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[Wilfred of Ivanhoe]

Very cool research and incredibly interesting read! Your dedication astounds me.

[Bumber]

I think the typical fort uses silver hammers. How do these compare against the results of steel hammers?

[muldrake]

It's a fair bit more complicated than that, as given as every weapon listed had a circumstance where they could outperform at least one, if not both axe types.

Nonetheless, it does make two-step simple+good military with the given weapons rather easy:
1. Set regional interaction and secret number to 0 in worldgen, preventing all kinds of reanimation.
2. Make candy axes.

What would this actually do, though?  Considering the rarity of candy, and the combination of weight and sharpness, isn't it possible that adamantine short swords are a better option?

I have no clue about the actual math of this.

[Fleeting Frames]

What would it do:
a) Prevent the counter of axes - that is, reanimation - from making an appearance.
b) Absolutely guarantee axes strike through everything, even steel enemies (though without necromancers, that just leaves the very rare procedurals, though I recall mentions that even inferior materials held some deflection properties). Perhaps also they're less likely to get stuck in wounds if they're sharper and leave just holes, not wounds? (Speculation)

As for short swords instead of axes...Maybe. They use 3 wafers instead of 4, but I expect they'd perform slightly worse - though probably not much, if the spears are any indication. As for the rarity of it...*shrugs*. Depends on worldgen params and embark site, I guess - single miracle pole may have merely ~two hundred bits, or it may contain thousands of it if you get a solid one with max-width SMR and above-magma sea layers.

(I hope to find one in a volcano or magma pipe someday to see how far it stretches, but haven't seen it happen yet.)

[fragfish]

Thanks again for all the feedback!

I agree that it looks somewhat lopsided for axes being the one true weapon, in particular considering you likely whether you'll run into undead (tower or evil biome).

However, as has been said, there are cases where you don't want axes:

1) You know you'll run into undead which will reanimate.
2) You don't have high quality material.

In the second case, you'll likely be able to trade sufficient iron and steel from the caravan to equip your primary squads with choppy goodness. But if you're like me and everyone in your fort is in the army (even if most of them only 1/3rd of the time), then you'll want something that's available locally for equipping the masses. Even more so with the new wear on armor/weapons mechanics.

I'm almost through with the rerun, only iron men and running the analysers missing. After that, I might do one of the following if I still feel like doing more:
* Mail Shirt VS Breastplate
* Picks/Short Swords/other dwarven weapons
* Silver VS Steel Hammers

We'll see : )

[anewaname]

Has there been research considering the effectiveness of weapon types combined with the being's strength and agility stats? While material type matters, it seems that a battleaxe would require a higher strength to wield effectively and accurately simply because it is a heavier weapon and because the center of mass is further away. If you've ever split wood, you'll know what it is like. The weapon may also be less useful for blocking or parrying for the same reasons. I've presumed that the effectiveness of a battleaxe would diminish significantly in the wrong hands and have put weaker dwarfs in spear and sword squads where agility seems more valuable.

[Fleeting Frames]

There is no imbalance as such in-game; all weapons are perfectly balanced - the best model for what you describe is how an axe requires larger size to wield than a dagger.

However, yeah, weight matters; weaker dwarves will tire quicker, and slade warhammers slow down the dwarf enough that platinum ones will do better (or even regular metal ones, maybe - don't recall) [going by previous arena testing].

I don't know if there has been any research for that that showed anything other than basically "don't go shieldless like the pikegoblins in the above test". I know that some adventure mode players like daggers and shortswords due eventual breakage and lighter weight compared to axes allowing them too haul more, so the hypothesis is hardly impossible - but given military training increases attributes very fast, I expect in practice heavier weapons would just do even better, as all trained dwarves will get better stats than arena-mode dwarves.

Tables on wiki Material science page might make for an interesting reading for weight impact.

[Ruhn]

I'm looking forward to the 0.43.05 test results!
Since FB tend to be larger I think spears did well against most/all types since the vitals are larger and there is more skin and muscle to penetrate?

