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[Dearnen]

My current soldiers have a layer of leather armor under the chain mail and breastplate and it seems to be working fine.  The melee troops are extremely slow to train their weapon skills, but I'm having no issues with armor.

[intently]

Since we're on the topic of armor in this thread I thought I'd as an armor related question.

How do bone and wooden bolts work in this new armor system?  Since the weapon needs to be one metal tier higher than the armor its hitting to penetrate does this mean wooden/bone arrows are all but useless for anything but hunting or do they still have a use for shooting at goblins with?

  My dwarves are all in steel and I just had several slaughtered by ambushing goblins in bronze, copper, iron, and silver garbage.

[dennislp3]

yeah well you have to remember that armor doesn't make you invincible....just cause a weapon doesn't pierce does not mean it can not cause damage and just because it is inferior does not mean there skill does not factor in as well.

[Shinziril]

Warhammers, maces, and other blunt weapons can now penetrate past armor (even armor of material stronger than the weapon).  A test squad combat of 10 each with steel-armored dwarfs, one side with steel battleaxes, the other with silver hammers, resulted in a near-flawless victory for the hammerdwarfs (the only casualty was a lucky throat-shot by an axedwarf - dwarfs need to invent gorgets).  The battleaxes could not really penetrate the armor at all, thus the easy victory for the hammerdwarfs.

Adamantine battleaxes versus silver hammers (both in full steel armor), on the other hand, resulted in a victory for the axedwarfs with heavy casualties (4 survivors, 3 heavily battered and broken).

[intently]

So does this indicate I should be training hammerdwarves rather than axedwarves? 

[dennislp3]

I believe slight mix is still best....hammerdwarves can get stuck on 1 enemy to long simply beating it to death....they should be used to immobilize then an axe/spear/sword dwarf could finish (hopefully)

[NW_Kohaku]

So does this indicate I should be training hammerdwarves rather than axedwarves?

Axedwarves can actually slap enemies with the flat of their blades as a bludgeoning attack, so they tend to be the most versitile weapons, and swords tend to fall into this category, too.  Still, hammerdwarves are better at attacking skeletal, armored, or organless targets, while spears and crossbows do best at killing things that are squishy and bleed, even things like dragons. 

Adamantine spears in the hands of well-trained dwarves will cut through armor like a hot knife through butter, but that only really works well if there are organs it can inflict bleeding on - it's not going to kill inorganic material creatures like an iron man or bronze collossus.

If you have to pick just one weapon, an axe is an OK choice, but a mixed group of weapon types can produce better results.

[intently]

So... do you make a selection and let dwarves pick their own weapons?  Or assign a mixture to each squad?  (Sorry to get off-topic.)

[CinnibarMan]

I usually only recruit dwarfs who have skill in some sort of weapon beforehand anyways. If I'm lucky I get a nice mix. If not well, FUN times when I get some creature that all my dwarfs are incapable of harming.

[NW_Kohaku]

Dwarves learn better by being instructed by a dwarf with high skill (and some teacher skill) than they do by drilling on their own.

For "Basic Training", you'll want to put everyone in a squad on one weapon, preferably with a dwarf who is experienced in that weapon.

Once you have some dwarves experienced enough that you can feel comfortable sending them out to handle real threats, mix the squads back up so that skilled hammerdwarves are in squads with skilled axedwarves and speardwarves.  They'll possibly still do demonstrations to each other to give them some experience in other weapons while training, which is a bit of a waste, but hopefully, they'll just go to sparring, which is generally safer in this version of the game, especially if they have actual armor.

[Felcis]

Adamantine spears in the hands of well-trained dwarves will cut through armor like a hot knife through butter, but that only really works well if there are organs it can inflict bleeding on - it's not going to kill inorganic material creatures like an iron man or bronze collossus.

Well, even piercing weapons CAN dismember limbs and such with a good strike, it is just MUCH less common than with Axes/Swords. I for example had the hand of one of my marksdwarfs shot of by an goblin elite bowman, through a forification no less. And testing in the arena with one bronze collossus vs 10 adamantium spearmen resultet in the collossus being slowly poked to death until his limbs finally fell of. But yeah...you should not rely on that and train a mixed army.

