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[PencilinHand]

I've determined that if you want blunt weapons to make more sense than they currently do, replace the placeholder raw values (in inorganic_metal file) of impact_yield and impact_fracture (all metals use extremely high values from stainless steel) with the values in shear_yield and shear_fracture.

Theoretically, the former should be compressive strength values and the latter tensile strength, but I read that for metals they are essentially the same (ref: here, here, scroll down to compression, and referring specifically to steel).

Of course real life is secondary to gameplay, but my testing found that these alterations make lead, gold, and silver less than ideal weaponry and armor, with steel-wielders consistently dominating.

This is true, but as you say gameplay is the priority.  Surely Toady knows this already....

[Zengrath]

The last page of comments is too off-topic... However this thread rocks with all awesome weapon research done so far. I don't care how DF compares to RL, please keep on discussion about how each weapon/armor compares in DF, not real life ...

[Rask]

I return with new research results:

The most important result so far: axes are so deadly because the typical breastplate/gauntlets combination doesn't protect the upper arms. After fixing this oversight by giving all dwarves breast plate AND mail shirt, the  axe dwarves didn't do nearly so well.

When equipped with all iron equipment, warhammers (silver, heaviest that can be made in fortress mode) won more often against axes than they lost. So did regular iron warhammers. Spear users did better, too. As a side effect, battles lasted a lot longer. This happened both at skilled and at grandmaster ability for all dwarves.

HFS equipment (armour and weapons) changed the situation again. HFS axes beat silver warhammers (but take a lot of bruises and broken bones in the process) and lose to platinum warhammers. HFS axes vs HFS spears was inconclusive, as the fight lasted so long that dwarves started to die from infection. They also went up from skilled to legendary over the course of the battle. HFS short swords vs HFS axes seems to be mostly luck-based.

[G-Flex]

Platinum (and gold, and to a lesser degree silver) all make such good blunt weapons mostly because of their weight. People have asked "what's the problem?" about this, but the problem is thus: You try swinging a giant hammer made out of platinum.

Real-world medieval weaponry was actually fairly light, and certainly much lighter than most people think. There's a reason they didn't use lead.

The game just doesn't penalize dwarves enough for using excessively heavy weapons. A platinum warhammer should be difficult to lift and swing well at all, and a dwarf shouldn't even be able to push most objects made out of slade, much less lift them off the ground and hit someone with them effectively.

I've done some pretty extensive tests regarding weapons and armor in arena mode, and there are definitely some problems.

A short, inexhaustive list, off the top of my head:

• Projectiles cannot penetrate any deeper than their assumed length; they do not actually penetrate fully through layers (i.e. the game treats them like a hand-held strike in this way, meaning you can stab someone with a dart/arrow exactly as deep as you can shoot through them with it, and darts will never really penetrate clothing no matter the material). By this logic, a bullet would barely be able to break skin.
• What I just mentioned about heavy weapons. A gold maul should be a bad thing.
• Whips don't really make a lot of sense. They're quite good at breaking bones, for instance.
• The "stab" maneuver for many weapons penetrates less deeply than the "slash" maneuver, due to typos.
• A smaller contact area does not seem to increase the chance of penetration, which is rather odd.
• Penetration is damn near impossible when the armor and the weapon materials are closely matched (some more randomness is needed?).
• I forget what else.

Anyway, that's the short version, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of things, and that's just the stuff about armor/weapons specifically. I have (way too many) more details in the thread I linked.

[Zengrath]

wow, i never thought that you would need chain to cover parts that plate mail misses... i'll definitely keep that in mind when equipping my army.

[Diomedes]

A weapon being heavy or light doesn't really change how much kinetic energy a wielder can put into it. If it's lighter you will swing it faster. If it heavier you need a larger force to get the same swing. Of course if a weapon is too heavy to wield or so light you can't get it to move so fast to get the same kinetic energy, things get different.

So right now Dwarves get stronger when they wield heavier blunt weapons.

Best would be if really really strong dwarves perform better with the heavier material blunt weapons. And really really weak dwarves perform less bad with the really light ones. That would make sense and would give decent gameplay.

[Geti]

As an insert, heavier weapons would be more effective for downwards strikes than their lighter counterparts due to the whole gravity thing.

[zagibu]

I've updated the original post with the current statistics. It's not much yet, mainly because the tests take so long now. I can't really do much about it, though, because doing less than 10 rounds produces inacceptable result fluctuation.

I fear the system will already be overhauled as soon as I'm finished analyzing...

[Rask]

Interesting. Is that with the dummy dwarf wearing both breastplate and mail shirt?

[zagibu]

Yeah, modded dwarf (all attributes set to average, so no strength gain etc. during combat, removed intelligence to prevent skill gain, added noexert) with mail shirt and full plate mail (2 gauntlets/boots) and no shield or buckler. You can also get the full combat logs here: http://node23.net/df_hammer.zip

[Wh1tefang12]

so what this research states is use silver hammers?

[Paul]

One thing that I wonder is: For the folks modding dwarves to be all average, are you using every attribute or only the attributes that are present in the dwarf creature file? Dwarves are only different from the norm in strength agility and toughness, so those are the only ones listed in the file - the others follow whatever default attribute distribution that the game uses (AFAIK it isnt in the raws, I assume its 1000 since - is 900 and + is 1250). The other physical attributes are disease resistance, endurance, and recuperation. There are also 7 mental attributes that aren't in the dwarf raws.

To get dwarves who were truly all the same you would have to have an entry for all 19 attributes.

[Rask]

I'm not sure how you are running and evaluating the tests, but would it be possible to speed up the process by having ten  1v1 matches fought in parallel instead of doing them sequentially?

With create water/lava, one can easily make segregated arenas for the duos to fight in.

[zagibu]

I'm not sure how you are running and evaluating the tests, but would it be possible to speed up the process by having ten  1v1 matches fought in parallel instead of doing them sequentially?

With create water/lava, one can easily make segregated arenas for the duos to fight in.

I guess it would be possible, but I'm not sure how much could be gained, because the results can only be processed when all fights are over.

I think the sharp and pointy weapons will not take as long as the blunt ones do.

[zagibu]

Test results for maces are out (see original post). No surprise there, they are as bad as hammers. Next is spears, of which the first test results paint quite a different picture (silver spears suck even more than hammers and maces). I expect the higher metal class spears to be able to pierce lower metal class armor quite effectively.