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[Nan]

Preliminary real game test - not scientific - with six military dwarves, all proficient teachers + proficient armor, shield, dodger, biter, axe or spear.

Dodging trained impressively fast and consistently. Other skills soon followed, although somewhat haphazardly. Several dwarves got proficient biter. Even after about 3 years some skills such as armor/shield user, on some dwarves, remained as low as competent or adequate. But by then all had managed to get at least dodger and one of the defensive skills to proficient and beyond, which is pretty good.

The two dwarves which started with weapon skills, both gained skills in "fighter" considerably faster. Whether this is because they sparred more often, or because their sparring was more effective, is hard to say. However they also seemed to gain other skills like biter more slowly, so I suspect they tended to skip demonstrations in favor of sparring.

Spear dwarves didn't learn any axe, and vice-verca.

So far I'm quite impressed. The mob hasn't improved their weapon and fighter skill as well as they would have by sparring in squads of 2, but their defensive skills are considerably ahead. Nice to watch them dodging bolts. And their weapon/fighter skills are pretty impressive for being in such a large squad.

Late-comers I drafted into the squad quickly gained skill. One of these has better armor user than the originals, and is training them. I would guess they (the teachers) would learn quickly because they get mega skill in student, from attending so many demonstrations.

Happily the goblins are very active. One of my dwarves got her arm smashed open by a lasher, but made a complete recovery, not even a scar.

[Qwernt]

So, would a teacher/miner teach how to use a pick in combat? I think I might have to try that...

[Telgin]

This is very useful information, wish I'd had it a month ago.  I embarked this time with a soldier with some training skill hoping it would be useful.  I didn't put much into his axe or teaching skill, saving points for other stuff, but now I wish I'd have bumped him up a bit.

After a few years of training, the other soldiers still suck.  Completely preventable, apparently.

[Nan]

Continuing the play test (somewhere around year 5), for some reason shield user skill is growing by leaps and bounds especially on the two dwarves who embarked with weapon skills, they have now surpassed the original shield user, the spear dwarf is "Great", the Axe Dwarf "Accomplished" and the Shield Dwarf only "Professional". This continues to reinforce my belief that dwarves who embark with weapon skills train more effectively in general, but it seems that "seeding" their shield user skill allows them to develop it via sparring, and the battle report confirms this, the axe/spear dwarves are blocking like crazy during sparring. But why it's the ones with the weapon skills who are training shield skill fastest, I really can't figure out, unless high fighter skill makes them better at blocking.

Now all of the original 6 are Proficient Biters, except the original Biter himself who is Talented and one who is only Skilled. The two newbies have demonstrated somewhat more resistance to learning biting. Right now a Biting demonstration is happening and one of the recruits (the one who has learned no biting at all despite being proficient+ in the other skills) has decided he would rather do an individual combat drill. Almost makes me wonder if some dwarves think "Bite and shake" is beneath their dignity.

I'm not sure how the Biter has raised his skill, I haven't seen him biting anything, but I guess he just gets the odd nip in here and there during sparring or combat, or perhaps individual combat drill (he chomps on his beard?)

[dreadmullet]

That explains what they do during individual combat drills...

"Alright, time to practice biting. *gnaws at steel left gauntlet* Ach, that does nothing, I'll try training Armor User then. *bashes self in face repeatedly*"

[Loud Whispers]

That explains what they do during individual combat drills...

"Alright, time to practice biting. *gnaws at steel left gauntlet* Ach, that does nothing, I'll try training Armor User then. *bashes self in face repeatedly*"

Don't worry, I'm a legendary teacher around here. *Bashes face in with axe*

[Nan]

So, would a teacher/miner teach how to use a pick in combat? I think I might have to try that...

From my observations - no, cross-weapon skills are not trained at all. What might happen is "Combat Demonstration" trains the dwarf in whatever weapon they are currently holding. But since mining is a pseudo-weapon skill, maybe it would work differently, I guess that would require testing to know for sure.

A Teacher/Legendary Miner might still be useful as an instructor, since presumably he would gain skill from sparring very quickly, and if combat demonstration does train the attendees on how to use their weapons, it might be very effective since the instructor is legendary - or it might not work at all since it's not a real weapon skill.

[Sutremaine]

Dwarves will teach each other any weapon skill they have. I had a hunter with pretty decent Marksdwarf skill immigrate and immediately get put in with the melee dwarves, and a couple of years later some of the others were Accomplished Marksdwarves or close to it. Definitely no accidental training involved, since they don't have the Archer skill to match. That one hasn't been taught at all; the only dwarf with more than 60XP is only at Novice and has a nice round figure of 1500XP that suggests migrant skill (skill rust is off in that fortress). Same with hammers; I have several decent Hammerdwarves despite not using that weapon at all. They've actually gained a little more skill than any dwarf had originally, but it's a couple of levels over a period of decades.

