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[Arrkhal]

Hi, I'm new, and I hate introductions.

Anyway, someone stop me if there's already something like this out there.

What I'm thinking of doing is changing the metal values and weapon/armor effectivenesses a bit, to more accurately reflect Real Life.  Mainly, bronze and iron would be swapped in effectiveness, and prices would need a lot more messing around with.

Historically (yes, I realize DF isn't an historic game), the iron age followed the bronze age because iron is harder to smelt and more common.  Copper and tin ore deposits occur togegther in only 2 places on earth, making bronze production heavily dependent on trade.  From what I've seen, this is also true in most DF worlds.  I've yet to find copper and tin together, but iron is pretty common if you know what stone types to look for.

Scientifically, wrought iron actually is intermediate between copper and bronze, in terms of strength.  I compiled a nice list.

Values are for material hardened as appropriate for a weapon, not annealed or as formed.
Material   Hardness (vickers)   Yield tensile strength (MPa)
silver      60         303
copper      110         360
iron      160         520
bronze      261         825
carbon steel   551         1400

Do square roots of the ratios between those properties compared to bronze, and you get:

Material   Hardness   Yield strength
silver      0.48      0.61
copper      0.65      0.66
iron      0.78      0.79
bronze      1.00      1.00
steel      1.46      1.30

Pretty incredibly close to the existing 50-66-75-100-133 thing!  Just gotta reverse iron and bronze.

And then the values.  Iron isn't incredibly common, so maybe a value of 2 or 3?  Copper and tin are just about equally rare and copper is considered semi-precious (including in Dwarfland, since you can mint coins of it), so 3 or 4? Then bronze could be worth 10 like iron was.  That also means I could change it so that it's bronze anvils available at the start, keeping the 1000☼ price.  Hopefully changing the [anvil] token will do the trick, otherwise I'm stumped.

Any thoughts?  Especially on price balancing everything made out of copper.  I think most of them could stand as they are now, like pewter shouldn't really be worth substantially more than copper or tin.

I'm also considering adding arsenical bronze to the game.  Arsenic ores don't exist, but arsenic occurs naturally in copper ores sometimes.  It'd be slightly more valuable than copper, and equal quality to iron.  Mainly for if you have lots of copper lying around but no tin or iron, and need weapons in a hurry.  Something like 2 copper ores = 1 guaranteed arsenical bronze block, and a 75% chance of a 2nd one?  It'd be nice if it could be something like 50% of the time the 2nd block is arsenical bronze, and the other 50% of the time, it's plain copper, so you always get 2 blocks total, but I don't think the randomization system can do that.  Can it?

[MrWiggles]

Well, Copper Ages and Iron Ages are used to show when a local geography and culture was using which metal. It doesn't denote what the whole of the earth was using. There are several regions which never used bronze heavily, as they had wrought iron and iron readily exposed there are some cultures where the Iron Age is older then the Bronze, as it appears the iron they had access to was no longer available.

[Arrkhal]

In dwarfland, obviously histories are going to be significantly different.  That was just an example, and to further state that iron actually is not stronger than bronze, like most people think.

It's mostly a mechanics thing, and a few similar things are in place in the game already.  Iron requires 1 fuel per bar, making it more costly and slower to smelt than bronze.  Maybe I could mod copper so that it always uses 2 ores and produces 2 bars, to make it equally easy/cheap as bronze...

[Rowanas]

The Celts of Britain skipped a couple ages because Cornwall has/had plentiful tin and copper, but few other "proper" metals. we somewhat stole the technology of the continent because they had done more on metallurgy than we had (we were content with gold and such ). Iron isn't plentiful in Britain, so we kinda ignored it until we could get it en masse.

[MrWiggles]

The Celts of Britain skipped a couple ages because Cornwall has/had plentiful tin and copper, but few other "proper" metals. we somewhat stole the technology of the continent because they had done more on metallurgy than we had (we were content with gold and such ). Iron isn't plentiful in Britain, so we kinda ignored it until we could get it en masse.

Then you had odd pockets, like North America, which seem to be perpetually stuck as neolithic society.

I think this was largly true for central and south america as well.

[ein]

Bronze may be harder than iron, but iron can be sharpened where as bronze has to be reforged. I'm pretty sure Impaler's metals simulates this. It adds a lot more metal based stuff into the game and makes bronze better for armour than iron, but iron is still better for weapons. Also, it has a more realistic (read:longer, harder, and more annoying) steel making system.

