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[Larix]

Edit: Wall of text incoming!
Anyway - thoughts, suggestions, advice on what i did wrong etc. welcome. Suggestions to use danger rooms will be ignored.

So i buckled down and tried actually training dwarfs in weapon usage instead of putting ten on inactive with most labours disabled and a barracks. Drawing from forum wisdom, i started with a two-dwarf squad, complete newbies (born in the fort and drafted within a year after growing up). I micromanaged them a bit by leaving their jobs on and giving them a month of free time after every three months of training, to improve their mood - eating in the legendary dining room, talking with family and friends, being satisfied at work. Expectedly, they took a long time to level up - five and a half years until they turned elite.

Then i split them up and gave each a fresh recruit to train. Those were elite after two and a half years. Not exactly speedy, but if you could train ten dwarfs simultaneously, that should amount to a pretty good buildup, esp. considering training gives a fairly well-rounded skill distribution with good defensive skills and very very good attributes.

After the newly-trained dwarfs were elite, i put them into their own two-dwarf squad, where they quickly sparred up to legendary and beyond. One of the established teachers got a fresh recruit to train, the other got two. And now things got interesting: i moved the single recruit over to the sparring squad after three years and a season, when he was still only at 'accomplished', i.e. not yet elite. It took more than half a year in the squad to finally advance to elite. The recruit pair is by now, after almost four years, at 'talented' and 'proficient' in their chosen weapon. In addition, the sparring squad went from 2/3 sparring to perhaps 10% sparring. The main culprit seems to be the spread of minor 'unarmed combat' skills - the more skilled dwarfs eventually pick up biting, kicking and misc. object user skill, and will teach those skills. To exacerbate the issue, with this wide spread and the massive time investments in demonstrations instead of sparring practice, old skills inevitably start to rust, which prompts the loonies to schedule even more godforsaken demonstrations to unrust them.

Another problem is that with increasing number of dwarfs in a squad, interruptions of training routines become ever more frequent; dwarfs will leave the training zone to eat, drink or sleep, and each such abscondication is almost guaranteed to interrupt the ongoing practice, prompting a whole new 'organise training/demonstration'. These interruptions are slightly mitigated when the squad is allowed to carry food/drink (although carrying food will only reduce the food-related breaks, which are the least frequent and disruptive anyway, by one half and will block happiness from the dining room when off-duty), but they are still irritating with two dwarfs and quite annoying with three.

Compared to marksdwarf training via archery ranges, this direct melee training is a whole lot quicker - in the five years which produced two legendaries, and one each master, talented, proficient and adequate melee dwarf, the five-dwarf archery squad produced one great, two accomplished and an adept and talented archer (the last two were still on hauling duty). An off-duty melee squad of six dwarfs was plugging away the whole twelve years, and they went from talented-to-expert to one Grand Master, one Great *** and the rest Accomplished, so expectedly, actual training is orders of magnitude faster, not to mention that the off-duty squad got only weapon and fighter skill anywhere notable, esp. their defences were practically nonexistent.

I guess that fighting living targets should develop weapon skills much quicker, so backing that up with a solid training regimen should allow somewhat faster training of a strong military. I wonder if large squad with two or more teachers might work - two teachers and one student proved completely useless, the teachers kept starting/aborting competing demonstrations over and over, and the student didn't learn a thing.

P.S.: mood of training dwarfs is a bit of a problem. I did all this in a completely sealed-off fort (twenty dwarf diplomats on the surface currently) with no invaders, and the non-elite soldiers were generally 'content', with great or grand bedrooms and year-round training. The only additional bad thought that ever came up was the very mild booze monotony, which caused no harm, but in an actually contested fort, a training dwarf could easily be sent over the edge by losing a friend or family. Giving them regular time off (every three or four months) to enjoy the dining room, do some workshop jobs etc. can keep them happy or better fairly consistently.

[KtosoX]

Could you maybe allocate all that data in a more graphic form?

On giving your military time off:
I usually go through a 2 phase process with my military.
The first part is preparation. Recruits are set to training all year long. All negative thought are usually countered with rooms / Legendary dinning hall. They have limited contact with other residents.
Once some combat potential is acquired I move them in to phase two, which is active duty. I avoid giving them free time since that gives them opportunities to gain friends. Instead I create a whole year long patrol/training schedule. This often leads to an entire branch of industry dedicated to making my military happy (big rooms with high quality furniture and engravings).
tl;dr Making sure your military has little emotional contact with the population is key.

[Ruhn]

Well, I'm sold on the "Master and 1 recruit" approach.

Once this scales up a bit, I imagine that a new barracks would be required for each additional training squad to prevent 2 Masters from fighting for attention.

[chevil]

The master and one recruit approach works well in long running forts. Each dwarf that the master has to train trains his teaching skill leading to even shorter training time.

[Mushroo]

I would recommend not using untrained recruits, but rather waiting for migrants to arrive with pre-existing military skills. This will significantly slash your training time and give you legendary in 1-2 years.

Also I never give soldiers time off, they train 24/7 in my forts, and are usually happier than the general population, due to "took joy in slaughter," "enjoyed a satisfying sparring session," and complete lack of friendships.

