The armour/weapon situation is from my experience quite sound if a little too discriminating - small differences in equipment tend to make combat between otherwise equal sides rather one-sided.
Blunt weapons have the disadvantage of killing less quickly against inadequately armoured opponents, but they consistently score telling hits through armour. Toughness, stiffness and density all matter in the material, with density taking over against heavy armour. So silver war hammers will be the weapons your steel-clad military fears most but they will kill your civilians more slowly than just about anything else.
Even when made of copper, swords and axes outperform blunt weapons against naked flesh. Bronze and steel blades will also cut through copper well enough to make them preferable to blunt weapons.
Against iron, things become more complicated. Steel axes may still deliver a kill more quickly than silver hammers but aren't necessarily superior. Hammerdwarves may take a while to kill, but most of this time was spent pounding away at an unconscious and already dying opponent.
So if blunt weapons appear the way to go, this doesn't imply faulty mechanics. It's a consequence from being worried mostly about armoured foes, and because you can make effective blunt weapons out of anything while you really want steel or at least bronze for blades. If the majority of our opponents wore leather and metal armour was restricted to a small elite, we'd see complaints that blunt weapons are too weak.
Whips and scourges appear to be incredibly overrated and actually rather poor weapons. Axes of the same material take off limbs far better than scourges. Whips are slightly unintuitive: as far as the game is concerned they are tiny hammers moving very fast. Because they still count as blunt weapons, they are more effective than sharp weapons against (good) armour which feels rather off... but compared to other blunt weapons they do not compare well at all.
The main distinction of both comes from not killing quickly. The gruesome sights of mangled dwarves passed out from the pain does not imply that these weapons are strong, rather the opposite - they would have died if the goblins had wielded other weapons.
Picks have a small-ish contact area and a higher velocity multiplier than other sharp weapons, this makes them punch through armour reasonably well. While they won't dismember unprotected opponents as well as axes and won't punch through steel or clownite as well as blunt weapons, they seem to be excellent general purpose weapons at the moment.
Spears don't impress me much against humanoids. They may be somewhat useful against large beasts, but superficial weapons can disable most of them well enough via pain and blood loss; nasties immune to those also tend to not have vitals to perforate through layers of blubber. I haven't done very extensive testing with spears and non-whip imported weapons yet though - it's on my to-do list.
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Topic: Is it EVER worth it to train military? (Read 1759 times)