You probably shouldn't do a crazy rebalance for metals because the next version should come out fairly soon and will completely break any of the old raws. If I knew where to find them, I'd show you the new metals. You're going to have to be pretty fneking hardcore to mod them in the next version.

[Arrkhal]

IIRC, the main indigenous American peoples to develop coppersmithing were the Tlingit (western coast of Canada), the Mayans, and the Incas.  All three plus a very small number of Inuit also made limited use of meteoric iron.

Anyway,

Bronze may be harder than iron, but iron can be sharpened where as bronze has to be reforged.

Not true.  I have no idea where that belief comes from (it's even on Wikipedia, unattributed of course), but it's totally false.  Both metals can be sharpened, and both can be work-hardened.  Both have edges formed and hardened by peening (i.e., "cold" iron), followed by honing.

But the difference is that bronze is harder and stronger, and thus able to take a better edge.  Iron also has long strands of slag in it, which would prevent it from ever holding a very fine edge.

For instance, the ancient Egyptians, and several other bronze age cultures, had razors.  But wrought iron cannot be made sharp enough to make a razor.  Bronze is absolutely sharper than iron.  In several Persian cultures actually, to this day, they believe that a cut made by a bronze weapon will never heal, a myth that goes back to their iron age when bronze and iron weapons existed side-by-side.  To this day, a couple countries still have laws on the books prohibiting bronze weapons.

On the other hand, bronze usually was peened to resharpen rather than honed, and then it would be melted down and recast when the edge cracked, but that isn't because bronze can't be honed.  Probably because with peening, the edge actually gets better and harder with age (until it finally cracks), and because bronze is more valuable than iron, thus more important to conserve, rather than reducing a good portion into powder.  Plus, you'd need to peen the thing anyway after honing, since grinding would reveal softer metal underneath the layer of work-hardened bronze.  So anything other than a very very light sharpening, on something very thin like a bronze razor, makes no sense anyway.

And on the other other hand, iron scythes (and even the "modern" steel ones) are also traditionally sharpened by peening, not honing.

[Niyazov]

I would say don't bother or wait until the next release, which is fairly imminent and completely changes how metals are handled.

[Lyrax]

What really made iron popular were the germanic/gaulic tribes on mainland Europe.  When everyone else was running out of copper to make bronze, they stepped in with iron and steel.  It wasn't the fine steel we know and love today, most likely, but it was similar enough to be classified as such.  Because of the superiority of steel, many people think that carries over to iron.

[Bricks]

I would say don't bother or wait until the next release, which is fairly imminent and completely changes how metals are handled.

Isn't the current status on the next version "hopefully this year?"  Seems like enough time to start doing some work.

[Eidalac]

Do square roots of the ratios between those properties compared to bronze, and you get:

Material   Hardness   Yield strength
silver      0.48      0.61
copper      0.65      0.66
iron      0.78      0.79
bronze      1.00      1.00
steel      1.46      1.30

Pretty incredibly close to the existing 50-66-75-100-133 thing!  Just gotta reverse iron and bronze.

Wow, that is a handy fact to know.

So, HFS would have a vickers hardness of about 2500.

[BlazingDav]

With all this fixed values stuff I just wonder why there just aren't formulas so values on stuff aren't the same in every world, as no two worlds are the same *unless you are so lucky you should go play the lottery every once in a while*, if you combined it on something like a metal's rating compared to other metals in terms of usefulness, then applied a rarity ratio compared to an average rarity, then difficulty to aquire and produce.

This would make values vary more, even from continent to continent, but with a good formula it'd mean you have to pay more attention to traders in order, to get an idea of where its more worthwhile putting your resources to, but you could guess that metals like adamantine would always be valuable, but they would rarely jump leaps and bounds over their average, but then even if a metal like silver were to go so rare even adamantine was pushed to compete, you would know its uselessness as a weapons material would drag it back down, but then again I guess you then have to decide how to define usefulness with respects of both weapons, armor production etc. and decorative purposes =P

[Fedor]

Most mods that make any changes to metals have considered the iron-bronze question.

The Civilization Forge Mod:
iron:  value 10, armor 80%, weapons 100%
bronze:  value 11, armor 100%, weapons 80%

The DF Rebalance mod:
iron:  value 10, armor 90%, weapons 90%
a variety of bronzes (plus red brass) with values ranging from 80 to 110% for armor and weapons.

