Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Dwarf Mode Discussion => Topic started by: Mimodo on September 14, 2014, 06:15:12 pm
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I'm in a rather interesting predicament here. My fortress minerals consist of Native Gold, Galena, a random assortment of gems, and both chalk and marble.
So, it's going to be a rather wealthy fortress, with a whole bunch of leather clad legendary hammer dwarves.
I know, it's not the best to have lightly armoured melee dwarves, but what can you do right? My civ is enemies with both elves and humans (YAY!)
I've also got a single spire of the good stuff, except I don't want to waste it on low quality goods. How can I train my armoursmith with minimal importables?
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There's really nothing you can do... Try branch mining out to find some copper and cassiterite, or maybe random veins of hematite.
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There are two tricks that could help you, which have a sort of synergy:
1. Melting (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Melt_item) metal objects does not give you a 1:1 return on your metal. This means you can make metal leggings and immediately melt the lot, which will give you 1.5 bars for every bar you invested into leggings. These bars can be turned back into leggings again, ad infinitum until you have as much metal as you require. It is a bit slow, and a bit of an exploit, but foolproof.
1a. For purpose of this, you do not want any masterwork armor pieces created, because melting them will cause tantrums. That leads to the next point:
2. The more dwarves that have armorsmithing as a skill, the more likely one is to get a strange mood with said skill and have it catapulted to legendary. To this effect, you want to get your entire fortress armor-smithing, preferably starting with useless dwarves that aren't essential for other industries. This ensures you don't quickly end up with unmeltable masterwork pieces, and also increases chances of a fast master smith a little bit.
Once you feel like you have close to enough metal, and you didn't get lucky with an armorsmith mood yet, pick your best armor smith so far. Check the melt page that I linked above, and start him working on the pieces you really want, which also give decent return on melting - save the ones that are a melting loss for last. Put him on repeat, and melt any non-masterwork pieces until you have as many of that part as you need. Hopefully by the time he gets to the "lossy" melt items he is making masterworks pretty consistently.
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You could import a little copper ore and start smithing leggings, melting them back down, then forging more. If I remember correctly, that will also increase the amount of copper you have. WARNING: do NOT attempt with adamantine! You will lose most of it! You'd actually be surprised by how easy it is to base your entire metal industry off of foreign metal with a few gold crafts to sell and some magma forges. You can also salvage all metal from human siegers. If you are careful, dropping them down a pit of death is a very useful solution. Just add a ton of wooden spikes at the bottom and they should die. Then you just harvest their metal. If you have flux, you can make their iron into steel. As far as armour quality, I don't think it matters very much unless it is masterwork. Any adamtine armour should be extremely protective.
EDIT: Also, if you want more adamantine, make minecarts out of them, then melt and repeat. It's a bit exploity though.
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EDIT: Also, if you want more adamantine, make minecarts out of them, then melt and repeat. It's a bit exploity though.
Coins/bolts give you a lot more, but setting up a macro for the trading part is necessary to preserve your sanity.
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EDIT: Also, if you want more adamantine, make minecarts out of them, then melt and repeat. It's a bit exploity though.
Coins/bolts give you a lot more, but setting up a macro for the trading part is necessary to preserve your sanity.
they also don't train armorsmith.
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EDIT: Also, if you want more adamantine, make minecarts out of them, then melt and repeat. It's a bit exploity though.
Coins/bolts give you a lot more, but setting up a macro for the trading part is necessary to preserve your sanity.
Sanity?! This is DWARF FORTRESS!!!
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An individual dwarf's preferences are also worthy of note. A metalsmith who likes a particular metal is more likely to produce higher-quality items when working with that metal, and if they get a Strange Mood (and you have smelted that type of metal in your fort before), they will absolutely insist on making their artifact out of that type of metal--nothing else will do (unless you use {forbidding} tricks to slip in something else). Similarly, a metalsmith who likes a specific type of weapon/armor is more likely to produce a higher-quality version of that type of item, and if they get a Strange Mood, their artifact will be that type of item.
