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[Methadone]

To echo a few others above me, I dislike foreign weapons for their low quality. If it's a metal I need, it gets melted. If it's one I have plenty of, it gets stuffed in a weapon trap. While some of the foreign weapons are better/situationaly more useful than the standard ones, I find it much easier to manage without using them.

[Linkxsc]

Often early on I use whatever i can get. I kinda LOL at everyone who whines of foreign weapons "poor quality" usually the only problem i find is you can't get steel longswords (although in some rare cases, human caravans will have steel). In the case of things like Morning stars, you can get silver ones all the time, And I've gotten more than just a few masterwork silver scourges off of sieges (srsly, they tear stuff up, 1 goblin took down 3 of my middling recruits with steel armor, with just a silver scourge).
Early on, if i don't have full access to steel and i see some nice iron or bronze swords or other weapons in a caravan, they're mine. Hell I've been so metal deprived before that I've used elven wood armor (it was a single pick challenge yeah, that stuff sucks, but its not so bad at keeping your dorfs alive when getting repeatedly attacked by undead wolves/geese).

Masterwork weapons are for the older forts that have the time to dick around with that crap, usually theres more important business to attend to, than making sure everyone has awesome gear.

[BlackFlyme]

It's well known that whips and scourges are OP, regardless of material or quality. But masterworked items have a x2 bonus to hit/deflect blows, which can help out lower-skilled recruits who could really use that bonus. A highly skilled weapons user will not need to rely as much on quality.

You could argue that armour needs quality more than weapons, since the armour user skill doesn't actually have any effect on how well protected you are, only how fast you can move in it.

I don't see how it's a late fort thing either, as I can get a great smith within the first few years. All you need to do is bring some ores along on embark and set your smith to make things with a high melt-return rate.

Also, why would you use silver morningstars? Silver is terrible for edged weapons.

[fragfish]

I recently started autodump destroying all goblinite for two reasons: FPS improvement, and it makes trade boring (no reason to produce stuff when thousands of dwarfbucks in clothing are delivered continuously together with happy "took joy in slaughter" thoughts). So that source of foreign weapons is gone.

In my current fort, military is very important and strict, and even ranged weapons are banned for any semi-serious military personnel (shooting things is for elves and craftsmen). So I won't use any non-dwarven weapons simply for roleplaying reasons.

In the future, I think I'll try them a bit, but I'm also put off by their low quality, often bad materials and this bug I read about (you can't actually equip the larger ones?).

[EvilBob22]

I don't see how it's a late fort thing either, as I can get a great smith within the first few years. All you need to do is bring some ores along on embark and set your smith to make things with a high melt-return rate.

Yeah, but that is definitely exploity, and in my mind past the tolerable exploitiness threshold.  (Unless you are talking about .8 or .9 bar return when you say "high melt-return rate".  And if you are, that isn't all that easy.)

[Linkxsc]

It's well known that whips and scourges are OP, regardless of material or quality. But masterworked items have a x2 bonus to hit/deflect blows, which can help out lower-skilled recruits who could really use that bonus. A highly skilled weapons user will not need to rely as much on quality.

You could argue that armour needs quality more than weapons, since the armour user skill doesn't actually have any effect on how well protected you are, only how fast you can move in it.

I don't see how it's a late fort thing either, as I can get a great smith within the first few years. All you need to do is bring some ores along on embark and set your smith to make things with a high melt-return rate.

Also, why would you use silver morningstars? Silver is terrible for edged weapons.

I consider late fort anywhere past year 3. Most of the time with the exception of megabeasts. I never have any trouble surviving. Exception to single pick forts and ones with lots of undead around.

Qnd my mistake. Silver flails are pretty boss sometimes. Not morningstars. Sorry i get caught up 8n the naming sometimes.

[Orange Wizard]

I don't see how it's a late fort thing either, as I can get a great smith within the first few years. All you need to do is bring some ores along on embark and set your smith to make things with a high melt-return rate.

