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[Vester]

That's probably because right now Iron Armor > Iron Weapon. Ideally the hammer still wouldn't penetrate the chain, but it should cause a lot of blunt trauma damage. The solution, of course, is to bring a bigger hammer.

[dogstile]

That is probably the reason.

Time to mod in a material named "Weight" and crush a couple of faces I guess

[Rollory]

Honestly, I read about problems like that with the combat, and I just go back to 40d.

It isn't that it's buggy.  It's that the fundamental system just plain does not work.  "Buggy" would mean it gives wrong results in SOME cases.  It is giving crazy results in nearly ALL cases.  This either/or business regarding one material totally trumping the other just should not ever happen, but it is the ONLY thing that happens.  The "bug" in this case is the whole entire system.

The more I see of it - and this is based purely on observed behavior and the sort of gut feelings one develops after a ten-year career of being paid good money to find bugs in software - the more I think it is not POSSIBLE to "fix" this so it gives sensible results.  He would have to rewrite major parts of it from scratch. 

If I had to guess, I would predict several months of futzing with it and trying to tweak it with increasingly systematic hacks layered on top of the orignal system, to the point eventually of obscuring the very system that was supposed to make things simpler and more useful - and without ever addressing the fundamental causes, so that whenever a case is encountered that isn't covered by the hacks, it breaks down entirely again.

I hope not.  But I've seen software projects entering death spirals before.

[Shurhaian]

Blunt weapons especially are problematic, often being turned aside by cloth when it has no business doing so.

I think the general weakness of blunt force is a known issue that is not intended to remain that way.

[Interus]

The point of an "Alpha" is to not just find bugs, but find those eliminates which detract detrimentally from game play and enjoyment.

Eliminate means to remove.  I'm pretty sure you meant elements.  You used it twice, so I'm sure you had a good idea of what you were trying to say, but using the wrong word like that annoys me.  Also, you don't need to say it detracts detrimentally because it's pretty much impossible for something to detract from gameplay in a non-detrimental manner.  I don't mean to be insulting, but that sentence really bugged me.

Now then... I should probably actually be on topic instead of just posting my dissatisfaction with a particular post.  I think what bugs me most right now is probably the UI, although some of the changes from DF40d are definitely nicer once I got used to them.  I'm still having issues with remembering which jobs are under which headings, but that's something I have to work on myself, and I really like that system right now.  I think some of the keybindings for buildings might need to be different, but I haven't looked at what exactly should be changed and what letters I would suggest instead.

One minor detail that bugs me is that each tile is like 1.5X1(I'm sure that's an exaggeration), so that hallways 3 tiles thick look so much wider along the X-axis than the Y-axis, and a lot shorter too.  I doubt that can be fixed while the game still uses ascii.  I just hope that if it ever leaves alpha(which I'm guessing ends when that huge devlist goes completely green), then at least one of the steps in beta is to move to at least sprites instead.

[Lord Shonus]

Honestly, I read about problems like that with the combat, and I just go back to 40d.

It isn't that it's buggy.  It's that the fundamental system just plain does not work.  "Buggy" would mean it gives wrong results in SOME cases.  It is giving crazy results in nearly ALL cases.  This either/or business regarding one material totally trumping the other just should not ever happen, but it is the ONLY thing that happens.  The "bug" in this case is the whole entire system.

The more I see of it - and this is based purely on observed behavior and the sort of gut feelings one develops after a ten-year career of being paid good money to find bugs in software - the more I think it is not POSSIBLE to "fix" this so it gives sensible results.  He would have to rewrite major parts of it from scratch. 

If I had to guess, I would predict several months of futzing with it and trying to tweak it with increasingly systematic hacks layered on top of the orignal system, to the point eventually of obscuring the very system that was supposed to make things simpler and more useful - and without ever addressing the fundamental causes, so that whenever a case is encountered that isn't covered by the hacks, it breaks down entirely again.

I hope not.  But I've seen software projects entering death spirals before.

Actually, the primary problem is that he used placeholder values for a lot of things, so a lot of materials have the same value for properties which should differ.

[Shurhaian]

One minor detail that bugs me is that each tile is like 1.5X1(I'm sure that's an exaggeration), so that hallways 3 tiles thick look so much wider along the X-axis than the Y-axis, and a lot shorter too.  I doubt that can be fixed while the game still uses ascii.  I just hope that if it ever leaves alpha(which I'm guessing ends when that huge devlist goes completely green), then at least one of the steps in beta is to move to at least sprites instead.

You need to use a different tileset, is all. Strictly speaking, the game is rendered graphically using a collection of sprites(all in one image) that just happen to resemble ASCII characters(and it uses these same images for its text rendering).

Look here: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Tileset_repository

Find one of the square tilesets which suits your fancy, put it in your DF \data\art subdirectory, and fiddle with init.txt to use it. IIRC the DF window is minimum 80x25 tiles, which makes the minimum dimension for a 12x12 tileset 960x300.

Make sure, for 0.31, that you download a BMP! The PNG will work once the OpenGL/SDL merge(40d##) is in, presumably, but the core game needs bitmaps.