So recently, I've found myself playing on an iron-less map, equipping my militia with largely bronze equipment. Of course I've also been importing iron and steel equipment to suppliment my bronze stuff, which has been a mixed bag... except for the morningstars the humans have been bringing. They pretty much just rock.
In the name of dwarven science, I pitted some macedwarves against each other in the arena; all adaquate combat skills, full iron armor, no shields. Out of 10 bouts, the morningstar-armed dwarf was victorious seven times. Looking at the combat logs, the morningstar seemed a lot better at inflicting injuries through armor, tearing muscles and bruising internal organs where the mace tended to just bruise.
I'm not familiar with the meaning of the values in the raws, but it looks like the morningstar's head moves faster, has a smaller contact area, and penetrates armor better. In other words, this is exactly how I should expect it to behave! I was worried at first that morningstars were too big for dwarves to wield but nope, they're quite a bit smaller than battle axes and maces.
In conclusion, it would seem that there is no reason to use maces at all if you have access to morningstars.
So now I'm wondering what else this would apply to, now that we have the ability to tell our dwarves to equip anything. A two-handed sword is apparently *just* too large for a dwarf to use, but dwarves are now of variable sizes ever since whatever update put the facial descriptions in. It has been theorised several times that a particularly large (or maybe just tall) dwarf could wield a two-handed sword, but I've never had this confirmed.
I await my next human caravan with great anticipation so that I might continue the cause of dwarven science, but in the meantime, has anyone else played around with exotic weapons? What works? What doesn't? Can dwarves use the previously unusable two-handed weapons now? If so, does the size of the dwarf affect this? And if they can, is the lack of a shield worth it? Of particular interest to me is the longsword. Dwarves can traditionally only use short swords, and used to be able to use longswords only with both hands. However, according to the raws, the longsword is smaller than a battle axe, which can be wielded one-handed! Is there anything stopping dwarves from using imported longswords? Could I possibly end this post with any more questions? Is
this a question?
All these questions and more I will endeavour to answer.... for science.