In my mind, they are tending towards the Dwarf Fortress equivalent of the Vandals and Huns. Smallish tribes, limited agriculture and hunting, burn the civilized world etc. I'm not familiar with the background behind Warhammer, nor have I head of Darklands, but I'd say that Tolkien's orc's ties to Sauron/Sauruman make them a bit too controlled for my liking.
Quite level with you on this. Like orcs with tribal leaders but no overarching power to "guide" them.
They definitely need all of the protection that they can get from arrows and bolts. I like the idea of giving them larger axes (and swords, and such). How did ring mail compare to chain mail (historically, I'd expect it to be worse). I had kept them with bows because a) it fit with the hunting tribe idea, even if they can run down most wildlife and b) non-ranged forces are entirely too easy to kill with ranged forces, so making them have no ranged weapons at all seemed like a mistake. I could see giving them something else as a ranged weapon, though. Staff slings or thrown spears come to mind.
Ringmail is a bit like chainmail but the rings are not interlocked and thus simpler, not so heavy and more flexible. Less protection maybe, but doing up for that in beforementioned traits, so I equal it with chain in DF. Although one could argue orcish armourers would just focus on crude but heavy/strong plate armour.
Yes, I was thinking about slings or throwing spears too. I totally agree that in DF they need some ranged weapon to be a sufficient threat
to people just trapping and shooting them.
Let me try and do both and we see how it works out.
I like the chain and the general "larger and heavier" theme. I think I'd want to avoid just making everything larger (since they aren't *that* much larger than humans, and likely get a bit of their stuff by raiding them), but I could see orcish spears, flails, and hammers. They already use the human two-handed swords in one hand, so that's taken care of.
I agree not everything should be larger. I've kept scimitars, scourges etc. My reasoning for heavier and orcish special weapons is that they generally are much stronger than humans albeit almost same size. Their main focus is on brute force and not on finesse, and thus humans can keep long swords to themselves and they would not be able to wield orcish weapons easily, even twohanded.
In my testing I have sofar seen barbed spears, spiked hammers, great swords and dire pikes; strangely only the pike was twohanded if I remember correctly, even if that is set as size 8 vs great sword size 10 for twohanded. My guess is that it is hardcoded or I am making a mistake.
(I have never seen dwarves and humans fly so much btw hehe.)
The metal knuckles are not equipped by the wrestlers.
Yeah, I've seen several people complaining about the amount of hauling that happens with Orcs, though I suspect that that's mostly a quantity + frequency thing. And the local leaders who show up with pages of leather and bone jewelery, which I can't do anything about without giving them industries that I don't want to give them. If I took away gauntlets and boots, I'd probably balance it with an increase in DAMBLOCK so they still had equivalent protection.
Agreed, it is worth trying although also fine as is imo.
Check the legends on one of your abandoned forts sometime, you'll see goblins go to war with something about scholars being unable to determine the cause of hostilities. The mounts (as before) only show up if the invading civ has them in their territory, but the added mounts greatly expand the terrains that will give them mounts (previously only evil swamps, now evil swamps/forest/grassland/jungle). The first siege also tends to be light on mounts, so they may have only had their squad leaders on mounts.
For extra fun, change the war elephants (or spiders) to [ANY_LAND]. The elephants are obvious, but I'm not really sure that anyone has realized the full potential for having dozens of (effectively) giant cave spiders attacking a fortress at once.
Maybe I have just been "unlucky" sofar in that respect; it could be a lack of evil area in my maps. Dire wolves at least could be almost anywhere I think.
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Topic: Orcs: More things to kill - Now for DF2010! (Read 151757 times)