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[Alastar]

There is a lot of bad info in this thread. I tested blunt weapons quite extensively, and in controlled environments there seemed no clear hierarchy for blunt weapons.

Silver seemed to have an advantage with small weapons and strong wielders against well-armored foes. Steel seemed best with large weapons, weak wielders and against unarmoured foes.

This makes some sense: a heavier material would not be as useful when the wielder can barely control the weight, and hardness would be less important than impact energy for indirect hits through armor.

[Urist Da Vinci]

My understanding of how material properties (i.e. ignoring item size/shape) relate to weapon combat:

Blunt attack depends on solid density.
Blunt defense (for armor) depends on impact yield, impact fracture, and impact strain at yield

Edged attack depends on max edge, and on shear yield, shear fracture, and shear strain at yield.
Edged defense depends on shear yield, shear fracture, and shear strain at yield.

So what we have is a situation where if you want to beat them to death, you can do it with a heavy item, whereas actually cutting through armor requires that your weapon material be better than their armor material.

[peri609667]

Equip your army with completely copper armor and copper swords, against a siege. Then tell me how inferior copper should be, compared to how it is.

Note that i said it makes superior blunt weapons. The fact that everything else is worthless is irrelevant if you can get a more efficient version of what you're after for 1/15th the cost. That's broken no matter what way you look at it. Way to take things out of context.

@Girlinhat Yeah, i thought it might have had something to do with a feature not yet implemented. Once decay is introduced that would balance out the cost to usefulness ratio IMO.

1/15th the cost? Why should not a cheaper(as in, takes less resources to create, adds less to fortress "wealth") not be in some uses more effective than a more expensive solution? DF only takes the crafting/smithing quality and material "price" into account any way. Theres no real object price or cost in use anywhere. If you think about it, shouldnt for example the traders ask more for everything made out of metals you dont have other access to? And the same way you can make thousands of rock crafts without making their price and exchange value fall. Copper is plentiful and to most quality requiring uses a sub-optimal even if cost efficient choice, so of course its cheap.

Personally I dont use blunt weapons unless if the only ore I have is tetrahedrite, native copper or malachite. And even then more than half of the weapons will be spears.

The item value is used by traders, is it not? Personally i tend to buy quite a lot of ore from traders since my current fortress is surprisingly barren of them, so the cost of them is rather important to me. Supply and demand hasn't been implemented (yet) so the traders don't care if you sell them thousands of rock crafts, they always seem to need more. I don't favour blunt weapons in particular, i just make sure i have enough of every weapon type so that any immigrant with military skills (who will be immediately drafted) can choose the weapon type they're most skilled with.

@Girlinhat The argument that value is based on difficulty to manufacture is true for most cases, but Dwarfort is a game of contradictions as well. For example in order to make iron you simply have to find its ore and smelt it, but in order to make bronze you need to find tin and copper, then make them into an alloy. There's a lot more effort going into making bronze, but it's less valuable (and in most cases, useful). Iron isn't all that rare either, i personally find it easier to find a vein of iron than to find both tin and copper, so i think the usefulness of the metal must play some role in its value.

I'm aware that the game isn't balanced - a line of cage traps at your entrance, overseen by war dogs in secured crevasses, will stop anything from getting inside your fort, barring titans etc. They're easy to make as well, using just a cage and a mechanism. This completely defeats the purpose of other traps, and even to some extent your military, since you can can consistently expect each tile with a trap to stop one creature (as opposed to other traps, which they may survive).

To be honest, i didn't expect such a response from my post. I do believe that copper shouldn't make as good blunt weapons as it does, especially for the cost, but with the upcoming weapon degradation feature, that would make the value justified. More importantly, with the number of ways to make the game unbalanced, this is trivial in comparison. Spoilerite, anyone?

[lanceleoghauni]

But hitting someone with a candy hammer is like hitting them with one of those stupid Inflatable Mallets

Once degradation is an issue steel will still only matter for low grade armor because bronze is denser, and thus should be used for Dual Shield builds. Steel technically has a higher impact yield and fracture, but if I'm remembering correctly the large difference in elasticity limits it's usefulness compared to bronze, as well as it's lower density. Even if steel ends up being better, I'm not sure the steel industry is worth it when you can just line the corridors with bronze filled traps for a fraction of the cost of outfitting a military.

But don't mind me, I'm just the token Anti-Steel guy. I LOATHE steel.

[Eddren]

I find myself using steel more then I'd like.
What I WANT to use is copper/Bronze, but with Genesis, that's nigh impossible..

[lanceleoghauni]

I've found the steel industry to be something of an anethema to me, I can't stand wasting that many supplies for something I could do with traps more easily, and far more effectively.

[Girlinhat]

Steel and bronze are both pretty durable materials, to be sure, but steel is just more durable.  When degradation is an issue, steel will almost always be preferred simply due to its low maintenance.  In the real world, a set of steel armor was a family heirloom, and a well-maintained steel sword could outlive a small kingdom.  Bronze never had such luck.  In a simple matter of efficiency, you're going to replace/repair steel a LOT less than other materials (except candy, because it's candy) and that alone is worth the initial effort to invest in it.

[lanceleoghauni]

Perhaps It's just a relic of my mindset, which entails that any military other than marksdwarves are expendable and to be sacrificed without any thought to deal with an unforeseen bit of fun before my real defenses kick in.

