Well, I'd been having trouble finding sufficient numbers of adversaries to skill-up on... my land is not very densely populated. So I started looking around for other options in the game, other than bandits.
There isn't really enough of any particular faction yet to keep me too busy. So I decided to start attacking caravans as well. They were pretty sparse also.
But then I discovered this setting "population=100.0" which starts off at "population=1.0"
It seems to increase just the population of caravans - but that's enough, really. More than enough, when staging an attack on the trade route between Brick and Trader's edge.
I'm getting plenty of skill-ups now... several party members have higher than 80 Strength. One has 117 I think... and now somehow has 156 Blood, when everyone else is sub 90. The "Heavy" weapons are beastly. One shot at high Str obliterates the target limb/organ/etc(hits w/high Str are mostly more than 100). This seems to be only when the heavy weapons are used, so far on my characters. I'm not sure if weapon skill is also a factor in that.
The game bogs a little bit on this system... but I have a couple hundred corpses I'm fighting on and several dozen simultaneous fights and hyper-threading has not been squared away yet. I'm wishing blood and terrain features were in now though

I think this would be looking really cool about now.
OS: Windows 7 Ult 64-bit SP 1
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9400 @ 2.66GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
Memory: 8192MB RAM
Video: ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series