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[Eniteris]

I was under siege by a group of undead humans, and one of them was lounging about my entrance, so I took three expert hammerdwarves with silver hammers, steel shields and armor and sent them against a lone human maulman (with a shield).

All three of them died.

Is this supposed to happen?

I've been testing it around in the arena, and it appears that even a full legendary full steel dwarf will get killed by a no skill no item undead human (usually dying due to overexertion). I think it may be due to the combat failure to use weapons.

Anyone else have stories about overpowered undead?

[RealFear]

Hrm, yeah, DF2012 seems to have made it so that AI will resort to punching and kicking with way to high of a frequency, even with a weapon.
This makes it so that Undead have a huge advantage, as their strength is much higher then that of a normal person, so they can pulp limbs with a small amount of hits, even with armor (which also seems to stop working if it takes enough blunt damage).

Also, Undead don't seem to be affected by the new "snowball" effect that you can see in combat much more often. It seems that the more hits somebody takes, the slower they are to dish them out, but the undead kept swinging as they had their bodies mutilated until they started snapping bones with their last remaining limb.

[Jacob/Lee]

They are wise to fear the dead.

Anyway, since animated dead are pretty much unstoppable as of now (and our dwarves can't sneak), I'd go with applying cage traps or dwarven atom smashers to solve the problem. Weapon traps loaded with blunt weapons might work. How effective are crossbows against the animated dead? Build a smooth block wall a few z-levels high to keep them from climbing up and mass-produce some cheap bolts and crossbows, then draft everyone you possibly can, arm them, and send them to the top.

[Melting Sky]

Don't use blunt weapons on them for starters unless you are in a reanimating biome. In those rare instances when your dwarf actually uses their weapon you want it to do as much harm to the undead as possible.

I ran some tests in the arena and a dwarf that is fully decked out in either lowest quality full steel or full candy armor with grandmaster combat skills and a matching axe will take out an average of about 4 or 5 dwarf zombies before they get taken down. My tests were one on one. Each time the dwarf was victorious a fresh zombie was immediately sent in to fight them.

These dwarves had starting level attributes rather than the raised ones you see in real game veteran fighters and they had base quality gear rather than the high quality stuff real game smiths tend to churn out once they get going.

Undead are indeed much more powerful in this version and you should not send completely newbie recruits to face them in poor gear, but they are hardly invincible. I just repeatedly watched a single veteran dwarf kill a handful of zombies by themselves. I think once the problem with combatants failing to use their weapons as often as they should in combat is solved these odds will improve significantly.

My advice would be to always respect the undead as powerful enemies. Make sure your melee dwarves have proper ranged support when they engage and never send new recruits against them.

The new elite undead that show up in armor and with weapons are very dangerous foes as are any sort of giant undead animal. Even elite melee dwarves probably should not face these foes in open combat unless its absolutely necessary. You should treat giant undead animals almost the same way you would treat an inorganic forgotten beast that has no syndrome or other special attack.

[dwarf_reform]

I took a master axeman against a single undead and it parried my blows away with its copper pick, or dodged expertly away :| Felt more like I was fighting Puss n' Boots, or a ninja from Half-Life.. After successfully dodging most of its attacks (about 30-40 rounds of doing low-to-no damage to the undead, but not being hit myself) it finally punched me in the foot and blew it into meat-shreds, which made me pass out, and then it gently drove the copper pick through my skull :> Wish it had happened within the first ten rounds, instead of round 39

[Melting Sky]

I took a master axeman against a single undead and it parried my blows away with its copper pick, or dodged expertly away :| Felt more like I was fighting Puss n' Boots, or a ninja from Half-Life.. After successfully dodging most of its attacks (about 30-40 rounds of doing low-to-no damage to the undead, but not being hit myself) it finally punched me in the foot and blew it into meat-shreds, which made me pass out, and then it gently drove the copper pick through my skull :> Wish it had happened within the first ten rounds, instead of round 39

Those undead that show up armed with weapons and armor are really nasty. They are kind of like weapon master zombies.

[PotatoOverdose]

I've had some success against the undead using wrestlers, particularly if I embarked with proficient strikers. Since dwarves fight mostly with fists nowadays might as well have them train mostly without weapons. Skilled strikers will punch consistently and often, and higher striker skill seems to make the punches more deadly.

Marksdwarves also work ..... eventually. You'll need many, many bolts to kill even a single undead though. About a month's worth of uninterrupted shooting, give or take. This varies with the armor used by the undead of course.

I'm sure if you look at your combat logs, you'll see your hammer dwarves actually kicked and punched far, far more often than they used their hammers. And if their striker/kicking skill was too low, those punches probably didn't do all that much.