Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh Armok. Did I not mention that you HAVE TO HAVE TO HAVE TO equip them with full armour? Mine do this only with a breastplate, mail shirt, greaves, gauntlets, high boots, and helm. I'm also working on getting the clothing industry running so they can have silk robes too. Thus equipped, the 1z drop is ineffective but the 2z works great with next to no injuries. I'm in the process of patching mine up to raise the level back up to 2 from the 3z I turned it into when I first started training swimming. Adequate swimmers after two years, so it's slow, but still it means they'll git gud one day. I have had two random bleedouts so far, and that's only after lowring it to 3z, so I can fairly confidently say that 2z is safe. BUT YOU MUST EQUIP THEM WITH METAL ARMOUR.

Anyway, dwarves are a very expendable resource. If your training isn't killing off a few in the process well then it's just not goddamned Spartan enough.

Just to check, when you say 2z seems to be the perfect drop, you mean that they're falling from the z-level they train on, through one level that is made up of only channels, and on to the bottom level where they land and return to their training? As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been having problems getting them to take many hits when dropping them that distance. I'd reckon only one or two percent of the drops cause an actual hit, and the rest of them don't generate combat reports at all. And similar to your experience, increasing it to three levels of drop (which is to say, two levels that are channeled out, plus a top and a bottom layer) caused enough crushed ears that my prospective teachers had bled out/died to infections within a few seasons.

For some reason, my dwarves seem to be falling a whole bunch, but they rarely generate hit reports when they hit the bottom. I'm also only seeing their armor skill raise when that happens - any clue what could be going on? I've got them falling 2z levels, but perhaps that's not enough?

:edit: Furthermore, out of the four dwarves training under what seems to be exactly the same circumstances (in accordance with the OP) - only two of them are generating a few hits when falling, the other two are just too bouncy, I guess?

I posted on the Dwarf Fortress subreddit yesterday, about the status of the wiki page on Military Training. The article briefly mentions methods of increasing the amount of time spent sparring, but does not mention or link to any posts containing experiments and/or discussions on the subject. I asked if any of the users there felt knowledgeable enough to glean through the recent advances in !!Dwarven Science!! on the subject, and try to update the wiki post in a meaningful fashion.

Now, one of the users suggested in a friendly manner that if the redditors, well-meaning as they might be, got their hands on the wiki post, it would turn into a clusterfuck of epic proportions. As an alternative, he suggested that I take my plea here, specifically saying: " Ask on the official DF forums, those people know their shit.".

So here I am.