[Jake]

Dual wielding in real life is fun. That is assuming you aren't in actual combat. The part that amuses me the most is animes that have people dual-wielding katanas, as if they are actually a good weapon and not rather awkward to use when held with one hand.

That's more to do with people who write and/or direct anime not always doing their homework. There are a few schools of swordsmanship that do endorse carrying a dagger in your off-hand in combination with a single-handed sword, but to be used mostly for parrying and the odd attack of opportunity. Sadly, the current game doesn't really allow for modelling parrying daggers or sai.

[Girlinhat]

Well, the current game would allow you to define a "parrying sword" type of shield with a unique block chance, but it couldn't be given an attack and cannot counterattack.  This was tried, but shields are armor and if you try to add weapon tokens it throws error reports.  Ah well, for next time maybe...

Also, anime doesn't matter.  All of anime follows the "Rule of Cool" where "if it's cool enough, it becomes practical".  Anime is not a documentary, it's made to entertain, and it does that quite well (usually).  Still, when people base their conclusions off anime or hollywood and come to the conclusion "dual-wielding double-bitted axes is useful" then that person has a problem.

[Eddren]

There are a very few that follow realistic designs, but that's for futuristic, and that's RARE.
Like, super-rare.
And they usually don't follow that path.
For instance, most of the Knightmares from Code Geass would actually be possible. Just not any of the fancy ones.

[Girlinhat]

Possible?  Certainly.
Workable?  Probably not.

Take, for instance, the hollywood ninja.  They dress in all black and run around with a sheath over one shoulder throwing ninja stars and daggers.  Dressing in all black would get you spotted pretty quickly.  "Who's that guy?  He looks weird dressed like that!"  A sword over the shoulder is extremely hard to draw, practically every sword would be at the waist.  The arm is simply not long enough to draw any decent-sized blade from over the shoulder.  Throwing daggers and stars would be neat, but take some fine craftsmanship to design and produce, and if you're close enough to throw one you're already close enough to step forward and stab.

All that said, it's entirely possible to sneak through a city wearing a black robe and have no one see you - but you'd best be sure no one ever sees you, because you're not going to even try to blend in as a peasant.  A sword over the shoulder CAN be drawn, with some effort and a specially designed sheath, but compared to the non-effort of a belt sheath, it's simply not worth the effort.  Throwing stars can be made that fly pretty well, even a skillfully tossed playing card can get some flight.  A star wouldn't penetrate very deep, maybe cut the neck open, but could be thrown.

It's possible, but nowhere near practical.
So much portrayed in the media is possible, but there's so many easier, cheaper ways to do it better.
Use steel and weapon+shield, it works easier, cheaper, and better.

[Eddren]

Pfft, I don't care what you say, sneaking through a city and killing every enemy with ridiculous noises does not go together.

[Alastar]

My understanding of how material properties (i.e. ignoring item size/shape) relate to weapon combat:

Blunt attack depends on solid density.
Blunt defense (for armor) depends on impact yield, impact fracture, and impact strain at yield

Edged attack depends on max edge, and on shear yield, shear fracture, and shear strain at yield.
Edged defense depends on shear yield, shear fracture, and shear strain at yield.

So what we have is a situation where if you want to beat them to death, you can do it with a heavy item, whereas actually cutting through armor requires that your weapon material be better than their armor material.

It's not quite that easy. Test lead maces and you'll see density isn't everything. Continue with different wielders and layouts and more complex patterns emerge.
Test very fine edged attacks, and you'll see that density can trump shear strength.

[SilentThunderStorm]

Thought - probably wrong, but I haven't seen it elsewhere.

Everyone says that dual wielding doesn't work, yet 2 weapon dorfs beat one weapon no shield dorfs.... if there is no advantage, this would not be the case.

It was stated earlier in the thread that two shields give two block rolls, so if the first fails, the second might still succeed, giving an overall higher chance to block...  that post went on to say that no such advantage occurs with weapons, a you cannot hit with both weapons at once.

I would counter that argument with the fact that you cannot block with both shields at once either.  Rather, you roll for one, and only if that roll fails do you get the attempt with the other.

If this were to hold true for weapons as well, then you would NOT get two strikes with two weapons, but you would have a second chance to hit if the first strike missed... netting an overall increase in your to-hit ratio.

Each actual strike would still do the same basic weapon damage, yet these strikes would happen more often than a single weapon would achieve, and therefor a higher overall damage output, just because each miss got a second chance.  This could account for the discrepancy.

In such a case, a dorf that is well trained is likely to hit with the first weapon, and unlikely to ever get a roll with the second one; leaving no improvement... yet a poorly trained dorf will tend to miss more, and thus get more swings with his non-primary weapon, resulting in a net gain in damage output.

To be fair, the average dorf, even if poorly trained, would probably live longer, and therefor have a higher total damage output, if they were running a shield instead of the additional weapon... however, if true, this would make it situationaly advantageous.

For example, a bum-rush of newbies against an FB... the more cannon fodder you threw out, the less likely each one would be to be the target of any specific strike, making the shield less useful.  Since their training is probably vacuous at best, a second weapon instead would give them a higher chance to hit and inflict damage on each swing.

In the standard case of bum-rush vs FB, obviously, the bum-rush dies... but that's often the point; kill off migrants, and do some preliminary damage vs the FB... in this case, this may be a method of increasing that damage.

It would also explain the variance in the data, and would make perfect sense, given the mechanics of shields.