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[Staalo]

Bit late to the party, but I finally got a fort built up to a point where running a boarding school is feasible. This time I built a bigger school with more space for students, more spear traps with less spears, more booze and a dedicated hospital. Clothes industry has been running full tilt for years, ensuring that there will be no shortages of protective clothing. First ten students are attending classes right now.

So far there have been no injuries but rate of learning seems to be a bit slow, probably because the spear traps I built are even more wimpy down than in previous iteration.
At one point a kitten sneaked in while a lecture was in progress and promptly got itself impaled; sadly there was no Discipline gain for any of the idly staring students.

I'm working on incorporating Swimming to the curriculum; I have a convenient aquifier nearby but the design will be a problem.

I'll put an update when I get some real results.

[Staalo]

Well I'll be dumbfounded; one of the children HAS gained Discipline... and Shield User. I'm fairly certain I didn't issue any shields to students so I think he could have learned it while watching his uncle the Mace Lord spar at the barracks. Other child is a Dabbling Wrestler and I don't think there has been any of that during classes... this opens some new possibilities.

I'll burrow some kids to barracks immediately; let's see what happens.

[Minnakht]

Has anyone tried incorporating a coinstar... corridor somewhere? If I'm understanding the way it works correctly, if you pave a stretch of corridor with 1x1 retracting bridges, dump single coins into it from above and set all the bridges to repeatedly flip, the coins will fly around, be perfectly harmless, and train attributes really well.
With some micromanagement you could even forbid the doors at both ends so that the errant child walking through has to stay in there for a while.

[Staalo]

Ok, so no learning happened from object lessons in the barracks. I can't figure out where some children have learned Wrestling and Shield User. There hasn't been any notable fighting during this fortress and certainly not by children.

Ah well, back to improving the school layout...

EDIT: Ah, now I think I got it: Children seem to train Wrestling and maybe some other odd skills very occasionally when a sparring soldier bumps into them while dodging. It's a very small gain but it still might be worth a try to have a militia squad to spar at the school premises...

[wierd]

Solution:

Pen waaaay more children in the room than the max sensible occupancy, so that everyone is on top of everyone.

hmmm....


I have ideas now.

How many dwarven children can you cram into a 1x1 space, using moving water current, and a floor grate with 3/7 water?

Eg, something like this:

O---------------------O----D----O
-----(water flow)--->#D             | <-barracks
O---------------------O---------O

Normally, children wont comply with that kind of density in a burrow, but if you were to wash them all into a concentration chute with a forbidden door, then unforbid the door when you had enough of them, you could jam them all up in the training room at sufficient density to get reliable skill builds. Especially if children dodge into other children, due to trying to dodge the sparring adults.

Just put an appropriate meeting zone or statue garden in the wash-way. They start a party there, and WHOOSH.

[Staalo]

I find that mental image way too hilarious to not try it. Time to start plumbing!

OR... the trainees could be dropped into the training closet by some sort of trap door arrangement... do falling dwarves roll down when they hit a ramp?

[wierd]

It makes me wonder if a feedback cycle can be induced...

EG, you have a 3x3 training room, with an armor stand/weapon rack in one of the corners. So, it looks a little like this:

++$
+++
+++

Urist and Ducim are scheduled for a wrestling match in this room. In this room, we stuff 50 children after they arrive, using the wash-o-matic party-pooper-izer.
That's an average of 6 children per tile, if evenly distributed.

Urist and Ducim start wrestling; Urist grabs hold of Ducim by his long braided beard, and throws him, sending him flying in an arc.
He can move at most 2 tiles of distance. He is very likely to collide with at least one child.

Now-- there are 6 children, on average, in each tile. Some portion of them will attempt to dodge. When they do, their movement becomes "uncontrolled", giving them projectile like physics, right? They will dodge into a nearby tile, which ALSO has an average of 6 children.....

At what child density does this dodging become a self-sustaining cascade reaction?

[Staalo]

Dwarven chain reaction, I love it already. It shouldn't even take long to create the new Dwarven master race with maxed-out everything using that method.

