It is year 215. Everyone from the 201-203 baby boomer generation have now graduated. There are still nine students left, born later as a result of a fire breathing FB decimating the militia and me being sloppy with the population cap. Since it will be four long game years before the last of them will graduate, I'll do a quick recap of the project at this point.
There are now 85 graduates, with nine more coming if no one dies before that. Six children dropped out of before reaching Legendary. Seven children died from various reasons, mainly from the dreaded Flying Dwarf Syndrome. If this continues, 94 out of 107 children born and migrated will probably make it through the school with honors. Not bad at all.
The students have been trained in Fighter, Dodger, Armor User, Swimmer, Observer and combat hardness. I also attempted training in Climber and Discipline but couldn't find a working method for them.
The following methods were used in training:
Fighter, Dodger and Armor User
These were trained by simply letting the children live in a large mild danger room, with spear traps containing one base quality training spear in each floor square. Fighter and Dodger were trained very quickly to Legendary but Armor User development stalled when the students started to rely more on dodging. This happened around Adept level at Dodger. Later I transfered more advanced students to a tougher school complex with fully loaded spear traps (ten spears each); this allowed further gains in Armor User since there appears to be some limits in how many attacks a person can dodge within short time.
If anyone else wants to try this I'd suggest a spear trap load of something between these; three to five spears per trap could train all skills to Legendary eventually without being too much of an exploit.
Swimmer
When the students started truly moving when dodging (again at around Adept level), it was only natural to add a narrow dodge trap bridge to the center of the new school facility. Falling from this bridge resulted in a drop to a swimming pool with 5/7 water level. The students were very persistent when trying to get a roast across the bridge to the dining table and hence got to Legendary Swimmers very quickly. There were some injuries from falling but these were sorted out by now very skilled hospital staff.
This was very easy to add to the training facility and swimming gives some very nice attribute gains; I heartily recommend adding a swimming pool to any child care facility. An improvement to this would be some kind of controlled drowning setup simulating under bridge swimming in adventure mode; this should train the recuperation attribute.
Observer
Simply by assigning a squad to spar within the children's observation radius will train Observer skill. I haven't done exact testing yet but it looks like the observation radius is from one to three squares, maybe depending on the Observer skill level. All students got to Legendary +5 Observers in few years with this method.
This is very easy to add and Observer is very useful skill to even civilian dwarves. Some might oppose combining this with the danger room setup, though.
Combat hardness
Also known as tragedy training. The most effective way for this was to expose the children to bits of dead sentient creatures, meaning anything with [CAN_LEARN] creature token. For a while it seemed that exposing and hiding the same body parts repeatedly gave very good results but after version .40.12 this effect vanished. This means the only working method is probably killing a LOT of sentient beings within the children's view. Again, the observation radius seems to be at play here, so a high altitude drop chute splatter would be effective in covering a larger area with eh, "training material". Of course the necessary miasma controlling activities must be handled in some way.
The most practical way for this kind of tragedy training would be mass dropping captured invaders to the training area until everyone is fully desensitized. My fort didn't get any invasions at that point so I used modded dogs, causing all kinds of horrible unintended results. I'm still finding Dog Bone Doctor teeth in odd places.
Climber
I couldn't get the students to climb anywhere. I tried placing the food and drink to a higher level and knocking students to channeled holes with dodge traps, but it seems that dwarves will rather starve than do any kind of climbing.
Discipline
Discipline was another that proved surprisingly hard to train. In theory, seeing death should also train discipline but in practice it didn't. Exposing the students to hostile creatures didn't seem to work either; the students either completely ignored the hostiles or mobbed them and beat them to death too quickly for significant Discipline gain. Even Minotaurs didn't last long as their playthings. I finally gave up and let Discipline to be trained in military duty after the school.
All in all, this project has changed my attitude to dwarven children; I no longer consider them as completely worthless booze guzzlers, but rather as valuable investments paying off in the future. This new generation will handle the ambushes and other little hardships of dwarven life much better than the earlier, unimproved generation. I'll be doing something like this in all my future forts.
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Topic: Dwarven Child Care [Reboot] (Werezombie Cloning Tech (What in Armok's name?!)) (Read 206708 times)