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[Idiom]

While this would be just fine for a videogame, in real life alloys often have VERY different properties from their components, and the only real way to know them for sure is experimentation.

[jaked122]

Any two metals don't necessarily make an alloy, and an alloy doesn't necessarily have a mixture of traits.  You mentioned hammers from lead;  one old practice was to make a hollow hammer out of a sturdy material and fill it with lead.  I had suggested this soon after hearing HFS metal would be too light in the next release to make effective hammers.  This same technique can be applied to making floodgates and other types of furniture that may need to be lightweight but sturdy.  In fact, simply plating a wooden floodgate in nickel would probably be lighter than making an alloy of aluminum and nickel and making a solid floodgate from that.

any two metals that do not differentiate as they cool form an alloy, although they typically often don't carry both metal's qualities.

[detinith]

I wouldn't think inventing your own alloys would be a bad idea if you were, say, an advanced metallurgist up-to-speed with current theory. Some metals just plain don't mix well, while there could be others we don't know yet. As for implementing it into gameplay, that might mean a whole engine based on metal qualities and combination effects (tin = soft, copper = soft, tin + copper = strong), and probably inventing new qualities just to make metallurgy have a point for things other than war materials.

But if we were to invent a whole new field of Dwarven Metallurgy, it'd be like saying "Dwarf rubies exist bountifully in Dwarf soil, and are still as valuable as real rubies."

does electro-plating count as making an alloy?

I don't think it does.

[Sensei]

I think that's called "Galvanization". It's not actually an alloy, just a means of coating one metal in another. If you've ever heard the term "Galvanite" (I know I have) it's not actually a real word, and would be a misnomer if it was.

[Mel_Vixen]

Galvanisation is iirc the the electric metal-coating of another material.

[eerr]

Galvanisation probabbly doesn't count because you use the structure of one metal, and the surface properties of diffrent metal. The mixing is kept to a minimum.

An alloy mixes to create new, or blended, structure or surface properties.