So, if you want masterworks: Check your dwarves' preferences, and see who likes what metals. Candy is obviously best, but how soon can you get it? Find some guys who like the metals you can work with now. Correlate each individual dwarf's preferences, so you don't risk wasting a potentially very valuable mood on a useless artifact, like a silver breastplate. (Note: Making one "ridiculous" artifact ranged weapon, like a candy crossbow or featherwood blowgun, is actually quite advisable, as it's a great weapon to give to your Hammerer/Captain of the Guard. Never have to worry about beatings again, and they're still very effective against actual enemies.) If you have the dwarfpower (with the correct preferences), try to have a different smith for each weapon & piece of armor: One woman makes axes, another guy makes low boots, their neighbor makes mail shirts.
If you want good artifacts: Largely the same as above, but applied to a broader spectrum of dwarves, and looking more towards the future. If a dwarf likes a good military metal that you don't yet have in abundance, try to acquire just a little--usually, by importing steel or platinum. Keep that metal safely forbidden until you need it. Next, give each of your "chosen" a little bit of the appropriate metalsmith training, just enough to exceed any other moodable skills they may have, and then have them do non-mood things, like (almost) the entire Farming menu, for the rest of their life. And finally, wait.
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Okay, so in conclusion, there's really no good way to do it without exploits, and I should just import what I can, and train what I can. In the mean time, Masterwork Silver Warhammers for everybody! Let's hope they can crush the enemy before they get a shot in
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Make shields, Leggings are too exploity. I hope Toady fixes melting returns too, everything that's melted should give 90-100% return.
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He has no way to make shields other than adamantine, so he'd be losing it.
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Okay, so in conclusion, there's really no good way to do it without exploits
Not exactly. True, the "contents under pressure" trick of melting certain items to get back more than you put into them is clearly a bug/oversight, but being able to groom your dwarves to take advantage of a mood is not. (The best way to serve the will of Armok is to know the will of Armok!) Like all overseers who embark in an area almost entirely bereft of weapons-grade ores, you're just going to have to subsist on goblinite (or perhaps just humanite, in your case) until your smiths get sufficient experience and/or a mood or two. Have them forge full suits of armor, and melt down whatever you consider to be sub-par. The fact that chain leggings provide a positive return will be balanced out by the fact that other items don't, so you don't have to feel guilty for taking advantage of a bug.
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Yeah, goblinite and caravan trade will be your next best source instead of the melt trick if you don't want to use it. As Six said above, just make full suits and melt those down instead, if you don't want to exploit the high returns of leggings. Cage traps are great, strip the goblins of the precious metal and dump them into a safe marksman training pit. Also, silver warhammers are quite effective... plus they train the same skill as marksdwarves use when bashing with their (hopefully) metal crossbows. ;)
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EDIT: Also, if you want more adamantine, make minecarts out of them, then melt and repeat. It's a bit exploity though.
Actually, Toady fixed that in version 0.40.05 - they now require 6 wafers to make (as per the MATERIAL_SIZE - previously, they were getting the material size from the corresponding weapon index), and if you melt them down you're only going to get 1.8 wafers back.
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Here's what I'd do, preferably with magma forges because you'll be doing it a lot.
Set a single magma forge to melt items - remember that partial ingots are stored in the forge invisibly!
Set a series of forges, each working a different material into something that requires low amount of bars, like gauntlets or boots.
Set these forges to handle different skill levels of dwarf. "No one higher than competent may use copper" and "No one less than competent may use iron".
Set dwarves in a burrow that doesn't include food, drink, or bed, but does include their workshop.
Here's why: You want to use the lesser and more plentiful materials to train on, and the higher materials for either more training, or actual armor use. The burrow (the last time I was aware) keeps your dwarves inside, but not to the point of death. They'll stay inside until dehydrating, and then leave the burrow to get a drink and come back. Dwarves with problems work slower, so if they're hungry, thirsty, tired, and upset, they'll work very slowly. In science I performed, dwarves gain attributes based on time spent on an action, not the number of actions or quality of action, so a dwarf working slowly on one item will produce more attribute gain than a dwarf who quickly completes an item. I assume the same works with skill as it does with attribute.
