Hey folks,
I'm running my first fortress without a danger room, and I thought I'd share my experiences so far. Given that the rate of skill increase from drill and demonstration is so slow, the only option I could see was to get my soldiers practice by fighting captured animals and enemies. My dueling arrangement is pretty simple: put cages in a room, connect to a lever, lock the militia in. This plan has a number of consequences:
* You need lots of cage traps. I allow myself three traps at my entrance, and then a few scattered around the map in strategic locations. The goal is to get lots of victims without making sieges too easy.
* To maximize experience, dueling soldiers use training weapons. This leads to a bias towards swords, spears, and axes because there are training weapons available. Managing training weapons vs real weapons (to prevent attachment) becomes a mini-game unto itself. Some animals provide almost too much practice - it takes hundreds of pages of combat logs to kill a giant badger (I'm not sure exactly how many, the early reports start expiring - you don't want to know how long the giant moose took). Soldiers getting hungry and thirsty during a session becomes a real problem.
* I've found that soldiers start sparring at level 4 fighter. Does that match with other folks' experience? I have found that small squads seem to work better, but I'm not sure why. I suspect it is natural selection - the lower skilled dwarfs die off, and the remaining ones are high enough level to spar. Once sparring starts, skill levels ramp up fairly quickly. I have two soldiers with legendary fighting after two years of training. But there will be lots of dwarf corpses before then.
* Big differences from danger room trainees is offense/defense - those who come out of a DR have very high defense, those who train through sparring and dueling have much better offense than defense (my legendary fighters still have very low dodge).
Overall it has worked out better than I anticipated. There is now a really big difference between veterans and newb soldiers, which I like. However, there is a long ramp-up period of rapidly dying soldiers before anyone is good enough to survive. Hope for good migrants! How does all this compare to your experiences?