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[Nilik]

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. 

[Anathema]

Testing has been done (it's outdated now though, might be worth redoing) that silver war hammers are the best dwarven-made weapon against fully armored dwarves, better than maces, so war hammers are the weapon you should be comparing morningstars to.

Either way, I can't see using human weapons - material trumps weapon type (not to mention quality), I'd take a masterpiece steel shortsword over a bronze longsword (or bronze/iron anything, really). Just melt down anything made of iron or steel you can get in trade, and make your own superior steel weapons.

It's also my experience (based on adventure mode) that shields are so good using one feels like cheating; there may be an advantage to two hand weapons, but it's not nearly as noticeable as the survivability you get from a shield.

[BurnedToast]

Weapon size does not actually matter. There are seperate entries in the raws that determine the required size. For example, longsword has:

[TWO_HANDED:57500]
[MINIMUM_SIZE:52500]

Which means a creature must be bigger then 52500 to use it at all, and bigger then 57500 to use it one-handed. Actual size of the weapon does not factor in to that at all (except that bigger might = weighs more which might slow the creature down). Note that dwarves average size is 60000 so most should be able to use longswords one-handed (I've never tried).

As for morningstars and silver hammers and all that, they are useless unmodded. Yes they punch through armor better, however cutting weapons largely ignore lower tier metal and dwarves are the only unmodded race that can use steel/adamantine which are the two highest tier metals. So Axes, Swords, and Spears (in that order) are the way to go for pure effectiveness in vanilla DF.

Still, if you insist on blunt, you should check out (metal) whips. The physics is kind of wonky right now so they are incredibly effective.

[Alastar]

Maces and morningstars are totally different mechanically - maces are blunt weapons with a relatively large contact area, morningstars are edged weapons with a small contact area (no blunt hits, the game treats the rest of the weapon as a means to put some force behind the spikes).

For an edged weapon, morningstars have a very small contact area and unusually high velocity. Backed up by a decent weight, this makes them very good at penetrating armour - and they're still more lethal than blunt weapons. On the other hand, small pricks with very modest penetration depth means the hits aren't particularly lethal by the standards of edged weapons and particularly lacking against large beasts: They won't cause heavy bleeding, and they won't penetrate to the vitals.
Very good at what they do, the question is whether you need dedicated can openers. Spears will do against equal-material armour and few opponents wear full armour anyway (while large blades are very bad at defeating body armour, they are very good at severing exposed limbs).

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There are two other weapons that stand out in terms of raw power... even more so than morningstars:

Picks are the other decent-sized edged weapons benefiting from high velocity. With a middle-of-the-road contact area and far better penetration depth than morningstars, they are in my opinion the finest general purpose weapons in the game. Coonsidering the raw force behind the blows, contact area is generally small enough to dig through goblin-level armour and large enough to take off goblin-sized limbs. Against beasts, they're quite capable of penetrating to the vitals. Against things that don't have vitals like bronze colossi, they're still good - picks were meant to dig through something tough.

Whips have a tiny contact area and tremendous velocity, the game mistakenly puts the whole weight behind the blow although most of it is slack. Roughly 1kg of metal hitting point-on at supersonic speeds is a 40mm AP round, not a whip strike. Still doesn't kill unarmoured opponents as quickly as edged weapons (apparently the game mechanics just give up for this kind of force) but practically ignores armour.

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Daggers can't keep up in raw power but turn out to be good anti-humanoid weapons in practice. While larger blades will do the job better, any slash will kill unarmoured civilians more quickly than stabs or blunt trauma. More interestingly, daggers also have a very fine point that allow their stabs to defeat armour without the raw force of morningstars, and they penetrate twice as deep. Daggers mostly succeed at hedging their bets where swords remain biased towards good performance aginst squishy things.