Bay 12 Games Forum

I've been doing some observation using Dwarf Therapist (no siege this year, plenty of time) and it seems that:

- When a pairing has either a good teacher or a dwarf who 'loves to take charge and direct activities' etc, the likelihood of a training session increases.
- The gain rates for student/teacher are dependent on the relative skill levels of a partner. That is to say that a novice teacher with a competent student will have a much faster skill growth rate than a double-novice pairing.
- When teacher/learner pairings have identical skill levels in teacher/student, the gain rate for those skills is matched.
- When teaching a skill, a teacher also gains points in that skill (so leading a dodging demonstration gives points in dodging). Furthermore, the gain rate for the teacher is always half of the learner's gain in their student skill. i.e. Learner's student skill increases by 90, teacher's dodging skill increases by 45.
- Sparring skill gain rates depend upon the quality of the partner, but not relative to the learner. So, two masters beating on each other both receive a 'sparring with a master' rate of gain, while two novices both receive a 'sparring with a novice' rate of gain.

I've only got a few sets of data and general conjecture to back this up, but now I'm going to break my military up into six groups of two - always active/training - and see if I can achieve better results by mixing groups and ensuring that 'teacher' types have lower combat skills than their partners. Wish me luck, and thank you for all your helpful replies.

Hm, I had hoped to encourage more sparring by breaking up the same-weapon groups, but now my Expert Swordsdwarf is giving a sword demonstration... To my High Master Macedwarf. Perhaps it's because he has a higher teaching skill than my Axe Lord, who just tries to beat the Fun out of everyone.

Hey folks, I'm new to the forum (you may release a collective *humph* of scorn before I continue) and I've returned to playing DF for the first time in almost three years.

While I have a fairly compelte grasp of the new training and sparring system (thank you, wiki-guide writers) I'm struggling a little to understand what determines the probability of sparring - as opposed to instruction - occuring, and also what impacts the rate of skill gain for various dwarves.

My situation is this: I have an almost four year-old fortress, with four squads of three melee-equipped dwarves. Each squad is scheduled to train all year round, with a minimum of two members training at any one time (theoretically maximizing the chance of sparring). To keep things brief, in my last migrant wave I received two dwarves who were pre-loaded with higher supporting combat skills (armor user, fighter, shield user, etc.) than my original batch. I put them in a squad with one of my 'classic' dwarves, and they proceeded to skyrocket to being 'Mace Lord' and 'Axe Lord' - with legendary Fighter skill, and generally sparring almost constantly when they're both active.

My questions, then:

- Are dwarves with matched skill levels more likely to spar, since neither one will be capable of teaching the other how to improve?
- Is there a minimum skill threshold for certain skills (armor user, weapon user, etc) at which dwarves will be reluctant to spar?
- Does agility have any impact on combat speed, and would this have an effect on skill-gain rates during sparring?

Thank you for any and all answers, and keep on dorfin'.