with this plan is that you can't let migrants into this core squad as it'll dilute the training - you want the core dwarves to be training each other not newbies at first. It'll probably be many sieges before they're ready to teach any skill to any recruit. Therefore it's best to have migrants train as marksdwarves instead of melee. So you'd eventually have 30~70 marksdwarves and like 4~6 hardcore melee dwarves. Given there's no friendly fire, this could take down any siege. In the long term you can now train up more melee dwarves as your core soldiers have lots of teaching experience and can teach any melee combat skill.

Whats the point of training if you use training weapons and stripped live targets ? We want challenge and/or realism, otherwise might as well use danger rooms.

I am now playing civforge purely with training and killing all enemies in melee if possible.  Most enemies use better then steel weapons(with lots of archers) and have mounts. Pretty much lost it (lost about 12 legendary swordsdwaves) around year 4 or 5 due to seasonal sieges, continued with invasions off and then slowly restored them via seasonal tags.
Your plan would work mostly for slow training without fighting everything, mine looks much better for military focused fortress based purely on training and melee live combat. Marksdwarves as militia with copper boots and wooden shields are nice but we are talking about melee training.

[Psieye]

Whats the point of training if you use training weapons and stripped live targets ? We want challenge and/or realism, otherwise might as well use danger rooms.

Challenge and realism - subjective standards. Very well, we've established your definition of those concepts and under that constraint, going with weapon skill twinking would be the optimal strategy.

I am now playing civforge purely with training and killing all enemies in melee if possible.  Most enemies use better then steel weapons(with lots of archers) and have mounts. Pretty much lost it (lost about 12 legendary swordsdwaves) around year 4 or 5 due to seasonal sieges, continued with invasions off and then slowly restored them via seasonal tags.
Your plan would work mostly for slow training without fighting everything, mine looks much better for military focused fortress based purely on training and melee live combat. Marksdwarves as militia with copper boots and wooden shields are nice but we are talking about melee training.

I did say, the army would mostly be made of ranged units (what copper boots or wooden shields? Completely unnecessary for mooks). The purpose of the core group would be to act as mobile fortifications and killing off the wounded that are trying to crawl off the map. We have incompatible visions of armies (and enemies), therefore we came up with quite different strategies. It's an important point - we can't get into in-depth discussion of what the best military training strategy is without making clear what kind of military we want.

[BurnedToast]

The point isn't for migrants to improve, it's children.  Migrants will arrive with whatever skills they want, but children arrive with zero.  If you could send children to school and train their Student skill, then they would make amazing soldiers, as they'd learn very quickly from instructors.  Children could change from a burden to a resource.

Unless the child can learn more in a year then a random migrant can learn in the 14 years it takes the child to grow up, children will still be a burden and you're still better off dropping them in magma to collect a new migrant instead.

[celem]

Regarding getting a squad to teach the way you want:

As most have noticed teaching gets weird in a squads later life.  The good dwarves spar and the rookies teach them random unarmed stuff with no real skill.  the good dwarves tend not to teach fighter/weapon which is what we really want since they are always sparring when not learning from fumbling fools.

I usually split my squads at this point so that these sparring pairs get broken up.  If you leave the skilled leader someone worth sparring with then he will.  If you leave him only greenhorns then he will actually teach them a thing or two between all the unarmed combat lessons going the other way.

For this reason my militia always looks like this (especialy in civforge or FD or similiar mods).
First squad takes two embarking soldiers, teach 2, student 2, dodge 5 and teach 2, student 2, shield user 5.
I dont bring weapon skills on my starting dwarves as these increase rapidly through general methods.  Dodge and shield (or armor) are particularly slow and valuable to have on a teacher.

These two are joined by rookie migrants until they start to show signs of forming a sparring pair (despite no embark weapon skill its rare that your starting guys dont get a considerable headstart in general fort startup phase), they then become squad leaders for 2-3 migrants each.  As various rookies reach the stage where they begin to show competance with a weapon you can start reshuffling squads.  I'll often in the later game put a pair of medium skill rookies who are starting to spar together under a weaponlord who isnt running a bootcamp squad.  He'll pick up random bits and since he has no sparring partner he'll throw the odd lesson.

Just some stuff to think about, military is a fairly personal thing.  Its makeup depends on dwarves available, mods on your game, local wildlife, playstyle, fort layouts...the list goes on.


Incidentaly.  I read once on these boards that a squad leader's willingness to lead sparring drills depends on his risk-taking personality trait.  Do we know this?  Can we use it to build squads more likely to teach?

Another somewhat related point is that you can force dwarves to train certain skills if they are lagging too much for your liking.  If weapon skill is leaving dodge/shield/armor miles behind then remove the soldiers weapon while training.  He'll level wrestling on offense and since he can no longer parry he is forced to use another defense than weapon skill.  If you leave him a shield he'll also learn to bash with it.  This sort of uniform filtering in a danger room can yield pretty instant guys who are legendary across the board