Looking at the undead tables, you mentioned hammers and axes as winners, but spears ultimately outperformed hammers, without suffering from unkillable reanimated part issue or a body part for every zombie rising up. That this happens with both steel and iron ones suggests that spears improve with skill there, unlike iron axes which I expect to become effectively sharper with skill (I think).
Though they managed to actually kill several times slower than axes, so....They did actually put down some corpses for good, right?
Actually, Spears killed more Zombies, but looking at reanimated Zombie/Part kills, those tended to simply get up again. Maybe they killed one or two for good, but Hammers have the advantage that stuff they killed stayed dead the first time.
As for the unkillable parts, that occured for spears in v0.43.03 as well. I think it happens when the brain is destroyed, but the head is not, so it can still be reanimated. Since Axes/Spears tend to never pulp the head completely, they can't kill it any more afterwards. In v0.43.05, the undead have become a lot more deadly, meaning they don't have to rely on unkillable heads to overwhelm the spears (and, often, not even for steel axes).
I would like to try a setup with reanimaton that can't be stopped by chopping up a necromancer, but far less initial zombies. That should show the strength of hammers in simply putting stuff down once and being done. However, I don't know how to make the arena reanimating.
Also, goblin side, mace performed worse in hits/kill, dropping by 0,8 to 18,8, while whip improved from 22 hits/kill to 16,6 hits kill. The first is well within the range of standard deviation, granted, but the second one is not. However; dwarven survival against goblin macemen dropped between versions and is all-around worse versus macemen than lashers in 43.05, with iron spears in particular doing lot worse due version upgrade.
Whips tended to need a lot of hits previously, as they would usually only chip bones unless they hit the neck. They had the highest "Dwarf suffocated" rate of all weapons. I'm guessing torsion damage helped here, transfering more blows to the neck. I could look at the data again to verify this.
I think it's not so much dwarves doing worse after the upgrade as goblins doing better, in particular short swords with armor removal and maces/whips with torsion damage. Piercing weapons (spears and pikes) don't benefit so much from those mechanics, so they fell behind.
It is odd that this doesn't reflect in hits/kill, even if it does in killed dwarves (where maces perform best).
From the data about hammers, where steel also had more hits/kill while doing better in overall kills/wins, I'm thinking that the "large" bashing weapons (non-whips) knock opponents helpless relatively quickly. However, as they do some damage through armour, their wearers don't remove helmets to kill the helpless opponent in one strike, instead killing in half a dozen by simply bashing helmet and head to a pulp.
Again, I could look at how "early" in the combat fighters went down (falls over/looses consciousness) to check if this is truly the cause.
PS: I hoped you saved the 43.03 post as well. I recalled some the differences from memory, but it's important for both comparison and LNP purposes.
I did. I also still have all the files. I did not want to start another thread, though. I could just add the results here as a post, for comparison and LNP?
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Topic: From Iron to Steel: A survey of v0.43.05 combat [Long] *VERSION UPDATE* (Read 18732 times)