[krenshala]

While this matches what I've seen in my own forts, it also appears you did not take advantage of scheduling multiple training pairs in the squad.  I have groups of ten peasants reach Adequate to Skilled in their assigned weapon (one type per squad) in about a year purely through the squad being scheduled with five orders of "Training minimum 2".  At best you end up with five pairs of dwarves sparring.  At worst, assuming three or four are "on break" or whatever, you have two or three pairs training with maybe one doing individual combat drill.  This gives you the benefits of both one-on-one training, and training a full squad all at once.

I haven't started military training in my current fort (pop 16, three of which are children that were just born in the last month) but within six months of when I start I expect to have at least two dwarves, if not more, at Adequate in their assigned weapon.  This is enough to take down your first goblin ambush if you pick your battle location.

[Xinael]

...the squad being scheduled with five orders of "Training minimum 2".  At best you end up with five pairs of dwarves sparring.  At worst, assuming three or four are "on break" or whatever, you have two or three pairs training with maybe one doing individual combat drill.

Isn't the point of the method in the OP that you're making sure that one of each sparring pair is a master with a high skill in the abilities they're passing on and a high ability in Teacher, meaning that training for that recruit goes much faster? In your example, if your ten-man squad has 5 masters and 5 recruits you could end up with 2 sets of 2 masters sparring together, 2 sets of 2 recruits sparring together, and one master and one recruit sparring together. That last recruit will progress much quicker than anyone else.

It sounds like there's a decent case for bringing one or more dwarves with some Teacher ability at embark if you want to speed this process along.

[krenshala]

What you describe is possible, however, I've also seen three or four dwarves participating in a single demonstration despite it being set for "minimum 2".  I go with one high skill dwarf training nine rookies.  Even if the rookies are sparring each other they are still sparring, and thus gaining skill at the fastest possible pace.  Also, the teacher won't spar until the noobs reach a certain skill level anyway, so multiple teachers in a single skill would most likely promote the teachers sparring with each other instead of training the peasants.

[Larix]

Thanks for all the feedback!

Nice to see that apparently i didn't do anything inexcusably wrong; training by hand _is_ fairly slow, but makes well-rounded soldiers. Starting out with dedicated teachers (i.e. dwarfs with 'teacher' skill and the core defensive skills from embark) should cut down dramatically on the lead time for training up the trainers themselves. Moving new soldiers to sparring squads earlier could also increase the output. And the problem with minor unarmed skill training getting in the way of sparring is probably just an intermediate issue that commonly cleans itself up with further skill gain of the teachers. If/when i try again, probably in the next version, i'll really have to see what you can do with multiple training orders for the same (larger) squad.

A note on auxiliary skills: expectedly, the teaching skills themselves were fairly slow to advance, but in the long run, they became notable. The two main teachers got out of their own training with 'skilled' and 'proficient' teacher skill; by now they've made 'accomplished' and 'great', so about a level per year. Student/concentration skill go up two to three ranks in the first year but then quickly level off when sparring becomes a larger part of the training regimen (the teachers haven't gone past skilled, but there are a few students who made 'proficient' and 'talented' by now). Organiser skill gets built by taking the 'organising training/demonstration/practice' jobs, but really, really slowly. My two main teachers reached 'skilled' in twelve years. I've no proper idea where the 'leader' skill comes from and what it does for training; i have one 'adequate' and two 'novice' leaders. And finally observaion skill: gains in this skill differ widely, and very incongrously - of the two dwarfs who first made up the sparring squad, one has 'legendary' observer, the other has 'novice (rusty)'. I couldn't find a correlation with any attribute, so my current best theory is that the skill builds on itself: when you have observer skill, it's easy to get more, but if you have none, it's hard to get any experience in it; it seems to go up with sparring, but only for those who have decent observation already.

[Bavette]

Hi. This is my first post so please bear with me while I get all this excitiment out of my system, guys.
I have been around the forums for a year and a half now and I have been in love with dwarf fortress ever since it showed up in a webcomic about 2 or 3 years ago (NerfNow, if you like games you should check it out). I remember it was a comic about cats, thirst, magma and (of course) dwarves. I then said to myself "Why am I not playing this!?"
Voila, one year later I finally got over the learning curve and managed my first fort. Military has, however, always been a pain for me. No matter how good my fort is or how many dorfs I got, I never seem to get over 10 or 20 noobs with one or two masters/legendaries. That is, until this last fort.

First of all, I thank the forums for such good advice.
I have to mention I am using the *Masterwork* mod, but things are still fairly vanilla. I got 12 [Weapon]lords, 4 grandmasters, 2 skilled (recruited this year), and 4 of them are even legendary armor users. I noticed that you can put all the different squads of 2 in the same barrack for training and they will just ignore each other and train accordingly with their schedule, which saves a lot of space.

What I really wanted to say in this post, however, was that I am simply AMAZED at how strong, fast and enduring my military got to begin with. Two of my dwarves have (in numbers) more than 3500 agility. They are far into the realm of Superdwarven Agility. They make 5 to 9 strikes before their sparring partners can retaliate. One of my oldest spearlords (using an artifact halberd) is unbelievably strong at more than 5300 strength. All others are circa 2500 to 3000. I never made a Danger Room, I never put them to swim. They don't even haul or pump! They are military 24/7, happy with themselves, and one of them is the strongest dwarf I have ever seen even in adventure mode, far beyond the classification of Superdwarven Strength. For Armok's sakes how did that happen?