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[Melting Sky]

Yeah, I think he has been gaining an incredible amount of experience from all the victories even though he started at the same level initially. I just ran him through a set of ten fights where he was up against 5 expert axe dwarves on the same team at the same time. He slaughtered them all every time.

I decided I would see if a 20 on 1 fight might finally down the copper morningstar god and low and behold he finally fell after killing about half of them. I'm going to start doing some more testing. This time I will put up a new morning star dwarf against axe dwarfs in full candy and see how it goes. I think the copper morning star will still win but it won't be nearly as crushingly one sided.

[Melting Sky]

I decided to run dwarfs in full candy armor, with shield and candy axes vs naked dwarfs with candy shields and copper morning stars. Each side had expert level skill in their chosen weapons and no other skills. I gave the morning star wielders a candy shield but no armor. Shields play a special roll in combat and get used as weapons sometimes so I wanted to make sure both sides were equal in that regard.

This turned out to be a much more even fight. I'm not sure which side had the advantage in the 1 on 1 fights as the results went back and forth a bit. It seems to come down to who gets in the first hit. Since its a real pain to have to keep changing the equipment load out for each combatant every new fight I'm going go a different route and run a 10 on 10 fight a couple of times and see how it goes.

I've finished running the ten vs ten battle twice now and unfortunately it still remains unclear which side has the advantage. The full candy armor battle axe users won the first round with 4 survivors. I reset the game. Set things up the exact same way and the naked copper morning star dwarves won the second round with 7 survivors.

It's getting very late so I need to call it a night but maybe I will return and do some proper testing at some point to build a decently large sample size of results and get some proper statistics on this.

What is painfully obvious even with this limiting testing is that "trash" metal morning stars are formidable weapons that utterly rip through even the best armor like it was tissue paper. They are so effective that a single expert mace dwarf in full steel with a copper morningstar was able to take out over 100 expert axe dwarfs in the same armor. The first 50 were one on one fights and the last 50 were destroyed in 5 vs 1 battles and he only finally fell in a 20 vs 1 fight. It should be noted that assuming creatures gain experience in arena mode, the morning star god was likely very skilled by the time he was facing those later 5 on 1 fights. The fact that naked dwarves with a copper morningstar can stand their own against dwarves geared in full candy with candy battle axes also attests to just how nasty foreign weapons can be. Do not under estimate them.

[Duuvian]

Not dwarf mode I know, but I've had excellent success before as a peasant adventurer using morning stars.

I take a blunt mace and hunt crabs with it to increase skill. Then I switch to the morning star after I feel like going after dangerous things.

[EvilBob22]

This is interesting, I'll have to see if I have enough morning stars to "upgrade" my mace dwarves.

[StupidElves]

I make sure that I always have a squad equipped with naught but halberds.

EDIT: I just remembered that dwarves can't equip halberds. That might explain why the squads that use them always die.

[Splint]

I make sure that I always have a squad equipped with naught but halberds.

EDIT: I just remembered that dwarves can't equip halberds. That might explain why the squads that use them always die.

Until the bug with that is fixed it's best to make them smaller or dorfs slightly larger (about the size of a goblin should do, since they can wield them, same for pikes.)

[Melting Sky]

I did a couple more runs of 10 vs 10 battles just like last night. The naked dwarves with morningstars won both times against the full candy battle axe users, once with 7 survivors and once with 2 survivors. Unfortunately, I will have do some modding if I want to do weapon quality testing since vanilla arena mode does not allow for it. My guess is that weapon quality is where dwarven weapons will come into their own since most foreign weapons tend to not only be of low quality metal but also plain old low quality. I am very interested in seeing how masterwork steel and candy weapons fair against low quality foreign weapons. Anyway, one thing these tests do seem to indicate is that regardless of weapon material morning stars are very dangerous and if you find one of decent quality you should really hold onto it unless the thought of using the crafts of filthy undwarven craftsman is just too much to bear.

My experience with other foreign weapons suggests that many of them are very dangerous. It's not just the morningstars although I think they certainly rank amongst the most devastating options along with whips. The wounds the morningstars cause are just so nasty. While reading the though the reports a typical blow tended to include fractering or shattering the bone on top of several of the following: severing tendons, nerves, ligaments and opening arteries.

I'm interested in seeing how whips vs morningstars turns out next. Whips are almost universally believed to be OP by most df players. I want to see if they are really top dog.

[Splint]

That one will likely be a toss-up, between blunt vs pierce. I wanna say the morningstars might fare slightly better though because of the injuries they inflict while whips tend to be more focused on bone breaking on its own (which seems to be how they do the bulk of their damage before the kill shot in my experiences.)

[Melting Sky]

The real world beckons so I have only gotten two tests done with morning stars vs whips. This set up was 10 vs 10. Both sides with expert skill level in their respective weapons. Both sides decked out in one layer of full steel armor. Weapons were copper. Both battles the morning stars won. First with 5 survivors then with 8.

Both the whips and morning stars cut through armor very effectively. The morning stars seemed to come out on top simply due to the severity of the injuries they created.

Edit: I've run this battle another two times. The morningstar users won each time. The first battle resulted in 7 survivors. The second battle resulted in 3 survivors.

It appears that morningstars are superior to whips when it comes to heavily armored dwarf sized opponents. With a change in materials the results might change a little since morningstars have one edged attack and one blunt and whips are all blunt attack. I figured copper was a decent compromise metal. If both weapons were silver it might help the whip a bit. If both were iron, bronze or steel I think it would benefit the morningstar.

[EvilBob22]

EDIT: I just remembered that dwarves can't equip halberds. That might explain why the squads that use them always die.

LOL, I'm totally putting this in my sig line!

[doublestrafe]

I've always thought it was rather odd that dwarves, the masters of metal, should be unable to create whatever weapons and armor they wanted. Given that, if one were theoretically to add foreign weapons to the dwarven entry in the entity file, would one also have to create an entirely new workshop in order to be able to make them? Because adding them to the entity theoretically doesn't make them appear as options at the forge.

[Splint]

They'll show up in the forge if they have it in the entity, but some weapons are way more expensive than others and may not appear on embark if you save weapons for last if you bring premades, and some would still need to be modded (or the dorfs be modded,) so that they can be wielded. 'Course it has to be before worldgen if I'm not mistaken.

[doublestrafe]

They'll show up in the forge if they have it in the entity,

This is not in fact the case. I added them to the entity file, genned a world, checked that the entries in the entity file existed in the world's save folder, embarked, built a forge, and they're not there.

[Splint]

They'll show up in the forge if they have it in the entity,

This is not in fact the case. I added them to the entity file, genned a world, checked that the entries in the entity file existed in the world's save folder, embarked, built a forge, and they're not there.

That's... Very unusual. They may have needed the COMMON, UNCOMMON, FORCED, etc. I never claimed to be an expert, but all the times I've added weapons they worked fine.

[doublestrafe]

They'll show up in the forge if they have it in the entity,

This is not in fact the case. I added them to the entity file, genned a world, checked that the entries in the entity file existed in the world's save folder, embarked, built a forge, and they're not there.

That's... Very unusual. They may have needed the COMMON, UNCOMMON, FORCED, etc. I never claimed to be an expert, but all the times I've added weapons they worked fine.

OK, nuked my entire install, tried again from scratch, and this time it worked. I must have done something wrong. Thanks!