Train weapon/ fighting skills?

[Joman]

Can I train fighting?

[Joe]

With mods, yeah. Vanilla game? You have to jump some hoops to train fighting. There are probably some better ways out there, but the only way I found a way to train pawns in melee and alternatively shooting in vanilla artificially was the catch and release method.

1. Catch enemy pawn.
2. Release enemy pawn
3. Brutalize enemy pawn with either basic melee or ranged weapon till they're downed.
4. Capture them again and give them time to heal. Helps train medical too.
5. Release when healthy.
6. Repeat.

[climbingeastofwinter]

Hunting trains ranged use, equipping a melee weapon to a pawn and sending them to attack an animal should train melee I expect -- I had a pawn kill a turkey in melee recently and the turkey defended itself so I expect melee skill gained experience from that encounter.

[Crimson Shadow]

Misc Training mod adds melle and ranged training dummys

[KalkiKrosah]

Melee hunting works. Give a pawn a gladius, club, knife or Iklwa and go pick a fight. The lower the melee skill the smaller you start out. Hunt squirrels and rats with a knife starting out. Move up to capybaras, monkeys, turkeys, snakes and gazelles with the gladius. When and if possible bring plate armor and a simple helmet for protection.

DO NOT give a longsword to an unskilled fighter under level 10 melee. Longswords are slow and high damage. A missed attack with a longsword is more impactful than with any other weapon and melee skill directly translates to hit accuracy. And its even stupider to use a longsword on small animals. Small animals (who fight with quantity not quality) you want to prioritize speed over raw damage. A knife or a gladius is better suited to combat an manhunting chinchilla army than the longsword is. Besides, longswords are overkill and once the battle is concluded there's less spoils from the meat and fur of your slain enemies.

As said above, you can also beat down released prisoners. I like to give them a peg legs for both legs, then take one back, then release them and beat them down with a wooden mace. Wooden weapons are the fastest attacking material and you get experience per attack not by damage amount. So dragging out the fight is a better training routine.

Doing this should get you the melee training you are looking to achieve.

[Astasia]

Exp gained from an attack is based on the attack speed of the weapon, so something very slow and overkill for a small animal will give you more exp per animal, especially since misses also give the same exp. So using a spear/warhammer/longsword to kill small animals is probably a safe and quick way to gain some melee exp. They don't revenge on a melee miss IIRC and one hit will probably kill them.

Melee skill isn't very useful though, so I wouldn't worry about it. 10 total skill is 80% hit chance, 20 skill is 90%, 30 skill is 93%, so there's very little difference in DPS between a skill 4 melee pawn with bionic eyes/arms, and a 20 skill melee master in archotech. Same deal with dodge, you get a lot from bionic legs and eyes, and it has equally harsh diminishing returns. A 20 skill pawn is "better" but I've never found it worth going out of my way to train.

Normal hunting with like a sniper rifle to train shooting skill however is definitely worthwhile.

[Raymond]

apparently shooting and beating up prisoners does level up your melee and shooting skill. Note that I am not in anyway responsible for what you choose to do with this information.

Originally posted by Astasia:

Melee skill isn't very useful though, so I wouldn't worry about it. 10 total skill is 80% hit chance, 20 skill is 90%, 30 skill is 93%, so there's very little difference in DPS between a skill 4 melee pawn with bionic eyes/arms, and a 20 skill melee master in archotech. Same deal with dodge, you get a lot from bionic legs and eyes, and it has equally harsh diminishing returns. A 20 skill pawn is "better" but I've never found it worth going out of my way to train.

another reason why you should download combat extended and remove these silly caps Tynan imposed on his game. Legendary cybernetically augmented swordman dying to some random average Joe is the dumbest game designing concept I ever heard.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by YariMurai:

another reason why you should download combat extended and remove these silly caps Tynan imposed on his game. Legendary cybernetically augmented swordman dying to some random average Joe is the dumbest game designing concept I ever heard.

Yes, great suggestion. Fix the minor issues with melee skill by downloading a mod that functionally removes melee. Brilliant.

Melee overall works fine in the game, it's just more gear dependent. Sending a highly skilled melee pawn into combat without gear is a pretty dumb concept indeed, I don't know why you would suggest it.

A "legendary" geared melee pawn unmodded can tear through a dozen enemies and walk away with minor bruises.

[Steelfleece]

If we're talking mods, there's this but it isn't exactly quick. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=717575199&searchtext=misc+training

[Mringasa]

Mechs. Love them for this specific reason.

You can level melee reasonably quickly with a little use of Skip and some LoS blockers when you get a mech cluster, raid, or similar event. Rather than just clearing it as fast as possible, send in your melee pawns and train them by thumping on the mechs. They are pretty weak in melee, but you should still pay attention to damages so you don't lose limbs or appendages.

[Rumar]

I wish we could build a boxing ring for this purpose. I suppose there is a mod for this but I would like it in base game.

[Raymond]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Yes, great suggestion. Fix the minor issues with melee skill by downloading a mod that functionally removes melee. Brilliant.

Melee overall works fine in the game, it's just more gear dependent. Sending a highly skilled melee pawn into combat without gear is a pretty dumb concept indeed, I don't know why you would suggest it.

A "legendary" geared melee pawn unmodded can tear through a dozen enemies and walk away with minor bruises.

yeah right, random Joe picking up a sharper sword from a downed raiders suddenly become strongest Joe, and your super melee cyborg die to a freakin squirrel depends on Randy's mood. CE functionally remove vanilla melee and give you a better melee combat where investing into your colonist actually matter, and end game melee colony in CE isn't just a viable strat, it's literally the meta.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by YariMurai:

random Joe picking up a sharper sword from a downed raiders suddenly become strongest Joe, and your super melee cyborg die to a freakin squirrel depends on Randy's mood.

Neither of those things happen, and combat has nothing to do with storytellers. Learn vanilla before discussing your broken mods, I'm not having this conversation again.

[Ann☆ﾟ.*･｡]

melee: tame a small animal like rat, place them somewhere, do not train them, then draft your colonist to kill them with weapon. if they survive (well, because you don't want to kill them), you can heal them with doctor.
shooting: get emp launcher, draft a colonist and shoot another pawn or tamed animal with emp launcher. you can even train indoors.
each day a pawn can gain max 4000 xp, after that they gain less xp. don't overtrain.

[Yxklyx]

Originally posted by Rumar:

I wish we could build a boxing ring for this purpose. I suppose there is a mod for this but I would like it in base game.

Sounds like a great idea! I didn't see one in the workshop though. It could be based on that ideology prisoner fighting ritual.