Therefore, starve your metalsmiths for maximum gains.
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Therefore, starve your metalsmiths for maximum gains.
This captures the essence of !!SCIENCE!!
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both chalk and marble.
You're set. I had a fortress with no native iron and got a nice steel industry after a few years. The game will supply you with plenty of copper, but more importantly, iron. You have to import, scavenge, and melt, but it works. You don't even really need magma or coal. Trees/logs do the job plenty fine. You may need to dig out tree farms or start clear-cutting the caverns.
Caravans are important. I bought out all wood, iron/steel/pig iron bars, all non-decorated metal bolts, all iron and steel anvils. Further request these items. anvils melt to a single bar.
Slaughter goblin sieges and scavenge their parts. Reclaim stray bolts/arrows and melt them. Having no-quality armor/weapon stockpiles for iron/copper/bronze/silver and stocking them with bins will allow your dwarves to actually be reasonably efficient with the DF2012 hauling changes. Wheelbarrows important though, as the bins get heavy.
As for "training your armorsmith" that should really be a low priority. By the time I get up to around 100 dwarves, I usually have a reasonably skilled armorsmith migrant. Or you can embark with a proficient one, which is good enough. Mostly focus on getting items for everybody of sufficiently good material. Once you're obliterating sieges and melting their stuff, you should have enough copper to start manually training. I suppose if you have a bigger than average return on leggings or whatever, you can use steel and continually remelt to both train and generate more steel.
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I assume the same works with skill as it does with attribute.
You assume wrongly. Crafting skill is gained per item made - furnace operators skill up fastest when making alloys from ores or refining coke, smiths level fastest when performing multi-output jobs (make goblets/flasks for crafters; presumably gauntlets/high boots for armoursmiths; bolts are _not_ best for weaponsmithing, because the "stack" of bolts counts as a single item). And they level faster the more jobs they perform, so the fastest exp. gain for smiths is got by well-fed, drunk and well-rested dwarfs.
Therefore, starve your metalsmiths to sabotage their skill development.
FTFY.
Incidentally, you can get much slower work and thus more efficient (per metal used) attribute gains without the mood hits by preventing your smiths from drinking alcohol. Since eating and drinking are near-instantaneous now, artificially reducing the numbers of such jobs doesn't really save time any more.
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Ah, well that's a shame. It's still easier to max their attributes using slow actions, and thus their metalsmithing will be better since they have the associated attributes high. It's nearly useless, but not useless.
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I've intentionally embarked in areas with no metals at all, and done well. Embarks with gold and flux, but no weapon-grade metals are actually fairly easy. Trade gold goods for every scrap of metal and steel the caravans bring, and ask for more. Ask for hematite, limonite and magnetite stones, iron, pig iron and steel bars, and all the crafts, weapons, armor, musical instruments, anvils, and anything else that a magnet will stick to. Crank out gold crafts/goblets/statues/whatever, plus get your cook trained up and make masterwork roasts. You can easily buy out everything a caravan brings with good gold & food industries. Buy all the wonderfully crafted stuff the caravan brings, then toss it all in the melting pots. Also grab copper/bronze stuff to melt for use in training smiths. If you're short on trade goods and can't buy everything, skip on the decorated stuff. But it's not hard to get to the point where you can afford those as well.
Also collect goblinite (or humanite if you've managed to convince them to make non-caravan deliveries). Dodge-fall traps are good for harvesting it, but cage traps or just a bunch of weapon traps work as well.
Girlinhat recommended just using one smelter for melting because fractions are recorded for each smelter, but I've found that one smelter ends up being a bottleneck, and I use multiple smelters for melting objects. On average, each will have half a bar of fractional melts, but once you've filled up the pipeline, you don't lose any more. So in the long run it doesn't really hurt you, and it speeds up throughput considerably.