Going back to discussion on page 2 the Coat, Cloak, Chainmail, and Shirt should all cover the neck.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Armor

If the wiki's conclusions about attributes (strength) are still correct then I would propose the strongest dwarves should carry the heaviest weapons into battle because of the better swing speed.  p=mv so better momentum on impact.  Using heavy weapons to train strength of weak dwarves more quickly makes sense but I don't know if there exists science to back it up?
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Attribute#Training_Attributes

[Nagidal]

Thank you very much for this research. As number said, I'd like to include silver maces and hammers. Is there any way we can help you with this research? You said you parsed the combat logs. What scripts do you use to capture and parse them?

[muldrake]

Thank you very much for this research. As number said, I'd like to include silver maces and hammers. Is there any way we can help you with this research? You said you parsed the combat logs. What scripts do you use to capture and parse them?

Agreed.  This is easily one of the best threads I've seen since I started reading this board.

I am very fond of silver maces and hammers especially early on when I embark in some area with nothing but tetrahedrite ore.  It would be nice to have some numbers on how much these things are actually worth, though, other than for squishing crundles and the like.

[Melting Sky]

Although Axes are an all around very solid weapon for dwarves there are several instances where they can end up being quite useless. As mentioned above, reanimating biomes can be a problem for edged weapons since you can end up with severed heads that just won't go down etc. The other place they have a real problem is FB made of strong inorganic materials. If you run into a Steel FB, for instance, steel axes will do absolutely nothing to it.

When DFhack and therapist are up and running on the newer versions of the game where Toady has reworked armor damage mitigation and added mechanics for applying torsion damage to joints I might sit down and try to contribute to this thread with some additional testing. My guess is that blunt weapons will be radically more effective against human sized organic foes compared to before.

[fragfish]

Thanks all for the replies! I'm done with rerunning the tests and in the process of going over the results. As there have been quite some changes due to new damage mechanics and armor removal, it's not as straightforward as just c/ping the numbers.

There are two major changes which I could also cover now:

* Wear - I've mostly seen it on shields and axes so far, but I might add up how much of it occured for what.
* Armor removal - undead and equal-material slashing weapons are more dangerous now.

Since I'm using silver hammers myself, I'm also quite interested in how they compare to steel ones. With the data available for steel hammers, running the tests with silver and comparing the results is definitely doable.

Is there any way we can help you with this research? You said you parsed the combat logs. What scripts do you use to capture and parse them?

Thanks for the offer, though I'm not sure how to help. My current workflow is:
* set up an arena for the test (attack and stat out dwarves and enemies), save it
* rename the folder to something useful for later reuse and identification
* delete gamelog.txt
* run the arena 20 times, abort after each
* split gamelog.txt into fragments along the *Loading Fortress* line, name them according to test setup (via bash)
* load the files iteratively, compute the desired statistics for each file, then compute average and deviation

For analysis, I'm using Apache Spark, since I'm familiar with it and it is convenient for handling line-based data in text format.

I'm not an expert on all the fortress scripting, so I guess if there's a way one can automate the process of setting up arenas or rerunning the arena x times, that could speed things up considerably : )

When DFhack and therapist are up and running on the newer versions of the game where Toady has reworked armor damage mitigation and added mechanics for applying torsion damage to joints I might sit down and try to contribute to this thread with some additional testing. My guess is that blunt weapons will be radically more effective against human sized organic foes compared to before.

Actually, in my tests, iron axes have profited most against iron-armoured organic foes. With armor removal and joint damage, they are now above iron spears. Iron Hammers have also improved somewhat.

[MorsDux]

I wonder if I should switch from copper shields to steel shields due to the armor wear effect?

[PatrikLundell]

A follow-on to MorsDux' musings: are feather-wood shields no longer useful?

[MorsDux]

in theory shield bash power is based largely on weight - heavy shield makes more damage.