As far as the best uses for each weapon...
As I mentioned, testing has confirmed that warhammers are the best for instant killing humanoids. A silver warhammer hit to the head will often crush the skull and destroy the brain (obviously an instant kill) in the first round. This is because warhammers have high weight concentrated into a small surface area. This allows the weapon to puncture through armor and cause organ damage.
Their cousins are spears. Not normally a good weapon, but they are also armor puncturing organ slayers. This makes them the preferred weapon for kill giant beasties. Hydra's have so many heads to smash/chop off, and their great size makes it very hard for a hammer to actually reach a vital organ. Enter the spear (literally) which can instantly kill a hydra by piercing its heart or lung. This works on pretty much any large beast. They can still skewer smaller enemies (killing them instantly), but spears get stuck easier. For general goblin and small bestie killing, axes tend to be preferred.
Axes will dismember your opponents. They tend to be both heavy and edged, so can shear through armor. They don't tend to instantly kill as fast, but something without a leg/arm will generally go down from pain and bleed out. They make excellent general purposes weapons... maybe not the best against any specific type, but still hella deadly against most. There is one glaring problem with axes, which leads us to...
Maces. Shitty weapon but the only thing worth considering against undead. Maces kill much slower than other weapons because they rely on pulping damage and fractured bones. For normal enemies this is wasted time when an spear/hammer would have killed it instantly or an axelord chop their leg off and then gone for the head when the enemy fell to the ground. Undead, however... can be reanimated. So if you are in an evil biome (or in the presence of a necromancer), you want to make sure the undead goes down and stays down. They are immune to organ failure, which makes spears entirely worthless. Hammers still do some pulping damage, but lose their one-hit-kill status and still do far less pulping than maces. Swords rely on causing bleed outs... also worthless. Axes actually make the matter worse. Why fight one zombie, when you can cut off its arm so it can reanimate and strangle you from behind while you fight the rest of it! Enter the mace. No dismemberments and lots of "general" damage make sure the corpse doesn't multiply and stays down. Zombies can't reanimate when they are a saggy sack of liquefied tissue and splintered bones. I cannot repeat the part about axes enough though. Legendary axelords will tend to sever at least one limb off every opponent. In evil lands or near necro's this becomes quite the nightmare.
Don't use swords. They can't one-hit-kill like a spear or warhammer. They are better than maces... but not against undead. They can't shear off limbs or cut through armor like an axe either. They just don't shine in any area. Axes are the superior all-around weapon in every case except undead... which is where you use maces and maces alone.
Marksdorfs can't puncture and kill enemies like they used to. Punctured hearts and lungs from bolts were common before which lead to xbows being insane. A skilled shield user could easily neutralize this, but those that didn't became corpses. They could easily slaughter squads from a distance. They are still good at softening up enemies though... just keep them behind fortifications or moats. The bonus is that hunting labor trains marksdorf (and ambusher). So if you want you can have a hunter from the start to gain (slow) training and some useful byproducts (more bones to make hunting bone bolts too).
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Topic: Dwarven military; what materials are best for what use (Read 8967 times)