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[Captain Willy]

My fort has been getting bombarded by constant sieges and ambushes and I'm loosing dwarfs with combat skills and will soon have to employ recruits.

So I'm just wondering how far skill vs equipment goes.

Like a full iron recruit vs a copper veteran. Or even a copper legendary.

Thoughts and opinions?

[Telgin]

Skill goes a very long way.  If you've got a weapon that's good enough, skill is what you want to prioritize.  That is, get an iron, bronze, steel or adamantine cutting weapon or spear and you're pretty much set as far as that goes.  Definitely add a shield.  If you must get more weapons but don't have good edged materials, copper makes a good bludgeoning weapon material.

Armor is good for noobs, but they need veterans to keep enemies busy.  All of the armor in the world, even made of steel or adamantine, isn't going to save a complete noob if he's getting hit a lot.  A hit is going to get past it eventually, especially if it's a bolt or blunt weapon.  Do try to get iron, bronze, steel or adamantine.  Copper is terrible for armor, and bone or leather are worthless.

So what I'd do, is take what veterans you have and spread them among however many squads you have.  Give them the best weapons you can, and give your recruits the better armor.

[Loud Whispers]

Copper makes great warhammers. You can create a highly effective copper hammerlord army with naught but malachite. Though since tetrahedrite is usually abundant, most would opt for the deadlier silver (or if they're feeling Dorfy - steel) warhammer.

Like a full iron recruit vs a copper veteran. Or even a copper legendary.

Skills win over material, material keeps the user alive and lets them use their skills. Prioritize skill.

[0cu]

Consider DFHacks' Military-Training command to fix the training.

[MDFification]

They way I see it, equipment is a prerequisite for combat damage. You need the right tools to do the job. The skill part is how good you are at it.

But it's worth noting that dead dorfs can't fight. Dodging skill and armor skill are huge.

[mopstar]

The guy above saying leather is useless is quite wrong,the raw recruits with low armour skill will get weighted down a lot by heavy armour and be slow as hell.If you have limited metal to work with just make sure your dorfs have at least a metal helm and chainmail to protect their most vital parts.Leather will not compare to metal but any armour is better than no armour and your dwarves will be a lot more agile getting in more hits and actions in general.A leather cloak always has the off chance of softening a blow along with various other leather parts to help keep dorfs alive.

raw Recruits armed with crossbows are a far more effective force than raw recruits armed with melee,you may need a meat shield of animals though.

[Telgin]

Leather cloaks are an exception to the leather armor being pointless rule.  Cloaks and hoods are sort of abusive because of the way that armor works in DF.  Of course, considering the challenge that the game throws at you sometimes, it's an abusive use of leather that I'm quite okay with.  Enemies use them too anyway.

Other pieces of leather armor aren't going to stop anything from a goblin though.  It might actually stop the odd silver sword or axe blow, but any blunt weapon, or even copper edged weapons are going to mostly ignore it.

If you literally have nothing else to give a soldier and have lots of leather lying around it might be worth giving to them.  Otherwise I probably wouldn't bother.

[moki]

As far as I understand combat mechanics, a skilled soldier with basic equipment will be better than a green recruit with masterwork armor and weapons. A recruit will be hit quite often and some of those hits are going to do damage eventually, even with the best possible armor. A legendary dodger and shield user, on the other hand, will be able to avoid almost every attack and very basic armor will deflect most of the rest.
But: A recruit with decent armor and weapons can cut up a naked and unarmed champion. A soldier does need some kind of weapon to be useful, because unarmed soldiers will just punch (and bruise) an enemy eternally without ever doing serious damage. They can bring someone to the ground, but the probability of killing someone that way is almost zero. In a recent fort, I had 10 soldiers punching an unconscious giant for weeks. One good hit with an axe would have killed it, but they just turned his face into pulp and I had to wait for some caravan guards for the final blow.

Leather armor is useless because even copper weapons will ignore it almost all the time. Copper beats leather, bronze beats copper, iron beats bronze, steel beats iron and adamantine beats steel. Since no (unmodded) enemy has anything better than iron weapons, iron armor works well enough and steel or adamantine gives you near invincibility as long as you have a full set for everybody. If your soldiers have steel (or adamantine) cutting or stabbing weapons, enemy armor is ignored almost completely, but if a recruit isn't skilled enough to hit the enemy, even the best weapons won't help.


/tldr: I the hands of a veteran, any equipment can be deadly; Equipment without skill isn't very useful.

[Loud Whispers]

/tldr: I the hands of a veteran, any equipment can be deadly; Equipment without skill isn't very useful.

A simple iron helm will protect Dwarves against GCS - making them near invulnerable. Equipment is powerful, yet skill is capable of overcoming equipment.

[mordrax]

This is probably one area of DF that isn't that well balanced and can be abused with trial and error. A while back, I did some science on military training, pair sparring vs squad teaching. One of the outcomes of that was super soldiers that were able to single handedly (literally with only one arm because the other one was taken off in a earlier skirmish) take out whole ambushes, seige parties, FB in the open.

Looking into the combat reports, all i see is my Hammerlord deflecting and dodging missles until she was within range, and then complete pulverizes everything in sight with a iron war hammer. Whilst similar, less experienced squad members usu came out with serious injuries.

So basically, I now start with 3 pairs of recruits and start them sparring from year 1. By the 3rd yr, they are well on the way to being masters of their weapon not to mention massive attribute boosts. I only start producing armor after my other industries (food, furniture, cloth, bed rooms, noble offices, dye, leather etcs...) are automated.

[Mudcrab]

Consider DFHacks' Military-Training command to fix the training.

I've been looking for info on that.

Does it just simply speed up the rate for skill gain? If so I wouldn't want to use it.

Or does it actually increase the likelihood of dorfs training? Then I would use it That would be awesome!

[0cu]

I've had 4 squads of speardwarves training for at least 8 ingame years. The training was organised by 3 Spearmasters. They all were either skilled or competent with spears before I used DFHacks command. Now, after using the command for another 1.5 years, I have 30 Spearmasters.

it's your choice. Either way, native DFs combat exp is flawed and I think the DFhack command takes things a bit too far.

[Mudcrab]

So it just ups the skill gain massively?

I was hoping it made sparring more frequent.

[0cu]

Well it does. My dwarves are now sparring all the time.

I can't tell you the exact impact because my dwarves were very experienced before I used it. Besides, you'll have to start it up each time you play DF unless you write it down in the DFhack init.