[Gentlefish]

Guys I don't think we want to mess with using dwarves as fusion material here. Be careful.

[wierd]

I'm not sure it would even work, or if there is a threshold of "safe operation" at all, should such a reaction indeed be possible.

Something similar to the 'dodge-a-tron' happens in overcrowded pastures already, and we see quite clearly what happens there-- Flying teeth, severed limbs-- blood everywhere---

In this case though, we would have a catalytic agent (The sparring military dwarves) instigating the dodging chain reaction, and once dwarven bodies start flying, it could very well become lethal very quickly.

I heartily endorse this experiment. I wish I had the time to test it.

[Staalo]

I believe the animal overcrowded-attacking-thing is toned down a bit in 40.xx. I haven't seen a single instance of an animal snapping at its neighbor for a while. I even left the war dogs to multiply freely for couple years and now I have almost fifty of them in one tiny pen area.

[Melting Sky]

You can make a clock with a werebeast.  Obviously it only ticks once per month.

That were beast clock is brilliant, but circumstantial - ie you have to 1) have a werebeast, and 2) you have to capture it.
But you can bet if I get one in this fort, I will try to capture it to set this up, as it is, again, brilliant.


I've found that reclaiming a fortress is far quicker than trying to set one up.
I took reelya's suggestion and made a pet dwarven caste.
So on this embark I have 75 test subjects to begin when I come to science.
Brought some adults along too for extra help hauling, and menial jobs.
I have reservations however, as I'm not sure if they will react the same way as a standard child would, as the tame child's personality seems to be hidden, and possibly disabled due to the [PET] status.
We'll see once I'm properly set up I guess.

What I would give for DFhack to make things easier and more convenient right now though...

The pet tag is likely to cause all sorts of unpredictable changes in the dwarves behaviors.

[YHVH]

I was thinking about making it climbable with spikes so if they fall, oh well. 

[Melting Sky]

From what I have seen so far misters have by far the best cost to gain benefit. They raise dwarven happiness greatly and they train swimming and its associated stats slowly. I have seen no down side to them other than the time and materials needed to build them.

[Mimodo]

Well, I just read 10 pages of thread...

If I'm correct, what we're trying to train here is:

-all military skills
- climber
- swimmer
- discipline
- not caring about death
- no, or little, social relationships

Before I can contribute much, I'll need a quick rundown on a few things.

- climber:

How exactly does it work? What causes a dwarf to want to climb, what can they climb, how does exp gain for climbing work (i.e. Is it X exp per tile, extra for multiple, exp for holding on?), how useful will climbing be, and how can we encourage climbing?

- swimmer:

I'm fairly sure there's research on this already, but if we can get all these things answered in the one spot, it gives a good starting point. Obviously swimmer is a useful skill. What methods are used for training? Remember, it doesn't have to be quick and efficient training. You have over 10 years to train this skill, so a training method which doesn't hinder other training is a good idea.

- Military Skills:

This seems to be the primary focus here, and much science is going into how to effectively train without serious injuries/fatalities. When designing this, again, remember that you have years. You don't need to have a legendary in 2 years like you'd expect from a normal training program. Take more time = decreased casualties

- discipline:

Scary things raise discipline. Periodically exposing to something such as a goblin chained up would work well. Have a mechanism to control when said scary thing is visible.

- not caring:

I'm assuming that being exposed to lots of dead things helps out with that. We don't want this to make a mess too often though, so perhaps a puppy exploding room, which is cleaned out by a flush of water every so often. Don't know too much on this, but we should include it.

- socialising:

Relationships are bad, but some social skills are needed. Earlier the suggestion of putting two children together, to force friendship and marriage has been suggested. As far as I'm aware, this won't guarantee marriage, whether from sexual orientation, or lack of desire, or even just conflicting personalities. So perhaps having 4 per room to provide a little more option here.


I'm kinda at work, on my phone, so I've lost my train of thought, but I'll post back when I'm home, and can draw up more of an idea