Last year, in
a previous post, I did some military science in the arena, using moderately high numbers of 1v1 matches and seeing who wins.
This year, I did some more science. Some of it was inspired by replies to the previous post- thank you to all who had replied there.
First, a simple bit of recording. I took a totally unskilled dwarf in the arena, equipped him with basic equipment, and had him fight unarmed goblins one at a time. As he fought, he gained skills- but not at the same rates.
Fighter skill advanced the fastest, followed by the weapon skill, as you see. I did some additional experiments (not so formal, not recorded), but it also seemed that the skills that advanced the fastest were the most valuable in combat (dwarves with skill in Fighter tended to beat dwarves with skill in Axedwarf, and both beat those skilled in Shield user).
Second: how important is skill? Obviously, more is better: how much better?
The x-axis shows the skill differential, and the y-axis is the win rate. So if you are 2 skill levels below your opponent, your skill differential is -2. If you are 3 skill levels above your opponent, your skill differential is +3. As you might expect, the result is looks like a
Sigmoid Function- you don't get to a point where you have no chance to win, but it gets smaller and smaller.
In last year's science, I tended to use dwarves. As the commenters mentioned, dwarves can get a martial trance, which can really skew the results. You see that in the orange points on the win rate graph; even with a high skill differential, with dwarves, the win rate can't really get above 90%. That's why I later switched to goblins, who can't trance; there, you see the win rates trend toward 0% and 100%, as you would expect.
The skill differential battles involved one goblin with all Proficient skills, and one goblin with a different skill level (ranging from None to Expert); I calculate the skill differential from that. It's possible that these curves look slightly different depending on your reference point (for instance, if I were to re-run it with one goblin always having Adept skill, the curve might look different).
Finally, some commenters suggested that I test picks. I have added those to the win rate by weapon type, for armored dwarves and unarmored dwarves separately; unfortunately, for these tests I had not yet started using goblins.
As many commenters expected, the pick performs well in both armored and unarmored cases. I calculated an overall average win rate (against all enemies in the tests), and the results are:
Armored:
------------------
Hammer: 60.5%
Pick: 53.6%
Axe: 47.7%
Sword: 43.5%
Spear: 42.4%
Unarmored:
-------------
Sword: 58.2%
Pick: 54.0%
Axe: 52.2%
Spear: 49.4%
Hammer: 33.3%
Combined:
------------
Pick: 53.8%
Sword: 50.8%
Axe: 49.9%
Hammer: 46.9%
Spear: 45.9%
Edits:
Additional results:
Effectiveness of Armor, measured in skill levelsRecommended reading:
From Iron to SteelTesting used Dwarf Fortress v0.44.09.
Methodology is mostly the same as in my 2018 thread. I used a custom arena.txt to define an arena with 9 levels, where each level has 196 small square arenas surrounded by walls. Each small arena had two characters, assigned to separate teams. After setting up some number of trials (usually with 196 combats each), I counted up the number of survivors on each team to figure out how many "wins" each character type had.
Full armor includes:
iron [weapon]
iron shield
iron mail shirt
iron breastplate
iron greaves
iron high boot
iron high boot
iron gauntlet
iron gauntlet
Unarmored includes:
iron [weapon]
iron shield
Skills included:
Fighter
Axedwarf
Shield User
Armor User
Striker
Kicker
Biter
Dodger
Thrower
In order to be able to test picks, I modified the raws so that picks used Hammerdwarf skill, and then I gave the pick-users skill in hammer.