Have one forge that only allows dabblers to use it, and with repeating orders for copper or bronze armor bits. Have enough orders so your manager can't add more to that forge when you want something good built. Then have everyone in the fort who doesn't specialize in a moodable skill have armorsmithing turned on. Dwarf Therapist is useful for keeping track of this, just make sure the option for "Highlight moodable cells in labor/skill columns" is turned on. So all your haulers and farmers will come to that forge, crank out some crappy stuff, and raise their armorsmithing skill to be their highest moodable skill. Once a dwarf has armorsmithing as its highest moodable skill, turn it off for that dwarf to avoid having him/her waste more time/metal. Eventually one of them will get a non-possession strange mood and you'll get a legendary armorsmith.
Within a year or three you should be able to crank out masterwork steel armor for everyone in your military. No exploits needed.
Well, no exploits, unless you consider being able to sell a stack of pig tallow roasts for thousands of Urists to be an exploit. But selling gold crafts is certainly not an exploit. Or being able to harvest all the metal from a siege without any real risk. Harvesting goblinite without traps would make this much more difficult. But marksdwarves in towers armed with bone bolts can still collect a fair amount of goblinite relatively safely (as long as no enemy bowmasters show up). But you don't need to use any clear exploits like melting metals to get more than you started with.
Keith
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As for "training your armorsmith" that should really be a low priority.
This is more correct than perhaps widely realized. The impact of armor quality on performance is quite minimal, at least for protection from projectiles. If you look at the material science (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Material_science) page of the wiki (and do some simple math) you will find that increasing armor quality from zero to masterwork increases the momentum of a projectile it can block by only about 6%. Code diving by Urist da Vinci suggests that the same momentum-based mechanism is used for armor protection from melee attacks, meaning this should be about 6% gain as well. The gains from having armor user skill go from zero to legendary are also about 6% (but the real utility of armor user is it makes worn armor weigh nothing).
It is possible that an increase in momentum stopped by 6% could take a given piece of armor from not deflecting to deflecting a given attack, but this isn't very likely. It's much more likely that for most attack/armor combinations you would notice no change at all from having masterwork armor as compared to zero quality.
That being said, I (like I assume everyone else) try to armor my dwarves in the best quality armor I can get, just cuz, but if you want to protect them from sieges, any armor quality will be just fine. If you can manage to get them zero quality steel plate + mail shirt, they will be essentially invulnerable, except for the facial features (eyes, ears, nose), which are not covered. I had two green soldiers (skills no more than competent) take on a siege on their own (the trained military decided to go pickup equipment or something) and they easily killed them all, with one suffering a cut on the ear and the other unscathed. As a bonus, their skills went up a ton. And they didn't have good quality armor - being the lowest of my military squads they had nothing better than +finely crafted+.
Conversely, if you train your military really well, they should be able to take out a siege even without armor (leather is useless against pretty much all weapons, so I would call this "without"). Especially if you back them up with traps. I started in a similar situation to you, and got a siege rather early on, before I had managed to get much armor at all made. I had the military (of 2) retreat into my entry hallway, behind a few cage traps. Since they were I think "talented" axedwarves (started as proficient), they easily cut down the six or so gobbos that didn't get caged, even though I don't think they had any armor and may have been using copper axes. Then I melted down all the goblinite to make steel so that next year the fight wasn't even remotely fair, as described above.
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You may need to dig out tree farms or start clear-cutting the caverns. . . . Caravans are important. I bought out all wood. . . . Further request these items.
Important note: The best way to get wood is to not have any. When a caravan arrives on-site, it magically knows how many (unforbidden) cut logs you have in your stockpiles. If your stock of available logs is less than your current fortress population, the caravan automatically adds enough logs to make up the remainder. So, if you have 137 dwarves, just make sure to use up your entire supply of logs (burn them into charcoal or whatever) before every caravan shows up. Each one is guaranteed to bring you at least 137 more logs.
This works with cloth & leather, too, and I think a couple of other things, but they don't matter as much as wood.
Girlinhat recommended just using one smelter for melting because fractions are recorded for each smelter, but I've found that one smelter ends up being a bottleneck, and I use multiple smelters for melting objects.