[Nan]

Needs more testing. I have observed Axe, Spear, Sword and Lasher not getting trained, not even to the extent of dabbling. The weapon skill associated with the crossbow (that is, using the crossbow itself as a weapon, rather than a bolt launcher) is actually hammerdwarf, not marksdwarf, so marksdwarf might be expected to act differently to other combat skills.

Testing this out - with a whole bunch of teachers with a range of skills (including mining), I'm not seeing any combat skills at all being cross-taught, the dwarves armed with crossbows get hammer skill, but that's because they're armed with a crossbow which is a hammer.

When my hammer dwarf does a "Hammer demonstration", only the marksdwarves turn up for it.

Marksdwarf being taught is confirmed. But only the crossbow armed dwarves have gained it. Archery is not being taught. The reasoning seems to go that "marksdwarf" is "crossbow using skill" and "archery" is "crossbow aiming skill", so marksdwarf can be taught ("this is how you use your crossbow"), but archery needs to be practiced.

My hypothesis is that dwarves can only be taught equipment-based skills if they actually have the relevant equipment equipped. My "sponge dwarf" who is purely a teacher with no equipment except a shield, has only picked up Shield User (actually he is most skilled in it), Misc. Object User and the non-equipment based skills.

This might seem a needlessly pedantic distinction (does it matter if dwarves don't learn skills for equipment they don't actually have?) but it's something to bear in mind. Also, if a dwarf is equipped multiple weapons, he'll attend demonstrations for any of those weapons.

This (rather sensible) behavior is actually useful, because it makes it possible to optimize your dwarves training. If you want them to focus on teaching non-weapon skills, then give them all different weapons. On the other hand it'd make a lot of sense to assign rookies the same weapon as a teacher to get them up to speed more quickly.

So marksdwarf being cross-taught has not been observed under controlled conditions. What I speculate when it seems like it is being taught, is that the dwarf, with "individual choice, weapon" set, switches weapons on a whim, and attends lessons while wielding the new weapon. I have sometimes been surprised to catch one of my "melee" dwarves wielding a crossbow because I was careless with the uniform. This would be consistent with marksdwarf and hammerdwarf being the skills observed to be cross-taught.

I also tested putting some recruits with picks with the teacher/miner. I did not see any "pick demonstrations" and AFAICT the only mining skill gain came from sparring. That doesn't conclusively say it can't be trained using demonstrations, but if it can, it must be low priority (but most likely, being a civilian skill, it wouldn't be on the list of valid demonstrable skills)

[Uristoteles]

In my current game I embarked with a Teacher[5] / Axe[5] Dwarf and a Student[5] / Shield[5] Dwarf.

I let them start train (8/12months, 3/3dwarves) almost immediately, made the teacher also the manager for a while and it seems to work out as I wanted:
the student learned fast to be a proficient teacher/axedwarf and the initial teacher followed to become a proficient student/shielduser rather quick (in 1 or 2 years), both also got proficient concentration in the process.
My first two migration waves were really small, so I added only three scapegraces, of which only one survived a nasty double-bowgoblin-squad-ambush, but two years after his draft he's also at least proficient in all mentioned skills.
In these two years I added more dwarves, which I gave swords/spears/hammers and they all are at least competent in weapon/shield/teacher/student/concentration.
Fighting and dodging leveled on their own through combat and sparring, only armour using drags behind, but thats probably due to the fact that I have only copper on my map and even goblinite consists mostly of copper, so all I do is training my armoursmith while waiting to have enough bronze/steel through trading before bothering about proper armour.

The organizer skill is also a problem and I don't know what to do about it; the
initial teacher is a level 9 organizer, but everyone else is level 2 at best.

Also to mention: This is obviously no scientific approach, I didnt really look what happened when, but I'm satisfied whit the outcome.

[Roflcopter5000]

Hopefully this isn't too much of a necro, but I was conducting related research. I decided to try to see if I could accelerate the training process via modding, but changing as little as possible about the gameplay.

So far what I've done is mod in a starting skill level of teacher and student at 1, and increased the skill learn on both of those to 13x normal.

Every dwarf drafted into the military thus far has had no weapon, shield, or armor skill. They are set up in 5 squads of 3 each, with minimum 2 for training, full-year round training schedule.

