Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Psieye]

Also, I can see a highly-skilled repairdwarf fixing up a lower-quality weapon while they're repairing, and perhaps increasing its quality level.

I don't.

Perhaps for the very worst weapons, but generally speaking the quality of a weapon is limited by its forging. A blade can certainly be ruined by lack of maintenance, but if it's badly made in the first made - if the iron crystals inside the blade are badly aligned, or there are pockets of carbon or silicon, whatever - no amount of maintenance is going to fix that; you'd need to reforge it.

True but a significant repair job may well require at least reheating the blade to smooth out really bad dings and bends.  Hardened steel is very difficult to mold without heating and even a good reheat can restructure the crystalline structure if it wasn't very good the first time around.

Also, weapon quality, I'd imagine, is largely based on the the quality of the edge since that is the main thing that quality modifies affect (weapon damage and as a result the value) so I could see the repair dwarf grinding out a better edge than the original blade.

Based on that, the opposite is also true - a masterwork blade is highly likely to degrade when repaired by reforge. So you'd have a mixed blessing and it'd all require fuel anyway. Plus when fractions of bars are used in the game just like fractions of cloths in hospitals, you could demand a portion of a bar is also required for reforging to cover chipped edge repair.

[RAM]

Also, how do you hack a bronze golem carefully in order not to break your axe?

I suspect that if you swung the axe in a steady and direct strike, more of the force would be expended in parting the bronze and the force that went into bouncing the blade would be directed along the length rather than being concentrated at the tip. Of course, if the material you are trying to cut is harder than the material your are cutting with, blade start to lose some of their appeal...

[forsaken1111]

Is steel harder than bronze?

[Old-one-eye]

yes, I would imagine so anyway.

[Baughn]

Good steel is, but modern steel has a consistent goodness that's unknown through most of history.

The ability to consistently produce good steel, lacking physics and chemistry, is one of the dwarves' nearly magical abilities.

[Jimmy]

I remember a story I once read that claimed the reason dwarven forged metals were such high quality was the tempering process. Instead of water they used, ahem, dwarven bodily fluid.

Seems to make sense since this game doesn't require water for forging. All that booze has to go somewhere.

[forsaken1111]

Good steel is, but modern steel has a consistent goodness that's unknown through most of history.

The ability to consistently produce good steel, lacking physics and chemistry, is one of the dwarves' nearly magical abilities.

Well, they ARE dwarves. You just hammer that shit until it does what you want.

[greycat]

I'd say dwarves have an understanding of physics and chemistry, although it may not be expressed in the terms modern-day humans would use.

[Poot]

I'd say dwarves have an understanding of physics and chemistry, although it may not be expressed in the terms modern-day humans would use.

Don't give them that much credit. It's all innate -- dorf magic, in other words.

[smd]

Why not?

Copper and Bronze Age societies had an understanding of physics and chemistry. And they put their knowledge into practice making edged and projectile weapons, complex architecture etc. Just because it is not founded on precise math, doesn't mean it won't work for simple applications.

As for the consistency of alloys, item quality takes care of that, doesn't it? a skilled blacksmith knows the exact proportions of ingredients to make a fine *sword* that a rookie might only guess at making swords and -swords- his first couple of years in the trade.

[G-Flex]

Why not?

Copper and Bronze Age societies had an understanding of physics and chemistry. And they put their knowledge into practice making edged and projectile weapons, complex architecture etc. Just because it is not founded on precise math, doesn't mean it won't work for simple applications.

As for the consistency of alloys, item quality takes care of that, doesn't it? a skilled blacksmith knows the exact proportions of ingredients to make a fine *sword* that a rookie might only guess at making swords and -swords- his first couple of years in the trade.

I wouldn't humor quotes like "it's all dorf magic" with actual argument. It seriously just isn't worth it.


The thing about alloy consistency is that it would be nice if there were a concept of ore/metal quality as well. After all, a weaponsmith is restricted by the metal he has, and a smelter is restricted by the ore available; this stuff gets pretty important in real life, or at least was back when resources were more local/limited.

[smd]

at this point I would normally refer to the old simple gameplay = fun gameplay rule. BUT this game seems to defy what has been generally agreed upon by other developers.

What would you base your ore quality system on? arbitrary values set to each tile? miner experience?

The same goes for metal bar quality. Obviously purity would be the main factor here, but how to define it? Would it be inconsistent enough to assign quality values? Copper age societies were found able to produce 99,7% pure copper with little to no tools and basic understanding of the smelting process.

[G-Flex]

at this point I would normally refer to the old simple gameplay = fun gameplay rule. BUT this game seems to defy what has been generally agreed upon by other developers.

What would you base your ore quality system on? arbitrary values set to each tile? miner experience?

Personally, I'm talking more about the natural quality of the deposits. It doesn't really matter too much how skilled your miner is, but I could be wrong about that in a realistic sense.

The same goes for metal bar quality. Obviously purity would be the main factor here, but how to define it? Would it be inconsistent enough to assign quality values? Copper age societies were found able to produce 99,7% pure copper with little to no tools and basic understanding of the smelting process.

Yeah, I have no idea how much variation occurs there myself. It might depend on what exactly you're smelting/alloying though.

[Baughn]

We're far less dependent on ore quality today than we used to be. It still matters, to a certain extent, but only for economics; generally they'll look for the purest iron (oxide) they can get, clean it up, then mix in the alloying substances in just the right way to get exactly what they wanted. To put it bluntly, nowadays we pretty much only care about getting the correct elements; the compounding can hang itself, except for economic purposes.

If you go back even two hundred years, we would not have been able to alter ore to anywhere near that extent. Eight hundred years.. forget it, the only way to get high-grade steel back then was to basically find a deposit that was close to those ratios already. (Wootz steel is a likely example)

(Luckily, finding pure copper was far easier. Iron ore tends to be dirty, though it's easier to extract overall and there's far more of it because of the iron potential valley.)

The point of that is this:

If DF was set today, it would make sense to model ore quality as a simple multiplier on the amount of metal you get out of it. But it isn't. If DF wants to do realistic ore modelling (which, at some point it very well might), the only halfway correct way to do that would be to limit the maximum quality of the resulting weapon, and its tendency to break, based on the quality of the ore. A lot of the iron ore wouldn't even be possible to make steel out of; steel is a very particular iron alloy.

Which means that, yes, you'd probably dump most of the poorer iron ore into furniture and such - things where the quality doesn't matter as much. That's what happened historically.

Ironically, some of the best iron mines today would have counted as very bad back then - they produce nearly elemental iron (oxide), and pure iron is uselessly soft. Mixing carbon in to make steel is well and good, but you actually want some elements other than iron and carbon to get the best steel - which historically tended to find their way in through the ore.

Which is not to say that they couldn't have used it. They just wouldn't have called it a good mine.

[arghy]

Its an easy patch to just say dwarves have fairly advanced metallurgical knowledge and an innate ability to get the best out of the ore. Is the no fish bug still in? i get a good supply of turtles and fishes then nothing for as long as my forts have lasted.