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[Digganob]

What affects the likelihood that a material will be used by a civilization for weapons and armor? Clearly it does not depend merely value, as silver is not of course as common a weapon material as iron is, despite the same material value.

Is there any other information anyone can give me that would indicate what materials would be more or less common? I want to add an intermediate steel alloy to humans, and I want to make it a little uncommon for any individual soldier to be using it. Or, perhaps, as common as it is for a dwarf to be using it.

[Telgin]

I don't know the mechanics for sure, but I'd expect availability to the entity to have at least something to do with it.  I'm not sure if worldgen is so detailed as to calculate how many pieces of each ore is available to a given entity, but it's pretty clear that material value and effectiveness are not how it determines this, since silver swords and copper armor are so common.  Someone may know better, but I don't think there's any way to influence it.

If you make a new alloy and give humans access to the reaction to make it, unfortunately it'll probably just be as random as any other weapon and armor material.

[Digganob]

Silver weapons are also common? About as copper is? Huh, I didn't think I'd seen that before. Maybe I just haven't played the game enough.

Bit of a shame. I was hoping to give some influence over rarity. I suppose I'll give it a value between iron and steel and hope for the best. And maybe cut out copper and silver as weapon materials, because honestly, that's a little silly for fully fledged civilizations to be using copper still for weapons, and very silly for anyone to be using silver so! And a little strange for it to be valued as highly as iron, too.

[Eric Blank]

From what ive seen, it always seemed like all materials are the same rarity in terms of showing up on generated units/being brought by caravans. If the material is produced by a reaction, then they'll always have it even if they don't have the ingredients for it (dwarf civs will have access to steel even if they never found iron or flux in worldgen), and if it comes from smelting an ore without a reaction they'll only have access to it if one of their worldgen sites does. So no iron if none of their sites have iron, no silver if they don't have silver etc.

There's no way I know of to actually control how often/how much of a material they use, which is a pain.

[Digganob]

Yeah that's about what I knew about availability as well. 'Tis indeed a pain. I know there are more pressing issues/features, but variables for such things would be very useful.