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[candylord]

Is there a big difference between exceptional and masterworked armor/weapons?
cause right now, courtesy of a legendary +5 armourer, all of my dwarves have at least exceptional armour, with about 40-50% masterwork
is it worth the effort upgrading the rest of my dwarves equipment to masterwork?
Same question with weapons, except, I only have a great weaponsmith (lvl 11 compared to 15+5)
so it would be a lot more tedious to get them all equipped in masterwork

[Olith McHuman]

I remember Toady saying that, in 40d, execptional quality was 1.8 times better than no quality and masterwork was 2 times better than no quality. Artifacts were 3 times better. I don't know how/if any of this has changed in .31.

[candylord]

only artifact weapons/armor that I have are a kobold bone axe (useless) and some iron greaves, which, as far as I can tell is about equal in quality to masterwork steel greaves...
although, to be honest, my military dwarves have yet to suffer a fatality...
must... invade... clowntopia...

[zwei]

If you have spare bars, sure, go for more masterwork armors, they are "nice to have"

It is simple if you just queue 30 of each part. Having magma forge helps and there is no reason not to keep armorsmith busy if you have spare bars and fuel taken care of.

Dwarves will simply replace their old expectionals with new masterworks, so it should be hassle free: adding jobs throught mamager and then just watching. Maybe melting exceptionals for bars.

Masterwork Weapons are "must have". I would suggest training weaponsmith to legendariness by producing huge amount of bolts from your least valuable metal and then queuing three times amout of weapons that you need for each type - statistically, you should have masterwork for each combatant.

[candylord]

right now all of my dwarves have as a minimum exceptional armour and weapons, and, yes I have been recycling my bars, everything thats below exceptional is ordered to be melted down and for my dwarves to try again
right now I'm training my weaponsmith by ordering him to spam steel axes, ammunition wouldn't be particularly helpful, considering my... distinct lack of marksdwarves
I'm turning on wood cutting for all my dwarves, so if it turns out right, I should have a fully armed, if not armoured citizenry =]
but yeah, I'm just slowly moving my standards up
that, and it eats up about 20 out of my current population of 85 dwarves (17 on furnace operating, and 3 on actual smithery)

[Hans Lemurson]

I get that "masterwork" is better than "exceptional" and that you might as well kit your dwarves out in nothing but the best stuff if you can, but how much difference does it actually make?  Using the obsolete metrics of "Masterwork is 2x and Exceptional is 1.8x" that still isn't quite enough of a difference to justify the wasted metal and time from melt/forge cycles to get nothing but the 'best'.

What does quality actually do in DF2010?

[zwei]

I get that "masterwork" is better than "exceptional" and that you might as well kit your dwarves out in nothing but the best stuff if you can, but how much difference does it actually make?  Using the obsolete metrics of "Masterwork is 2x and Exceptional is 1.8x" that still isn't quite enough of a difference to justify the wasted metal and time from melt/forge cycles to get nothing but the 'best'.

What does quality actually do in DF2010?

It really depends on what you mean by "wasted", but currently, bars are easy to come by and dwarven time is cheap (what else are they going to do - idle and let those expensive skills rust?).

It is not like there is other use for all that metal and workforce anyway unless you are set out to make steel megaconstruction.

[Psieye]

To my knowledge, this question has never been conclusively answered. The arena doesn't allow for quality to factor in and that's where we've been doing our detailed combat research. I don't know how we learnt of the system in 40d but we'd need some extremely rigorous research programme spanning several players to get an answer to this in DF2010 if Toady doesn't flat out tell us.