Back to armor:
Does anyone know for certain if armor, that is not able to stop stronger weapons, is at least able to weaken the force of the blow? So for example when a leather/copper armor gets penetrated by an iron bolt, but at least weakens the force enough for the bolt to only bruise the upper body fat and instead of tearing apart the heart.
I usually assign mixed metal/leather-uniforms (metal mailshirt and helm, rest leather) to my marksdwarfes and early military-units (before the metal-industry is working effectively) and also additional leather hoods/cloaks to every soldier, but I am not entirely sure if the leather armor/clothing is even doing anything useful, as it always gets penetrated anyway (even by bone bolts and teeth). Testing in arena (unarmored vs full leather with same skills/weapons; I tested with unarmed and copper/wooden swords/maces) only revealed a slight advantage of leather armor (and that could just as well be luck). Toady once stated that leather is supposed to be more effective against blunt attacks, but that does not seem to be the case so far.

I also hope that some day certain rare leathertypes will make better armor than your average lifestock-leather. Crocodile-/Dragonleather or GCS-Chitin should really offer more protection than Deer-leather, imo.

[o_O[WTFace]]

Some of the goals behind the new armor system is that armor should absorb some of the energy of an attack even if the weapon penetrates it and that muscle and bone and stuff should work in a similar way.  Its not entirely clear whether or not it actually does work like that, but it does seem like having metal armor of any sort means more bruises and cuts and far less limb severs and instant death strikes.  Keep in mind that bone and fat and muscle have pretty sorry material properties though.  It doesn't take much leftover energy to mess up whatever is under the armor. 

[terminal]

Since we're on the topic of armor in this thread I thought I'd as an armor related question.

How do bone and wooden bolts work in this new armor system?  Since the weapon needs to be one metal tier higher than the armor its hitting to penetrate does this mean wooden/bone arrows are all but useless for anything but hunting or do they still have a use for shooting at goblins with?

It can punch through their armor with a lucky shot, and it can still hit them in the face.

[NW_Kohaku]

The way that penetration seems to work is that everything has a "thickness" level, plus resistance to being pierced.  I'm not sure on this, but I think it works by having a "Piercing Power" number where it first hits the outer layer, which subtracts its resistance to damage times the thickness from the piercing power.  If this reduces the piercing power to 0, the weapon is stopped.  If not, the remaining total of piercing power gets applied to the next layer down, all the way through armor first, then skin, then fat, then muscle, then organs and/or bone.

Therefore, even having wet tissue paper between you and an iron bolt is going to reduce the amount of penetrating power when it hits your body, it's just that it's probably not going to be enough to really notice the difference.

[GuudeSpelur]

Since we're on the topic of armor in this thread I thought I'd as an armor related question.

How do bone and wooden bolts work in this new armor system?  Since the weapon needs to be one metal tier higher than the armor its hitting to penetrate does this mean wooden/bone arrows are all but useless for anything but hunting or do they still have a use for shooting at goblins with?

I believe someone tested this, and it went something like this:

Wood bolts are deflected by cloth.  Only use them to train.
Bone bolts could penetrate leather well, copper okay and iron rarely.
Silver bolts were slightly better than bone.
Iron bolts went straight through leather and copper, pierced iron frequently, and occasionally pierced bronze.
Bronze bolts went straight through leather, copper and iron, frequently through bronze, and occasionally through steel.
Steel bolts went through everything below it and frequently steel.
Only Adamantine bolts could pierce adamantine.

All could still get lucky face shots (and if there are a lot of enemy archers, you will lose a dwarf or three to this eventually), arm shots if you didn't have mail shirts, hand shots if no gloves, calf shots if low boots, etc.

DISCLAIMER: I may be totally wrong with this, as I can't find the thread so this is just off of memory, and would appreciate if someone went and tested it again since I don't have enough time.