The correct setup is one smelter per type of metal. If you're using two smelters to melt, say, bronze, you could have 0.6 bars of bronze "invisibly stuck" inside one smelter, and 0.4 bars in the other. But if you have just 1 smelter for bronze & only bronze, the "loss" is completely minimized.
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Girlinhat recommended just using one smelter for melting because fractions are recorded for each smelter, but I've found that one smelter ends up being a bottleneck, and I use multiple smelters for melting objects.
The correct setup is one smelter per type of metal. If you're using two smelters to melt, say, bronze, you could have 0.6 bars of bronze "invisibly stuck" inside one smelter, and 0.4 bars in the other. But if you have just 1 smelter for bronze & only bronze, the "loss" is completely minimized.
Right, but once you have on average .5 bars in each smelter, you don't lose any more. But if you have a bunch of stuff sitting around waiting to get melted when a siege arrives, you might as well not have it. I guess you could start with one smelter doing your melting, and if you start seeing a backlog, enable another, and so on. But if you have a caravan load of iron to melt, you might as well just turn on 3 or 4 smelters and get it done quickly. Yeah, with 4 smelters you'll end up with 0-3.6 bars sitting in the smelters when you are done, but if you got 20 bars from the caravan, "losing" ~2 isn't that bad. And you won't (on average) lose any from future melting. One the pipeline is full, you don't "lose" any more.
Keith
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Of note is that a bucket will give a 100% melt return. None is lost, but none is pulled from the Aether either. Not useful for your armorsmith, but your metalcrafters will certainly benefit.
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Of note is that a bucket will give a 100% melt return. None is lost, but none is pulled from the Aether either. Not useful for your armorsmith, but your metalcrafters will certainly benefit.
Actually your blacksmiths will benefit, since buckets use/train blacksmithing. To train metalcrafting, use chains instead--they also provide a 100% melt return.
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Okay, so in conclusion, there's really no good way to do it without exploits, and I should just import what I can, and train what I can. In the mean time, Masterwork Silver Warhammers for everybody! Let's hope they can crush the enemy before they get a shot in
Interestingly, combat speed is implemented in the new update so leather clad dwarves should be getting more actions in a given period of time than fully armoured ones. It could prove interesting to have a fast, hardhitting (silver blunts!) military. Perhaps a combination of massed crossbows behind fortifications and a rapid response team of hammerdwarves to rush out there and wreak some havoc among the downed goblins?
At any rate the wealth will attract goblinite, so you can gradually build up your armour supplies.
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Import metal for mail shirts and helms, then make everything else out of leather, wood for the shields.
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This might not help people who have already started a fort and need metal, but in embark you can buy copper ore and tin ore for 3 points a piece, depending on the exact ores chosen. You can also buy one piece of bituminous coal for 6 points each, and smelting will produce 8 coke bars from these. By getting rid of the useless splints, crutches, wheelbarrows, and quivers (replace those with leather to make some. It's cheaper) and minimizing cloth, thread, food, and other things that you can easily produce/buy later on, you can easily embark with 180+ bars worth of bronze and plenty of coal to forge with. Later on, you can upgrade to magma and import flux, iron, and even coal in all their forms. By doing this, it is completely possible to have a healthy metal industry, even with absolutely no ore on the map.
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This might not help people who have already started a fort and need metal, but in embark you can buy copper ore and tin ore for 3 points a piece, depending on the exact ores chosen. You can also buy one piece of bituminous coal for 6 points each, and smelting will produce 8 coke bars from these. By getting rid of the useless splints, crutches, wheelbarrows, and quivers (replace those with leather to make some. It's cheaper) and minimizing cloth, thread, food, and other things that you can easily produce/buy later on, you can easily embark with 180+ bars worth of bronze and plenty of coal to forge with. Later on, you can upgrade to magma and import flux, iron, and even coal in all their forms. By doing this, it is completely possible to have a healthy metal industry, even with absolutely no ore on the map.
Bismuth Bronze is cheaper per ingot than Bronze. Bismuth costs less than copper, and it counts for another bar in smelting, so you can get cheaper bars of bismuth bronze, which has the same combat value.
