seriously with steel Armour and weapons they can dodge like pro's and hit like trucks.
For some reason, I have yet to actually enlist elves in my military - got three humans, four goblins and the areforementioned honey badger man, but no elves.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure if any of the visiting
experiments bards and scientists are elven...but there are elves around, I even get a caravan every year (for now). maybe there is some cultural problem that discourages them from wandering. I'll check some stuff as soon as I have access to my save again.
JUST IMAGINE WERE ELF"S
IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE
IS IT WRONG
ARE WE PUSHING !SCIENCE! TO FAR!
WHO KNOWS UNTIL WE TRY!
Larger creatures like elves and humans might be in the same size category as smaller werebeasts and therefore keep their armor - so that could actually become a thing.
I generally defend the position that anything that is really good at murdering things is inherently dwarfish, no matter its origins - and at the end of the day, all werecats are grey in the dark. with glowing eyes. and armor.
With regard to werebeasts, my experience is that low-level soldiers often survive encounters with them, becoming infected in the process. I understand standard procedure for such things is to get them killed, but I prefer to keep them in double-sealed rooms as emergency shock troops, since any fight they walk away from, they can be reused after.
yeah, I have a similar room for the unfortunate fisherdwarf that got infected from a very early werebeast surprise attack, though I have to admit that due to the building destroyer tag, I have not found much use for him so far. still, no point in wasting lives,all that keeping him has cost me so far is a few stone blocks for some...really solid doors. I should experiment how much I can influence him as a recruit, though.
One other thing I have noticed regarding animal men - due to one-handed weapon size restrictions, most of the syndrome-inflicting animal people are at a disadvantage when using actual weapons. The notable exception would be the serpent man, with a base size of 50000 only slightly smaller than a dwarf, and therefore should be mostly able to wield dwarven weaponry one-handed.
Another, somewhat more exotic exception, would be the brown recluse spider men and (I assume) bark scorpion men - they have six arms, so using multiple for weapons might not be an issue. However, I have no clue regarding dual- (or sextuple-?)wielding mechanics.
I included the bark scorpion men because they have a syndrome-incucing stinger, however I have not tested this and am just assuming based on the BODY:SPIDER tag that (as far as I can tell) is the reason for the extra arms - thes might be different due to pincer things messing here, however.
The best weapons for small creatures seem to be silver whips, considering that silver is the best whip material and those are reasonably easy to attain via goblinite. quality might be an issue, though, so at some point masterwork (steel/adamantine) shortswords and spears might outperform them. I will run some preliminary tests on this.
Late edit: I have to correct my above assumptions, bark scorpion men do
not have multiple arms. in a naked wrestling session, the brown recluse spider man won hands down (pun intended), I only got halfway through the combat log before my machine crapped out, but I guess having six arms is kinda helpful for wrestling. this, combined with my suspicion that the stinger body part will be hard to provide armor for, unlike the extra arms of the spider man, makes me think spider men should outperform scorpion men. Will require more testing to confirm, however.