The Dig Deeper Mod:
iron:  value 5, armor 100%, weapons 100%
bronze:  value 10, armor 111%, weapons 111%

The Wonderment Mod:
iron:  value 10, armor 100%, weapons 100% (less expensive ore, but more energy and labor to refine)
bronze:  value 10, armor 105%, weapons 90% (ores more expensive, but less energy- and labor-intensive to alloy than iron is to refine)
(both iron and bronze have alloys with improved values)

(these values may or may not change in future versions)


I'm the author of the Wonderment mod.  In developing it I gave a bit of thought to both the real-world attributes of iron and bronze and to the attributes that would work best within the game.  But my conclusions are a work in progress.

I don't entirely agree with the assertion that bronze is strictly superior to iron.  The strength comparisons given above are between a modern tin-bronze, with proportions controlled quite finely, and wrought iron.

In reality, iron used in medieval weapons and armor was at minimum beaten in the presence of atmospheric carbon, hardening the surfaces somewhat.  Trace impurities in the iron or unknowingly introduced during forging can certainly cause weakening or embrittlement, but also often strengthen the metal, especially once smiths learn how to work a particular ore.  Medieval bronze certainly can be superior to medieval iron, but the reverse can also just as easily be true.  The one assertion that my sources did clearly agree on was that it was much easier to make good body armor out of bronze than iron.

[Fedor]

And then the values.  Iron isn't incredibly common, so maybe a value of 2 or 3?  Copper and tin are just about equally rare and copper is considered semi-precious (including in Dwarfland, since you can mint coins of it), so 3 or 4? Then bronze could be worth 10 like iron was.  That also means I could change it so that it's bronze anvils available at the start, keeping the 1000☼ price.  Hopefully changing the [anvil] token will do the trick, otherwise I'm stumped.

My own mod (Wonderment) make changes similar to those you're considering.  Iron ores tend to be worth 3 and iron itself is 10.  I kept the price or iron at 10 because I made the stuff more energy-intensive and time-consuming to smelt and I also wanted to keep 1000☼ anvils.  I'm considering dropping the value of iron and accepting lower-cost anvils, because the total starting points you get drop if the price of anvils does.  In any event, bronze anvils sound a bit weird...

In my work, copper has a price of 3 (I keep thinking about making it 4), bronze 10, and tin 6.  Tin has historically been quite a bit more scarce and valuable than either copper or iron.  Silver's still 10, but I'm considering boosting it to 13 (I've already raised gold to 40).

I'm also considering adding arsenical bronze to the game.  Arsenic ores don't exist, but arsenic occurs naturally in copper ores sometimes.  It'd be slightly more valuable than copper, and equal quality to iron.  Mainly for if you have lots of copper lying around but no tin or iron, and need weapons in a hurry.

Several mods have arsenical bronze.  I'm not a big fan of the idea, personally.  The gap between copper and bronze (or iron, as suggested in the first post) isn't so great that we really need to add a new one-trick metal in the game to fill it.  I actually deleted bismuth bronze and therefore also bismuth because they just weren't interesting enough.

Something like 2 copper ores = 1 guaranteed arsenical bronze block, and a 75% chance of a 2nd one?  It'd be nice if it could be something like 50% of the time the 2nd block is arsenical bronze, and the other 50% of the time, it's plain copper, so you always get 2 blocks total, but I don't think the randomization system can do that.  Can it?

To the best of my knowledge, the randomization system can't deliver guaranteed total amounts.  You can, for example, cause 2 copper ore to yield 1 copper, a 50% chance of another copper, and a 50% of arsenic, but that's still a uncertain total amount.

[Grendus]

There have been several massive discussions on this, with no real consensus. For example, bronze is harder and easier to work, but iron's strength to weight ratio is better. Iron weapons can be larger than bronze, a pretty big advantage in battle. Bronze is much stronger and holds a better edge, but shorter.

For dwarves, I think weight isn't a huge problem since dwarves are, by nature, hardy and strong, meaning that bronze would probably be superior for them. However, I don't know exactly how huge of a difference size and weight would be for a dwarf compared to a human, which is how we make the comparison in DF.

I do agree that metals need to have their value rebalanced though. Two bronze bars are worth the same as iron, but cassiterite is comparatively rare. The reality is tin should be as valuable as iron and bronze probably doubly so, if only to account for the difficulty of creating.