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[SpiralDimentia]

Can dwarves have backup weapons? Would it do them any good? Lately I've been reading Gates of Fire, which is about the Spartan's battle at Thermopylae, and it's got me to thinking about a fortress. Small, mainly for fighting. The army would use spears and shields, of course. Armored. But the Spartans, along with their shield, have the Xiphos sword. I know DF doesn't have quite that particlar sword, but it does have swords. My question is, if I assign to the uniform both a spear AND a sword, would the dwarf use both? the first one? neither? I've never seen a dwarf get disarmed, but could it happen? would he then use his second weapon?

[Maklak]

I did some tests with crossbows and backup axes and almost all the time they used the first weapon in their {v}iew->{i}nventrory list. A backup weapon might do them some good if they loose a hold of their primary, but otherwise this doesn't work well. Some more info is in my signature. It is better to just equip more shields. Those seem to stack.

[Telgin]

It used to happen more often that weapons would get embedded in creatures, then the creature would die and the weapon would become forbidden.  I haven't seen this happen in .34.11, so maybe it was fixed.  When that happened, a backup weapon could be useful.

In the current version, a dwarf is only likely to lose a weapon if it gets wrestled out of his grip (I assume this is possible), or if he loses his entire arm.  In either case, he's probably toast and a second weapon won't do a ton of good.

If you're swimming in metal and don't have anything else to do with it, it can't really hurt though, aside from a small speed penalty from the additional weight.

[Sutremaine]

Dwarves assigned two weapons will hold them both of them (as visible in their inventory screen). As said, they will very rarely use the second weapon they take. There are two situations I can think of where secondary weapons may be useful even with this sharp limitation:

1. Crossbow + any melee weapon
Most of the time a dwarf will use the crossbow as their melee weapon, but occasionally they'll use the more useful secondary weapon. Generally speaking, any dwarf that can survive bringing a crossbow into melee can make kills with that crossbow, but something sharp may speed up the process.

2. Pick + a blunt weapon
Picks provide the edge, the blunt weapon provides a blunt attack that's better than a pommel strike or a blade slap.

But overall, it's probably not worth bothering with, even for complementary weapons. Getting dwarves to equip things in the right order and keep them in that order is a bit of a pain, and for a very minor benefit. It's pretty cool when a marksdwarf decides to stop messing about with the crossbow and lop somebody's head off though, and since the sword and spear are fairly similar weapons it doesn't matter too much in-game which one is used to attack.

[Maw]

I recall reading some testing on backup weapons, something along the lines of;

Xbow plus blunt weapon (2nd), they will never use the second blunt weapon;
Xbow plus sharp/edged weapon (2nd), they will switch to the melee weapon to use.

Sorry, I can't recall the references atm.