For the first year, there was very little sparring, almost all dwarves were constantly engaged in dodging/striking/combat demonstrations.

'Teacher' skill seemed to balloon quickly on a few key dwarves. These dwarves also had the highest ranks of skills commonly being taught. Important to note that none of these combat skills are above 3 or 4 at the highest. Comparing and contrasting with what I've read about other training methods, this would seem to prove with a high degree of certainty that demonstration efficacy depends very strongly on the dwarf leading the demonstration having a numerically high combat skill, as opposed to just a relatively high one. The over-all usefulness of a high teaching skill seems to still be quite questionable. It would seem that even with rank 8-10 of Teacher, it still took almost a full year to train my dwarves just three ranks of dodge/striker. My theory is that the modifier granted to the learn rate of skills in a demonstration by the teacher/student skills is capped by the teachers rank of the relevant combat skill.

Unfortunately, the validity of most of my observations past the point of about a year starts to crumble, since goblins have started invading and whatnot, and my dwarves have gained skill fairly rapidly by virtue of actual combat. Additionally, it would seem that now that my dwarves are more uniform in skill distribution, they are sparring quite a bit more often, which is behavior that seems to match other peoples observations about demonstrations vs. sparring.

The only other thing I've noticed is that despite the learn rate modifier of 1300%, none of the dwarves are above rank 5 in student. This would seem to prove that the amount of student skill granted by being a part of a demonstration is ridiculously low. Given the relatively small amount of socializing that my military dwarves have been doing, and the relatively skill gap compared with the civilian population, I feel safe in saying that some student exp is definitely being granted, but very little.

Modifying the learn rate of student/teacher has had very little impact so far on the rate of military skill gain. Next, I will wait until my dwarves have reached 'adequate' in their combat skills, and see how much of an effect this change will have in the presence of more skilled instructors.

[arzzult]

I'm curious as to what the difference in skill level was between the teacher and students in your test. I mean it would be a reasonable assumption that if the teach isn't very skilled him self in what he's trying to teach then he can't really teach much of anything to any one regardless of how good he is at teaching. And I would guess that the teacher skill ballooning would be from the teacher getting skill for every student present.

[Psieye]

I should have put my thread on this topic in my sig a long time ago.

The short version: Teacher, Student and Concentration skills affect how much EXP is being raised by demonstrations. Organiser had no visible impact on EXP - it may speed up the "organise demonstration lecture" phase but not so much that it's noteworthy.


The real obstacle to training via demonstrations is that once dwarves get into real combat, they'll start giving lectures on any random combat skill. If any dwarf in a squad ever threw one punch in his entire military career (be it from combat or sparring), then your entire squad's demonstration series will be greatly diluted in usefuless. There will be so many Striking demonstrations instead of [main weapon of squad] demonstrations. So unless you are willing to mod out kicking/punching/biting from your dwarves, you must have your teachers and students never ever face real combat to streamline the demonstration topics. Once students graduate, they must never ever go 'back to school' else they will pollute the skill pool and thus make demonstrations have useless topics mixed in.

[Urist Da Vinci]

The real obstacle to training via demonstrations is that once dwarves get into real combat, they'll start giving lectures on any random combat skill. If any dwarf in a squad ever threw one punch in his entire military career (be it from combat or sparring), then your entire squad's demonstration series will be greatly diluted in usefuless. There will be so many Striking demonstrations instead of [main weapon of squad] demonstrations. So unless you are willing to mod out kicking/punching/biting from your dwarves, you must have your teachers and students never ever face real combat to streamline the demonstration topics. Once students graduate, they must never ever go 'back to school' else they will pollute the skill pool and thus make demonstrations have useless topics mixed in.

I wonder what dwarves or skills receive priority for leading demonstrations. The "common knowledge" is that skilled dwarves teach their higher skills, but perhaps it doesn't work that way or is biased towards certain skills. I've seen dodging training appear often, for example. I might test this by embarking with well-rounded military dwarves, and seeing what they prefer to demonstrate when I interrupt and force them to restart demonstrations rapidly.

[Blah]

I recently discovered this technique on my own and it seemed great at first. I embarked with four dwarves and they had legendary sword and fighter skills in a year or so with non-stop training. Then I let them lead a squad each and train new recruits. The new recruits barely gain any experience for whatever reason. It's better to let them do individual combat drills instead.

I suspect this is because a random dwarf is chosen to do demonstrations instead of the one best suited for it. Even then, the experience gained is noticeably less - could it be that the experience gained decreases the more dwarves are following a demonstration?

It's still worth it to embark with a few teachers but not worth using them to train later recruits.