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[Blue_J]

*steel picks*

No seriously. Picks are roughly as deadly as axes, and the skill they use in combat (Mining) is actually useful for your fortress and is easily trained. Armor your miners like a good military (iron/bronze/steel), put them a month into a danger room, and you'll be fine. War miners not only dig, but own in melee as well.

However, you will have to disable their Miner job when they are in the military. If not, they will not use picks and be much less efficient.

So, here's a question I've been wondering about: If you make a squad of recruit-level war miners, can you train their mining skill up to legendary in a danger room? Normally by the time I'm able to make a danger room I have enough passable miners that I don't feel the need to do this, but is it possible?

[JmzLost]

Yes.  Just remember that military and mining don't mix, so they need to be assigned as one or the other.  Unless you WANT them to take off all their clothes, throw away their picks, and run into battle naked 

JMZ

[Urist Imiknorris]

Yes.  Just remember that military and mining don't mix, so they need to be assigned as one or the other.  Unless you WANT them to take off all their clothes, throw away their picks, and run into battle naked 

JMZ

Same with woodcutters and hunters.

[Naryar]

*steel picks*

No seriously. Picks are roughly as deadly as axes, and the skill they use in combat (Mining) is actually useful for your fortress and is easily trained. Armor your miners like a good military (iron/bronze/steel), put them a month into a danger room, and you'll be fine. War miners not only dig, but own in melee as well.

However, you will have to disable their Miner job when they are in the military. If not, they will not use picks and be much less efficient.

So, here's a question I've been wondering about: If you make a squad of recruit-level war miners, can you train their mining skill up to legendary in a danger room? Normally by the time I'm able to make a danger room I have enough passable miners that I don't feel the need to do this, but is it possible?

Yes, danger rooms increase mining skill (and faster than mining visibly) if the dwarf is wielding a pick.

[veok]

Can't you just solve that by having spare picks? So they drop their "military" pick and pick up their "mining" pick, and vice versa?

[morikal]

Ok, I did some arena testing.

Wasn't testing picks at first.

Tested with 5 dwarves on each side, grand master in everything.

Tested with steel equipment only.

 - short swords handily beat everything else when no armor is worn. Yes, they slaughtered the poor axe wielders.

 - In armor, short swords beat everything else handily, except for war hammers, which slaughter them.

(Tested: battle axes, war hammers (steel), spears, short swords)


Went back to test picks:

Pretest: grand master everything vs grand master everything, 5 on each team, picks vs short swords:
 - short swords annihilated. Expected since picks didn't have any mining skill, since that isn't available in arena.


First test: no skills at all (since mining isn't an option)

 Outside armor, picks beat everything else, including the short swords


Second test: all non-weapon/misc obj skills at grand master:

 In armor, picks beat everything except war hammers, including the short swords


Tested with 5, 7, and 15 dwarves on each side. Takes a while with GM armor skills, and no weapon skills, but the picks won every time, except against hammers.

[psychologicalshock]

I have more hammerers than everything else but I tend to keep it varied. The reason I trained up hammerers was because I wasn't yet aware that I had enough flux stone to make everything out of steel and I wasn't aware that the local goblins don't have anything better than iron. Basically I overcompensated fearing that the gobbos might bring steel plate mail , but they didn't - so technically speaking a bunch of axemen would probably be more efficient as steel axes go through iron armor pretty easily.

[SirAaronIII]

Short swords all the way, man. Who cares how dwarven they aren't?

[Alastar]

From my experience, picks are the best general purpose weapons dwarves can make, whips and morningstars are also great if you can get decent ones. Most things have their place though: Spears are good at getting to the vitals of big fleshy things, and don't need fancy materials to be adequate against anything you're likely to face. Axes are probably not worth making below steel, but decent ones create a glorious mess.

[Tapeworm]

If you feel like doing some modding in the entity file or relying on imports, morning stars are a great blunt weapon - even better than hammers.

You'll generally want your melee squads to have a mix of weapons so you can deal with all types of enemies easily - at least one each of stabbing, slashing and blunt weapons is best.

I'm not sure why maces are considered bad; could somebody explain?

[SirAaronIII]

I'm not sure why maces are considered bad; could somebody explain?

Too big contact area, too little velocity or something like that.

[nanomage]

War hammers are great against metal armoured opponents but the thing is that neither of your enemies is ever armoured enough for you to notice this.
With slashing weapons of sufficient material and quality (steel or adamantine ones, and no less than *), almost every hit on poor goblins wearing nothing more than -copper mail shirt- and "iron cap" is going to cause bleeding, pain, fractured bones or limbs sent flying everywhere whereas hit with that famed =silver war hammer= is only lethal when delivered to the head and may otherwise just bruise some fat and muscle.

in a nutshell, in fortress mode your enemies are essentially unarmoured, so you'd better go for blades.

[Alastar]

If you feel like doing some modding in the entity file or relying on imports, morning stars are a great blunt weapon - even better than hammers.

You'll generally want your melee squads to have a mix of weapons so you can deal with all types of enemies easily - at least one each of stabbing, slashing and blunt weapons is best.

I'm not sure why maces are considered bad; could somebody explain?

Morningstars aren't blunt weapons in the game, the game just calculates the impact of the spikes. In essence, they're pointier picks with the same high velocity usually not seen in edged weapons... quite deadly and better at penetrating armour than any other sharp weapon, but doesn't rip apart soft targets as quickly as others.

In tests maces tend to do worse against armour and better against unarmoured targets than hammers, which isn't what you want blunt weapons for (they still won't make a significant contributions against soft targets in a mixed force. Edged weapons are so much better there).
Since they have twice the contact area and twice the size (and therefore mass), I wouldn't be surprised if maces became relatively better with increasing wielder strength but I haven't tested that rigorously.

Generally speaking, contact area goes both ways... bigger wounds if you connect, but struggling against armour. Against tough material things, you want something middle of the road... too large and the blows glance off, too small and you'll wound but not kill.
As such, I prefer to base my weapon choices around unquestionably desirable qualities... ideally: high velocity, a decent size (doesn't have to be huge but shouldn't be tiny) and for edged weapons adequate penetration depth. Whips, morningstars and picks look attractive here and they've proven themselves in tests. Because I can't make whips I'll usually have to make do with hammers, and as there isn't an inherently superior weapon for chopping up lightly armoured humanoids axes fill that niche.

[Kamamura]

Whips are strange in the game. They are far too effective - normally, they should wound and bleed unarmored foes, but should have serious difficulties to cause major injuries (unless eyes, throat, etc are hit). Against armored foes should be near worthless.

[morikal]

I wish I could do some arena testing with picks where the dwarves aren't unskilled with them... I wonder if mining skill doesn't scale up the pick lethality as quick as a real weapon & weapon skill does...

(I.e., wondering if my test results are skewed because of the unskilled thing, and I should go with swords after all, and not picks)