sparring

[mehelsel]

If you can increase your men attack using training dummy's, why not defense with sparring.

One character can attack while the other blocks, thus increasing the blocking characters defense. Or maybe you can make it so sparring increases both defense and attack, with two characters fighting each other.

[hbrown]

Been sugested alreayd a load of times if i am not wrong, not saying is bad, just been discussed a lot xD.
But yeah a "basci" thing to do and maybe one of the most common ones, tho i guess would make easier to train new recruits, or easier, an drender dummies uselss, unless youd need already a higher lvl to sparr properly, and depending on the lvl as well of the partner.

[Clawdius Talonious]

I myself have always imagined that we would be able to make a dojo so that we could have our high skill units teach lower skilled units. Basically you'd put a practice mat in a building possibly alongside a number of training dummies and assign a highly skilled warrior as the sensei. I'm not sure if it would be easier to automate the process by having say, a pedestal stand for the Sensei to be assigned to and assigning everyone who would be training to the mat, or just alter the training dummies code to work alongside the mat, so you'd assign students to the dummies and the sensei would arrange sparring matches to increase their skill. The primary advantage, at least IMO of having a dojo/sparring would be getting weapon skills up to a reasonable point, as having attack skill is nice but if you could get 15 weapon skill for new troops they would be a lot better off going into combat.

The bottom line is, no matter what training options Chris adds going forward, we're not likely to really need something along these lines until we can control multiple squads. At that point it will likely be best for it to be a highly automated process so you can assign new recruits a squad equipment layout and they'll go train up while their gear is being created. I suppose the Dojo would really need its own unique weapon racks filled with practice weapons that would automatically be acquired according to the gear they will use when it is crafted by the smiths.

I have no doubt we'll see something to increase weapon skills a bit before we send our troops into combat, but currently the best you can do is equip the worst weapon of the type you want to master and send the units who need training in against groups of bandits. After they are incapacitated run in and slaughter the bandits, patch up the wounded and repeat after the recruits are rested. It isn't the best solution, but it is the one we have available now and I managed to get my heavy weapons skill up to 20 or so after just two or three groups of bandits last time I did that. Of course I was using units that had been saber users, and as such they had 20+ Dex, so YMMV.