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[Jordan~]

Huh. I never knew that. I always assumed that iron was better on the basis that iron-users always seem to be conquering bronze-users. But I guess that has more to do with steel and tactics.

[Flaede]

Huh. I never knew that. I always assumed that iron was better on the basis that iron-users always seem to be conquering bronze-users. But I guess that has more to do with steel and tactics.

And if you're running out of bronze, you can't make as many pointy things with it.

[Girlinhat]

Incidentally, iron was considered lethal to faeries and other-kin, particularly the trickster and baby-snatching type of faerie.  So bronze and copper were often used by the forces of night, and iron and steel preferred by humans.  No idea if this influences the opinion that iron is better, but it's interesting.

[bucket]

BUT COPPER IS STILL BETTER CAUSE YOU CAN MAKE A BILLION BARS FROM ONE ORE!

[mszegedy]

I was gonna reply that copper is valuable with tin, but you guys seem to have carried that discussion out already.

The ironic thing is that I have so much hematite at hand that I can't fit it onto my stockpiles, and the clutter is really starting to annoy me. And I can't smelt it because I have no flux, and the stupid magma smelter isn't getting built because of the damn crundles that I just can't eradicate.

[Girlinhat]

You need more aggressive construction methods.  Guard your builders with a squad of soldiers, or assign a few war dogs/bears to your mason, and fortify your entrance to the caverns.  Then, do the magma forge.

[Bouchart]

You can always make crossbows and a few trap components from wood.  The material type of a crossbow doesn't affect how good it is when used to shoot bolts.

[agatharchides]

Bronze is better than iron? How'd that happen? Someone had better tell history.

They already have.
The switch to iron from bronze was because tin became scarce.
Steel got cheap enough by the time this leveled out that bronze was outmoded.

As a history buff, I can't held noting that the idea of tin scarcity is not certain or watertight. It is one of a variety of theories to explain the problem, accepted because it is plausible but the paucity of evidence from that long ago means it is as much speculation as fact. Truth is, anything from that longer ago is fairly sketchy.

Making steel was fairly hard and hit-and-miss in that age. The carbon contents varied based on ore, the skill of the smelter and what-not. My understanding is that most of it was what we would term wrought iron rather than steel.

[Lamphare]

You can always make crossbows and a few trap components from wood.  The material type of a crossbow doesn't affect how good it is when used to shoot bolts.

it does affect bashing effectiveness upon close quarters.

[Bouchart]

You can always make crossbows and a few trap components from wood.  The material type of a crossbow doesn't affect how good it is when used to shoot bolts.

it does affect bashing effectiveness upon close quarters.

Yes this is true.

[GhostDwemer]

Chiming in on the irony-bronzy thing. There was a breakdown in western bronze age society around 1200 or so, where the palace economies collapsed and were replaced by isolated, primitive villages. That much is pretty well established fact. The reasons aren't entirely known, some say volcanoes, some say earthquakes, yeah, there's the tin shortage hypothesis, and migration and raiding (but what made people migrate and raid?), the disruptive development of ironworking, heck, for all we know for certain, maybe everybody just got into a funk and things went to hell.

However, this disruption did lead to local tin and copper shortages because trade broke down. And iron is very plentiful. It's not that it's good, as plain old iron, it's that it is cheap. So what if they have bronze and chariots if your iron equipped force outnumbers them ten to one. The problem with iron is that it is brittle, and it rusts. When ironworking first got started, bronze weapons were far superior. And good steel was very hard to make in any quantity with the available technology. Really, it wasn't until the development of reverberatory furnaces and puddling in the 1700s that we could make good steel in any real quantities, and even then it was a highly skilled art.

[Justin In Oz]

<some stuff> . . . , heck, for all we know for certain, maybe everybody just got into a funk and things went to hell. . . <some other stuff>

You have just hit upon the hidden truth as to why the Mediterranean went into a dark age between the Bronze and Iron age.

Very large scale tantrum spiral. There is no other explanation. That or they had a bad version change.

[agatharchides]

I think we can agree that the causes of the late bronze age collapse are basically a matter of speculation, though the fact that there was such a collapse is as well established as anything can be when talking about events so long ago. We don't really even know for sure where the ancients got their tin though, let alone how much trade was disrupted and if it was cause or effect or both. So basically I agree with GhostDwemer.

 One thing to note though is that bronze and iron were used simultaneously for many centuries side by side and were both quite valuable as anyone who has read the Iliad can attest. The effectiveness of iron is mostly dependent on the carbon and phosphorus contents and those were things the ancients could control only to a limited degree. Bronze is easy to cast while casting iron was beyond the ability of the ancients and is brittle anyway. Classical Greek breastplates were usually bronze mostly for this reason from my understanding. My personal speculation, for whatever it is worth, is that peculiarities in local ores were probably as important as the different between bronze and iron for a long time, with iron eventually winning out as smelting improved. But it is complicated, largely speculation and probably very OT for this thread. 

[mszegedy]

You need more aggressive construction methods.  Guard your builders with a squad of soldiers, or assign a few war dogs/bears to your mason, and fortify your entrance to the caverns.  Then, do the magma forge.

Never mind, it turned out that there were serpentpeople in that cavern I found. I had a friggin' legendary swordsman! Just… what? (I had nine population)

New world: so much hematite that I build toilets out of it. Or I would if that were possible. Not too shabby...

[Girlinhat]

I've got enough tetrahedrite on my current map to build my entire 44k material tower (21x21 with 100 levels) and have enough silver to build grates for my mist generator.