Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Devin]

Long-time player here.  Something I've never really heard anything about is what melee weapons might be the most effective to pick for your dwarves in fortress mode or adventurer mode.  (Obviously there's not much choice when it comes to ranged weapons.)

Is there any dwarven !!SCIENCE!! on the topic?

[StagnantSoul]

The best weapon to pick, is, THE PICK!!!  For piercing. Slashing= axe. Piercing= pick. Blunt= war hammer. Ranged= crossbow.

[smjjames]

Axes are hacking weapons though, not slashing.

[StagnantSoul]

Hacks and slashes function the same, same results. But better.

[Harken]

Long-time player here.  Something I've never really heard anything about is what melee weapons might be the most effective to pick for your dwarves in fortress mode or adventurer mode.  (Obviously there's not much choice when it comes to ranged weapons.)

Is there any dwarven !!SCIENCE!! on the topic?

Cats.

[Tacomagic]

Long-time player here.  Something I've never really heard anything about is what melee weapons might be the most effective to pick for your dwarves in fortress mode or adventurer mode.  (Obviously there's not much choice when it comes to ranged weapons.)

Is there any dwarven !!SCIENCE!! on the topic?

The short story so far as I remember it:  Warhammers against armored, battleaxes against unarmored, maces against undead (this might not be true), and crossbows for ranged.

Or, the simpler version:

If it burns, use magma. If it doesn't, use magma followed by water.

[Devin]

Wow, picks are better piercing weapons than spears?  And swords aren't worthwhile?

[StagnantSoul]

Never said they weren't worthwhile. To me, the hierarchy goes like this-
Picks>Axes>Hammers>Spears>Swords>Maces>Shields>Cowardly weapons. (Crossbows, ballistae, magma)

[Urist McVoyager]

Picks use the Mining skill whether you're mining soil, stone, or skulls. So Picks can train up faster than anything else, even without a squad set up. Just remember to pack two or three picks for each warrior, since the toolset doesn't double as a weapon.

[StagnantSoul]

Simple answer: get five guys to legendary mining, take away the mining labor from everyone, give those five steel picks in a squad equipment menu, turn mining back on for every other miner except them after they have their pick, with the uniform replacing clothing. It's a simple solution.

[Urist McVoyager]

If you have access to candy, why not make them out of that?

[StagnantSoul]

I never said not to. Just steel is probably the best most people will have for a while. I use all weapons minus crossbows, siege engines, and maces.

[Aslandus]

Which weapon is best really depends what you need:
Short swords are sort of a jack of all trades, master of none weapon having slash, stab, and bash attacks that are less powerful than a weapon that does a specific thing. The versatility makes it useful to adventurers, but less awesome in fortress mode.

Axes make heads roll. Expect to fill your refuse stockpile with severed bits. They tend to kill unarmored things pretty fast.

Warhammers are unsurprisingly the best at crushing things, mainly limbs and skulls, but I think maces have a lower chance of severing bits.

Apparently picks are good, but I've never made my soldiers use picks, training isn't much of an issue when you scum the game with danger rooms like I do, and spears have better piercing, though according to the wiki it's not too far apart...

Crossbows are... well crossbows, they shoot bolts and hurt enemies, and function as a club when ammo runs out, what more do you want from a ranged weapon?

[Max™]

Picks have a high velocity modifier and most importantly: no "strikes the enemy with the [anything except the pointy/sharp/dangerous parts]" type attacks.

Maces sever parts WAY more than hammers from my experience, hammers tend to give combat logs full of "crushing the skull, jamming it through the skull and into the brain, and has lodged in the wound", though I've never seen them actually pull it out, so I guess they don't get as stuck?

Axes give page after page of "and the severed part sails off in an arc" which is ultra-amusing.

Picks give similar results as axes but seem to get stuck a bit more often.

Spears are weird, I've got a spearmaster with more kills than an artifact pick wielding dorf does, but I think it's because they keep showing up and jabbing stuff in the brain after it falls down.

I had some initial success with dorfs dual wielding crossbows and hammers, but I think they weren't disciplined enough to face down 40 gobs and trolls up close, so once they dumped their ammo they just hung back and complained while the heavy military dorfs wiped the rest out.

[Zaroua]

I've made a fort in .34 with the intent of finding out which weapons performed well under which circumstances. Here's some insight on the more common weapons:

1) Spears work extremely well against everything that's living, they let you use a shield, they're cheap to mass produce. In combat, they usually incapacitate enemies with 1 hit or 2. Limb hits usually result in a useless limb and body hits almost always result in badly damaged internal organs. Size doesn't matter for spears, they'll work as well on a fully matured dragon as they will on a goblin.

2) Axes work extremely well against small/medium sized living targets like trolls and goblins and they let you use a shield. In combat they almost always incapacitate limbs with 1 hit but body hits aren't that useful. Against larger enemies who's size is in the millions, axes are a very poor choice and your best bet will be to bleed enemies to death.

3) Short swords are a mix of axes and spears and are *the* weapon of choice for adventuring that I've found. You can slash off limbs easily and you can pierce the body easily with them. In fort mode they're not as effective as axes vs. small targets but they're better against large targets; they're also not as effective as spears overall.

4) Greatswords and greataxes are the best weapons in the game, by far. An adamantine greatsword can and will cut cave dragons and other large creatures in half with a body shot. Anything smaller is pretty much guaranteed to be cut in half in the material is good enough. Of course, you can't use a shield with them and supposedly maintain their optimal hit rating, but when it comes to raw killing power these weapons have no equal.

5) Blunt weapons suck in vanilla against living targets. Sure, they'll get you kills eventually (or very quickly if you get a lucky head shot), but overall they're rather puny. If you modify bones to have less pain receptors (in vanilla, breaking a pinky is more harmful than having your kidney skewered by a spear), then blunt weapons become truly awful. Unfortunately, they're by far the best weapons against undeads, so if you're embarking on an evil region, you'll want to use blunt weapons. I saw a thread about blunt weapons' effectiveness against undeads, but I don't have the link saved. You'll have to dig for it for the results, but the results showed that there were clear winners when it came to undead slaying with blunt weapons (mauls I believe?).