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This is more correct than perhaps widely realized. The impact of armor quality on performance is quite minimal, at least for protection from projectiles. If you look at the material science (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Material_science) page of the wiki (and do some simple math) you will find that increasing armor quality from zero to masterwork increases the momentum of a projectile it can block by only about 6%. Code diving by Urist da Vinci suggests that the same momentum-based mechanism is used for armor protection from melee attacks, meaning this should be about 6% gain as well. The gains from having armor user skill go from zero to legendary are also about 6% (but the real utility of armor user is it makes worn armor weigh nothing).
It is possible that an increase in momentum stopped by 6% could take a given piece of armor from not deflecting to deflecting a given attack, but this isn't very likely. It's much more likely that for most attack/armor combinations you would notice no change at all from having masterwork armor as compared to zero quality.
That being said, I (like I assume everyone else) try to armor my dwarves in the best quality armor I can get, just cuz, but if you want to protect them from sieges, any armor quality will be just fine. If you can manage to get them zero quality steel plate + mail shirt, they will be essentially invulnerable, except for the facial features (eyes, ears, nose), which are not covered. I had two green soldiers (skills no more than competent) take on a siege on their own (the trained military decided to go pickup equipment or something) and they easily killed them all, with one suffering a cut on the ear and the other unscathed. As a bonus, their skills went up a ton. And they didn't have good quality armor - being the lowest of my military squads they had nothing better than +finely crafted+.
Conversely, if you train your military really well, they should be able to take out a siege even without armor (leather is useless against pretty much all weapons, so I would call this "without"). Especially if you back them up with traps. I started in a similar situation to you, and got a siege rather early on, before I had managed to get much armor at all made. I had the military (of 2) retreat into my entry hallway, behind a few cage traps. Since they were I think "talented" axedwarves (started as proficient), they easily cut down the six or so gobbos that didn't get caged, even though I don't think they had any armor and may have been using copper axes. Then I melted down all the goblinite to make steel so that next year the fight wasn't even remotely fair, as described above.
I understand that the numbers add up in this way -- similarly, I have learned that material and quality don't make much difference for the blow-deflecting power of shields. However, to clad my military in anything less than a masterwork suit of steel just feels uncivilized.
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But bismuth bronze can't be made directly from ore, so it requires a lot more time and fuel to make.
Keith
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But bismuth bronze can't be made directly from ore, so it requires a lot more time and fuel to make.
Keith
Exactly. If bronze were your final goal, bismuth bronze would be very useful to conserve tin, but in this scenario, it's only used as a temporary solution for a lack of military metal, so it will be replaced with much better gear. If you used bismuth bronze from the start, it would result in the loss of much-needed fuel because you are unlikely to have a magma smelter or forge.
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Melting operations are well underway. They actually have been for a while, as every time my weapon smith turns out a low quality war hammer (as he did often as a beginner), I melted it down.
Turns out hammer dwarves with nothing but a shield and a little training aren't TOO useless. 9 of them killed 5 human cross bowmen with only one loss.
I did this to myself though. Couldn't quite make it as hard as I wanted (I've got scarce trees, not none), I'm just trying to find a way to improve my chances of survival.
For steel bars, even with a magma smelter I need refined coal (of any sort), right?
As for "training your armorsmith" that should really be a low priority.
This is more correct than perhaps widely realized. The impact of armor quality on performance is quite minimal, at least for protection from projectiles.
I'm assuming this ISNT the same for weapons? Either way, I might stop finding ways to train, and just up the melting industry instead.
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For steel bars, even with a magma smelter I need refined coal (of any sort), right?
Yup. Steel and pig iron need coal for carbon. They don't need any for fuel if you have a magma smelter. So they need about half as much.
Keith
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Melting operations are well underway. They actually have been for a while, as every time my weapon smith turns out a low quality war hammer (as he did often as a beginner), I melted it down.
Turns out hammer dwarves with nothing but a shield and a little training aren't TOO useless. 9 of them killed 5 human cross bowmen with only one loss.
I did this to myself though. Couldn't quite make it as hard as I wanted (I've got scarce trees, not none), I'm just trying to find a way to improve my chances of survival.