Yeah, but that is definitely exploity, and in my mind past the tolerable exploitiness threshold.  (Unless you are talking about .8 or .9 bar return when you say "high melt-return rate".  And if you are, that isn't all that easy.)

Some things have a 120% return rate, or thereabouts, like helmets. It is kind of exploity, but you can at least justify it by saying "the metal doesn't go anywhere, we're just reshaping it".

[Melting Sky]

Qnd my mistake. Silver flails are pretty boss sometimes. Not morningstars. Sorry i get caught up 8n the naming sometimes.

Silver morningstars are also very devastating weapons. Never under estimate foreign weapons based upon material and quality. Try arming a bunch of dwarves in full steel armor in two teams in the arena. One team with cruddy foreign weapons made of copper, silver and iron such as morningstars and whips and another with your favorite dwarven weapon made of steel and watch what happens. It will be a complete slaughter. Many foreign "trash" weapons often even beat candy dwarven edged weapons in match ups like this. Foriegn weapons that are particularly nasty include whips and morningstars since they are deadly through armor even when made of common low grade metals like silver and copper. Iron daggers and iron long swords are also very nasty.

[Splint]

The morningstars have a fairly small contact area if memory serves, which negates their often crap materials a good bit. Iron ones scare the crap out of me. Them and spears cause more permanent injuries than any other weapons in my forts.

[Melting Sky]

The morningstars have a fairly small contact area if memory serves, which negates their often crap materials a good bit. Iron ones scare the crap out of me. Them and spears cause more permanent injuries than any other weapons in my forts.

They also have the highest velocity modifier for an edged weapon. I think they can do both edged and blunt damage but due to the other modifiers such as the small contact area and velocity multiplier they just go strait through armor regardless of what the morning star is made of.

[Splint]

Actually they're just edge (due to being spiked,) you may be thinking of how armor often converts such damage to blunt which when put to such a small contact area can lead to even a silver one snapping bones.

[Melting Sky]

Actually they're just edge (due to being spiked,) you may be thinking of how armor often converts such damage to blunt which when put to such a small contact area can lead to even a silver one snapping bones.

You might be right on that. I thought they had a blunt pommel strike attack option as well as the edged bash attack but I might be mistaken.

[Splint]

Actually they're just edge (due to being spiked,) you may be thinking of how armor often converts such damage to blunt which when put to such a small contact area can lead to even a silver one snapping bones.

You might be right on that. I thought they had a pommel strike attack option as well as the edged bash attack but I might be mistaken.

Well most weapons seem to come with a pommel strike as standard, and those aren't exactly the most effective attacks against anything except a skull most of the time unless the thing attacking has some serious strength backing it, like say, an adult minotaur for example.

[Melting Sky]

Just for fun I decided to run some arena fights just now. Here is the scenario. I created one dwarf clad in a single layer full steel armor set and gave them a copper morningstar. They had skill in only one thing which was expert level maceman. I then created another dwarf with the same exact armor set and gave them a steel battle axe and expert level axeman.

I knew the copper morningstar dwarf would destroy the steel battle axe dwarf so what I wanted to test was just how many newly spawned expert axe dwarfs in full steel he could kill before finally falling. After the first twenty or thirty axe dwarfs went down I realized I had to put some sort of time limit on it. I decided I would keep spawning new opponents until the copper morninstar dwarf either fell or he killed 50 axe dwarves of the same skill level and armor. He killed all 50. I didn't go through the details of every single report to check, but I never even saw him take an injury.

The arena doesn't heal the victor between battles. He killed all 50 in a row without a break or any sort of healing. That is just crazy. I still have dwarf fortress open in a window so now I am going to start spawning 5 axe dwarves at a time on the same team to see if they can kill him.

[Splint]

He may well have an edge in that each opponent only has that base skill while he has some experience built up from each opponent and probably some armor user from awkward strikes hitting him but it does show the effectiveness of even a standard level piercing weapon.