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[Alastar]

Seeing as colossuses are just a can, use blunt weapons here.  Bolts/arrows act the same as a spear, but from range (duh.)  So, no use shooting bolts at a bronze colossus.

There is a difference between solid metal and fragile flesh in a can. Blunt weapons are good against the latter because they can get to the juicy bits through the armour; from my testing they are very ineffective against bronze colossi. My testing had picks > short swords > axes = spears > harsh language > hammers.

Just for completeness' sake: bolts cause similar wounds to spears (deep impalement rather than shower of limbs) but material hierarchy is completely differt - density is good. Silver, bronze and copper are good; iron, steel and cotton candy aren't.

*

I tend to prefer picks as an extremely dwarfy weapon.

[Fanklok]

If you manage to have one of your dwarves get their hands on a whip he can take a colossus alone, so a human caravan or two with lashers should probably meet an !!unfortunate accident!!.

[Zaik]

Currently there's just about no reason to not use axes in vanilla DF, unless the only metal on your entire map is copper or silver, and even then it's somewhat questionable.

[Alastar]

If you manage to have one of your dwarves get their hands on a whip he can take a colossus alone, so a human caravan or two with lashers should probably meet an !!unfortunate accident!!.

Is this tested or conjecture from having one's well-armoured dwarves mauled by lashers? Lasher are useless against colossi according to my tests.

Like all blunt weapons, whips dent and fracture things all over the place but they don't kill it and don't cripple it either. Scourges were just as bad -  the low penetration depth means they only scratch the finish. Picks seem the way to go followed by short swords; axes and spears will do but they're considerably worse.

[WrathNail]

What about the other foreign weapons? Is it true that maul > hammer and pike > spear? I know you need a particularly large/strong dwarf to carry either.

[Vehudur]

If you manage to have one of your dwarves get their hands on a whip he can take a colossus alone, so a human caravan or two with lashers should probably meet an !!unfortunate accident!!.

Is this tested or conjecture from having one's well-armoured dwarves mauled by lashers? Lasher are useless against colossi according to my tests.

Like all blunt weapons, whips dent and fracture things all over the place but they don't kill it and don't cripple it either. Scourges were just as bad -  the low penetration depth means they only scratch the finish. Picks seem the way to go followed by short swords; axes and spears will do but they're considerably worse.

Did toady fix whips having a nanometer edge then?

[Alastar]

Sorry if I'm being pedantic... but let's please keep sarcasm/hyperbole out of the discussions of game mechanics. It's easy enough to jump to the wrong conclusions as it is.

Whips still don't have an edge, and their contact area is still 1 compared to a hammer's 10 - I believe it's cm^2

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

for blunt weapons at least, edged weapons use something I don't fully understand. Their values are in line with contact length in cm *1000 for slashes, to be divided by the edge value for true contact area... but then the entries for stabs would be unrealistically small. I may well misunderstand it, but the model is a little rough anyway: afaik, all edged attacks use shear strength of the material even though that specifically refers to stress along the surface - slicing rather than stabbing or hacking

and the game doesn't keep track of the shape beyond 'edged' or 'blunt'.

As far as I'm aware, whips still incapacitate humanoids in heavy armour faster than any other weapon. They're still nothing special against unarmoured foes and useless against bronze colossi. 'Manhandles my dwarves' does not imply 'Awesome against everything'.

As far as I see it, the main problem with whips isn't the value entries but that the game doesn't fully acknowledge flexible weapons. The game models a main advantage (being able to move the business end at higher speed than rigid ones) but not the corresponding disadvantage (only the weight of the business end is behind the blow. For a morningstar, this may realistically be about half its total weight, for a whip or scourge it would be a tiny fraction).

I did a bit of testing with this: Whips with a drastically reduced weapon size killed slowly but were still good at incapacitating unarmoured opponents through pain. Lashers won against naked wielders of other blunt weapons but lost against wielders of sharp weapon. The modified whips were useless against any form of metal armour. Quite satisfying in my opinion... making flexible weapons too easy to lug around is in my opinion a lesser evil than having them hit with too much force.

[Dok Enkephalin]

Speaking from adventure mode experience against many colossi, whips aren't useless against them, they just won't get a kill. Whips will very quickly disable their threat value, even when wielded with mediocre strength and skill. Hammers and maces are completely useless against them, you could pound on them for a week and still only dent them into the yellow. Spears and pikes don't even do that much.

Swords and axes, even knives are best against them, as they all have increasing chances to sever parts over the course of the fight. A large dagger has a pretty good chance of getting a one-hit decapitation.

[Zaik]

What about the other foreign weapons? Is it true that maul > hammer and pike > spear? I know you need a particularly large/strong dwarf to carry either.

If you check the raws, both the maul and pike are just bigger versions of their counterparts with higher numbers all around.

So, yeah, if you edited the minimum size/two handed values of them so that all dwarves could use them one handed, they'd be flat out 100% superior to their smaller counterparts, however the offset is that most dwarves can't even pick them up, and the ones that can can't use a shield with them.

Also, the problem with whips and scourges is, while being able to penetrate steel armor with a silver scourge, and jam skull through brain with just about any whip ever, due the the teeny tiny contact area you're hitting useless areas a lot, even if you are punching all the way into something currently, meaning you end up killing by slower blood loss as often or more as you tear apart brain or something else fatal.

Another unrelated thing about hammers, while playing fortress defense 2 mod I ran into the giant civ, the post in the mods forum for it says their average size is 9,000,000, I think. Anyway, they are so big, that their armor is so big, that my exceptional adamantine axes and short swords often were completely deflected by no-quality bismuth bronze armor. They could cut off the lower arms no problem, but beyond that the best they could do is cut open exposed areas like face/ears/toes and bruise places that would normally end up severed. SO i'd have 30 or 40 armless giants trying to kick my dwarves to death until they finally bled to death or someone got a neck shot on one. So, i made some platinum warhammers, and they totally destroyed the giants.

Anyway, before that i just split my military half swords half axes, the swords don't sever stuff as often as the axes, however they penetrate deeper than axes do(kind of like spears, if you've ever had a non-bleeding FB that was too thick to kill with an axe, you know what I mean). Afterwards, it's like 2:2:1, I guess. Though I definitely wouldn't bother with hammers at all without platinum, silver just doesn't do the weapon justice.

[Dok Enkephalin]

doh, double-post