For steel bars, even with a magma smelter I need refined coal (of any sort), right?
As for "training your armorsmith" that should really be a low priority.
This is more correct than perhaps widely realized. The impact of armor quality on performance is quite minimal, at least for protection from projectiles.
I'm assuming this ISNT the same for weapons? Either way, I might stop finding ways to train, and just up the melting industry instead.
Yes, you will need coal or coke to make steel, even with a magma smelter. If there are no trees on the surface, and you are desperate, ready your militia, breach the caverns, send out woodcutters and haul the underground trees' wood inside your fort while under guarded protection from said militia, and seal it off. Then, make charcoal with your new wood.
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This is more correct than perhaps widely realized. The impact of armor quality on performance is quite minimal, at least for protection from projectiles.
I'm assuming this ISNT the same for weapons? Either way, I might stop finding ways to train, and just up the melting industry instead.
I believe that weapon quality influences chance to hit (although I am not 100% sure of this - the wiki claims that masterwork items get a x2 modifier for weapon to hit and armor deflection, but masterwork armor only increases deflection by 6%), and hence is quite important. It definitely does influence the sharpness of edged weapons, increasing it by a factor of 2 from zero to masterwork quality. As you can imagine, this has a significant impact on how well they cut up critters. So, in short, yes, I believe weapon quality is very important. I always have my weaponsmiths train by making bolts (for which quality is not so important as it doesn't impact hit chance, also masterwork bolts make for unhappy smiths when they are lost) and/or trap components, and then move them up to actual weapons.
If I can get DFHack working on my computer (I run 64-bit linux, so its nontrivial) I will see if I can run some tests of melee combat with different weapon quality, but I can't promise this will happen any time soon.
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The (ch)easiest training would be to make gauntlets, since they get double exp that way.
Combine that with weaponsmith training, making large serrated disks. The disks smelt into 150% of the bars, so you'll have plenty of bars for those gauntlets.
Sell the useless masterwork gauntlets and disks, to avoid tantrums. Or melt them slowly over time, you get less penalties when they make more of the masterwork items.
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Sell the useless masterwork gauntlets and disks, to avoid tantrums. Or melt them slowly over time, you get less penalties when they make more of the masterwork items.
Specifically, a destroyed masterwork produces something like 1/x * 500 unhappy, where x is the number of masterworks produced. In this way, if you produce 500 masterworks, then melting one will have a 1/500th effect of destruction, and leave the creator fine.
If you produce ~10 masterworks and sell them, then from then on any melted are pretty negligible. Like, if you sell 10, and melt one, then you've got a max 1/11th unhappy effect, which is totally manageable.
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Sell the useless masterwork gauntlets and disks, to avoid tantrums. Or melt them slowly over time, you get less penalties when they make more of the masterwork items.
Specifically, a destroyed masterwork produces something like 1/x * 500 unhappy, where x is the number of masterworks produced. In this way, if you produce 500 masterworks, then melting one will have a 1/500th effect of destruction, and leave the creator fine.
If you produce ~10 masterworks and sell them, then from then on any melted are pretty negligible. Like, if you sell 10, and melt one, then you've got a max 1/11th unhappy effect, which is totally manageable.
40d:Item Quality (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Item_quality) page on the wiki says 1000/x. The information's gone missing on subsequent version pages.
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Sell the useless masterwork gauntlets and disks, to avoid tantrums. Or melt them slowly over time, you get less penalties when they make more of the masterwork items.
Specifically, a destroyed masterwork produces something like 1/x * 500 unhappy, where x is the number of masterworks produced. In this way, if you produce 500 masterworks, then melting one will have a 1/500th effect of destruction, and leave the creator fine.
If you produce ~10 masterworks and sell them, then from then on any melted are pretty negligible. Like, if you sell 10, and melt one, then you've got a max 1/11th unhappy effect, which is totally manageable.
Good to know! That explains a funny incident in my current fort, when a new migrant bowyer made one masterwork bone crossbow, which was stolen by a kea, and then he went straight into melancholy.