So after the failure of my lasher, see previous post for hilariously useless birdman, I made a mace man.
And these are his skills after abusing a giant tortoise for about maybe 10 minutes and some other nonsense.
I won't lie, I started as a demi-god. No shame here, I can't wait to get eaten by a hippo or something. Started with a Silver Mace and an Iron Shield, pretty good, but I found an +Iron Shield+ and some bronze armor right out the gate.
So anyway here's what's happened so far
A whole bunch of nothing including spending 2 hours learning how to equip armor properly and how to abuse the armor system [lemme just wear 3-15 sets of the same clothes and a breastplate] and I still don't understand it, gathering a couple cronies to follow me around, thinking about where I want to go and accidentally running into the blessed giant tortoise. I ran into them when I stopped to knap some rocks to improve my skills, abuse the system for fun and profit, and I saw the blessed creatures. Threw some rocks at them to provoke them and get some meat, when I bruised the leg of one, my two buds went berzerk and smashed it into egg-shells. Butchered it and got a crap-load of food, and then I noticed there were two other Tortoises who refused to come out of their shell. I remembered the "wrestle a mostly harmless creature" tip and you can't get more harmless than a tortoise. [Giant Alligator Snapping Turtle says hello] So I set the combat preference to wrasslin' and held the arrow key to the point of over-exertion several times over several minutes. Legendary Wrestler and Legendary fighter, and somehow an improved dodging ability were the result. I wish real life was this exploitable, never exercise again, just grab and release your pet turtle for about 20 minutes.
So after cheating like a b-ch to become Heracles, I moved on over to one of the several nearby necromancer towers. The world somehow generated like 5 on one continent and about 8 total, I believe. I was greeted with about, eventually after they crawled up and down from all over the tower to barge through the front door, somewhere around...25 undead? I'll give a picture when I can, I have to go back first.
Well my buddies lasted all of 3 minutes, but I have to give props to the human spearman who got crippled in the fourth round and then spent another 12 biting zombies apart. He didn't even get "struck down" he bled out. They stabbed him in the head once and then kept only giving him superfluous wounds.
So after like, 2 hours of fighting, real-time since I do other things while playing DF but eh, I decided I needed a better mace. I was...Adept Mace Man when I first went there and left...Skilled I believe, and every time I hit the zombies in the head it was a coin flip if it would kill them. One guy took like, four square hits. So I decided, "screw this" and left to scrounge some dorfortresses for maybe a +silver mace+ at the least.
I found one fortress that crashed my game when I approached, so I'm going to write the name down and check it out in legends mode later or something.
Pic related
Another was completely and utterly abandoned of everything, and the stairs led down into an underground cavern with some amphibian men that occasionally yelled at me but were rather friendly. I got lost and didn't explore too much, didn't find anything of interest.
Went to another fortress, same thing, but there were some lonely elves and goblins running around screaming, occasionally fighting with each other and acting like they were both at home but that their home was under attack by the other. Down in the cavern, there were two stationary naked mole dogs, one of which I accidentally kicked and sent scrambling while the other took a good minute to react and run itself. Found a long friggin' hallway, so much so I just held the "north" key and accidentally got in a fight with a giant Olm. I reached the end and took a left turn, went down a slightly shorter way and hit a dead end.
So I left that place and went to yet another fortress, this one was populated and...weird. Didn't find anything good, so I left to look at the nearby human Town but I wanna talk about this dorfortress first.
So on the surface the fort looks normal. The trading depo had a hilariously long staircase leading down, 40 something z-levels I think, and down below was a twisted, large are of what I can only describe as several rooms stacked together tetris style, with at least 3 or 4 staircases/hatches leading to different rooms in each room, some of which were sometimes completely cut off from everywhere else, and down one staircase was an enormous underground depo filled with $items$ on every square and smiling dwarfs waiting for customers. There was almost nothing in the fort except small clothing, and a dwarf followed me around on the stairs and kept me "prone" so that was fun. There was also one staircase that led downwards into another large underground cavern that I knew I'd get lost in, and there were several goblins walking leisurely in the fort, only to be cut down by anyone that saw them, including my very angry hammerman I found to replace my other cronies. And they weren't soldiers, thieves, or snatchers. I only saw "Goblin farmers" running around screaming "what's going on?!" The only free stuff available was "small [blank]" clothing so I gave up and left before I got lost in that mess. It's hard to describe how uncomfortable it was to navigate.
So after that I went to a human town on the coast and found a ton of stuff, including, TADAH, some maces, flails, malls, morninstars, and other goodies.
So I have about an hour of armor re-organizing to do now.
My question is, are flails better than maces?
Also, is a ≡Copper Flail≡ better than a +Iron mace+? Is there a reliable way to compare super-high quality weapons of inferior metals with Fine Quality weapons of superior metals?