v0.34:Live training

Or how to attack creatures with minimal injury in order to train your military's skills, if you consider danger rooms as an exploit, or don't want to randomly lose children or pets, and find sparring, barracks training too slow.

There are many ways how to do this, but the most efficient tend to be:

• complete (train most if not all military skills)
• nonlethal for the dummy creature (so you can reuse it, if you haven't got an infinite source of dummy creatures)
• nonlethal for the dwarf (obviously)

Killing Wildlife

Easy enough, just arm and armor your military and gratuitiously hunt wild animals. Note that some wild animals are more than capable of killing your dabbling militiamen, so you may want to scale the creature's threat to your dwarves.

Pros:

• gets you meat, bone, skin, animal parts
• gets rid of unwanted animals
• possibly will get you new, more interesting animals on the map to catch
• very easy to set up, no special infrastructure needed
• slaughtering wildlife is fun
• trains most skills
• very easy to set up with crossbows : just make your dwarves hunters

Cons:

• not the fastest training method
• may be dangerous for dwarves
• can easily bring you too much meat and animal parts
• easily gets repetitive
• If training melee, dwarves spend a long time running after wildlife : "Yakety Sax syndrome"
• wildlife supply isn't infinite
• may generate unwanted hauling jobs
• requires oversight
• tends to train offense much more than defense

You can also improve on this by breeding wild non-grazers in some room for your dwarves to slaughter periodically. It removes the limited wildlife problem, but has still most of the other drawbacks.

Beating on Enemy Prisoners (aka Away with thee, accursed Geneva Convention !)

Quite a bit more efficient than the previous one, this consists of catching intelligent enemies in traps, making sure they are armored, then sending them against your armor-clad dwarves with training weapons. You can totally kill them anyways, other goblins will come next season.

Pros:

• decent training speed
• beating on goblins is fun
• infinite supply of enemies
• more constructive than tossing goblins in the volcano : good way to use prisoners
• trains all skills

Cons:

• goblins are trained as well (although this may be a good thing) if you don't kill them
• still requires enough oversight to be a bother
• may be dangerous to your dwarves
• goblins tend to die easily due to poor armor coverage, you must replace a new batch
• more efficient with a training weapon : dwarves may get attached to it
• generates hauling jobs (although this may be a good thing)
• as offensive skills improve and goblin skill diminish, goblin defensive skills

Flesh Ball Beating

This is a quite efficient technique to train offensive training skills. Just cage trap and then enclose flesh balls in some room, arm your dwarves with BLUNT weapons only, armor your dwarves and send them beating flesh balls. Do NOT use this to train marskdwarves, it is a massive waste of time.

Pros:

• good training speed on offensive skills
• totally safe if you armored your dwarves correctly
• requires little oversight, since flesh balls are immune to blunt

Cons:

• may be seen as an exploit
• requires some flesh balls and a fair bit of building and preparation
• dwarves may attach themselves to a training weapon
• dwarves tend to bite and scratch, therefore making flesh balls die of bleeding sometimes
• flesh balls are in very finite supply
• doesn't train defensive skills much

Bronze Colossus Dummy

AKA : using a bronze colossus's toughness and high experience gains to get good skills easily and safely.

For marksdwarves : catch the colossus, put it in a room, fire on it. You may want to use wooden/bone bolts to not damage it further, or iron bolts if you WANT to damage it further for melee training. For melee : Remove it's arms and legs via falling and/or bolts, and then drop the colossus on a closed room, and send your melee dwarves on it. Remember, steel or better weapons will kill it, and that's not what you want.

Pros:

• very good training speed, due to BC giving a lot of experience
• generally not dangerous
• infinite training
• little oversight needed, since both sides doesn't do much damage
• easy to set up for marksdwarves

Cons:

• endgame only, you don't get a colossus before 80 dwarves
• must actually have a colossus in the world
• dismembering a colossus without killing it isn't easy
• may be dangerous to dwarves with a low dodging skill
• limitation on quality material weapons => dwarf may like a poor weapon
• trains mostly offense skills, although Dodger as well
• melee may be seen as an exploit

Undead Battle Arena

Using one or several imprisoned necromancers to train your dwarves with a controlled, infinite stream of undead.

You must first catch one or several necromancers, or use a friendly necromancer, then dump him/them in a small space (if possible 1x1) surrounded by gem windows or fortifications (so he can animate what is around without being murdered by a dwarf), make an animation room. You can replace the necromancer by an animating evil biome or a demonic fortress, but necromancers raise undead faster and can be moved anywhere you like. As a bonus, add raising bridges or floodgates to block the necro's view and stop the reanimation on command.

Then drop whatever bodypart you don't need and want your necromancer to animate. Enjoy as undead are animated, dwarf kills it, undead are reanimated, dwarf kills it again, etc.

Pros:

• decent skill increases
• only little hauling needed
• use for necromancers
• infinite training
• requires little oversight
• trains every skill
• entirely controllable
• controllable difficulty level, depending on corpse (from dropping llama wool to dropping a dragon corpse) and number of corpses animated

Cons:

• can be dangerous, actually danger is proportional to your oversight and difficulty level
• requires more stonework than most other methods
• requires to actually cage trap a necromancer
• time between two reanimations is wasted time => more necromancers is better

Giant Cave Spider Armor Training Program

Using a giant cave spider's inability to bypass the armor or a webbed dwarf to train armor user.

First you must prepare the terrain to separate wild GCS and dwarf when the dwarf gets hungry/thirsty/drowsy/sufficient armor user skill.

Set the training on a non-lethal pit trap consisting of a 2x2 or 3x3 retracting bridge, or a series of grates, all linked to a lever and on top of a 1z-deep pit. Fill the ground under the bridge with cage traps.

Set a military dwarf fully armored in metal, without any weapons against a wild giant cave spider. Wild GCS webs the still-conscious dwarf, wild GCS attempts a bite to the head but fails to penetrate metal armor. Dwarf gains armor user skill. Repeat a hundred times.

When you want to stop the training, pull the lever. Bridge or grates go down, dwarf and spider fall 1 z-level and get stunned, one or both get caged and separated.

You can also try a dwarf without full armor and only a metal helm, but in that case I no longer guarantee the safety of your dwarf.

Pros:

• can double as a GCS silk farm
• very good training rates
• Useful skill which normally increases slowly in combat
• No danger at all for both dwarf and GCS, provided you armored your dwarf well
• Requires only oversight each month

Cons:

• slightly exploity
• trains only one skill
• needs quite a bit of work to set up if you want to save the GCS and reuse it
• can't train several dwarves at once unless you have several wild GCS and several training facilities