Bay 12 Games Forum

Density just affects momentum, and this scales very degressively. Small advantage for silver (or platinum if you make that happen), so small it's hard to verify in-game.

There's a pass/fail check that involves the weapon's impact yield, armour density, and contact area. Hammers and maces will pass this against any common armour material even when they're made of copper (lowest impact yield of the regular weapon materials). Impact Yield might matter occasionally for flails or nonpenetrating hits of edged weapons, when a weapon with a large contact area hits a small body part.

A lot of the input is fairly repetitive and can be commited to muscle memory, if the interface supports it. Digging out rectangular rooms, a stairwell of a size we know in advance, a new hauling route following a common pattern, navigating individual screens and lists.
We need to do a lot of mouse waving now for things where that makes absolutely no sense. It feels like a throwback to times when mouse-driven GUIs were new and exciting, but nobody had a clue how to make them efficient. A good modern interface is laid out for convenient mouse use but entirely controllable by keyboard. Neither is currently the case.

Take the stocks screen for example. One would expect to be able to select individual entries with keyboard or mouse, then hit a hotkey for the usual dump/forbid/etc options. We can't do the former, and the mouse controls are on the far side of the entry.

I appreciate a lot of the interface cleanup and consolidation, and the additional mouse functionality in places where it's helpful. But fundamentally, having almost everything controllable by a series of hotkeys in an interface that laid that out clearly was a better fit.

Picks are probably the best overall weapon: middling contact area that's small enough to dig through tough things and large enough to take off humanoid limbs, lots of brute force. Picks and morningstars stand out in that they still deliver perfectly good bludgeons on nonpenetrating hits, other edged weapons don't hit with competitive force. As such, even a copper pick is a fine weapon, and a steel pick the best of both worlds.

That said, with a vastly superior weapon material you probably want an edged weapon with a large contact area. Armour penetration is a given, you want to sever body parts rather than poking neat holes. So, axes.

The most important part is having full metal coverage, which you can get with 5 bars, 1 more for a metal weapon: Helm (1), boots (2x1/2), gauntlets (2*1/2), mail shirt (2).
Metal shields may be worth an additional bar - wooden ones protect just as well, but they break easily if dwarves attack with them.

Greaves (2) and breastplates (3) take a fair bit of metal and are quite heavy - those two items weigh more than the full-coverage uniform above.
However, they have the advantage of stopping hits entirely; flexible armour like mail shirts and leggings just convert edged hits to blunt.
Leggings (1) are mutually exlusive with greaves, and add little if you have a mail shirt and high boots.
I usually arm auxiliaries before I get additional armour layers for my career soldiers.

Whip, morningstar: Better can openers than anything we can make. I will happily import them because material and quality don't matter too much for blunt weapons. A morningstar is still a better hammer if the edged penetration checks fail.

Dagger, tool knives: Interesting half measures. Very fine stabs that get through superior armour, weak cuts that are still faster than stabs/bludgeons against small fleshy things.
Long sword: Decent generalist, both attacks are strong.
If I could produce them out of good materials in high qualities, I'd use them a lot more.

Flail: Should be weaker against armour, better at pulping flesh than other blunt weapons. Not really attractive, but worth considering if reanimating undead are a concern.
The rest don't seem very useful.

On top of which, spears are better in both contact area and penetration depth, which is the essence of piercing combat.

I prefer picks over any other dwarf-made weapon. Contact area is at a sweet spot - large enough to dismember goblin-sized enemies, small enough to do well against armour considering they have twice the velocity of most stabbing attacks, no pronounced weaknesses. They all have their uses though.

Unfortunately, I agree that lead is not a good material for edged weapons - shear fracture is the most important characteristic unless you want to use it as a fancy club. Picks should actually be usable as such: a mini-maul (same contact area) that you can use along with a shield, or something between a flail (large contact area, pulps things nicely) and mace (smaller contact area, better can opener).

For blunt weapons, density is practically the only thing that matters; there is a check that involves the weapon's impact yield but that only seems to matter for slashing attacks that fail to slash (hits can glance off heavy armour for very large contact areas). Even the effect of density is quite subtle and tends to get lost in the noise for the standard materials; lead isn't that much heavier than silver.

If you need to dispatch (armoured?) reanimating undead without creating a mess, but want a slight edge (ha!) over blunt weapons for soft targets... you may be able to convince yourself a lead pick is what you want. As a general purpose weapon, it will be inferior to regular picks.

When evaluating metal leggings - do we take full metal coverage granted (helm, mail shirt, boots, gauntlets already)? My reasoning:

a) if not, I'd rather add pieces that get me on the way to full coverage. Helm, gauntlets, high boots together weigh less than leggings, and don't seem individually worse per metal bar expended.
b) if yes, we're already at 34Γ (more for copper or bronze) and 5 metals bars of body armour, with leggings adding 22Γ more. My concern is that leggings may not be worth their weight just for a second layer. It's much easier to justify the weight for greaves - and if I'm reluctant to expend two metal bars on greaves, spending one on leggings seems worse. Both are a luxury.
Bone greaves and leather armour may be flimsy, but they don't weigh us down, don't cost any metal, and with proper armour below we don't rely on them - it's ok if they break, and replacing them isn't urgent. I get the reluctance about wooden shields - if those break, we lose something that's actually important rather than "nice to throw in". However, I think I'd rather have a metal shield than buckler and lleggings if we're conscious about weight and metal use.

Something I can see if our troops can handle the weight and we have something like abundant iron, limited flux: Iron greaves and breastplate over steel. Full coverage in our best material, rigid and still durable layer on top, using half as much steel as a full set. Lesser metals tend to be less elastic, so in some case they may even be advantageous.

Things get interesting if resources are tight. A few fully armoured and well trained soldiers vs. a large armed militia that represents a similar investment is an interesting comparison - I've been happy with both, depending on what I needed them to do.
I guess my point is: Giving a civilian a metal weapon and a wooden shield makes them a lot more capable in combat for a very low investment. Replacing their civilian clothes with organic armour saves time and resources eventually, because it doesn't wear out. Neither slows them down.
If we go beyond this and consider partial metal armour... how much and what bits?

It seems we agree on metal greaves and breastplate as the last things to complete a full suit.
But does a mail shirt really do more for the metal/weight than helm/gauntlets/boots? I'm not convinced, and quite sure that leggings do less. Headshots are scary, limb armour improves punches and kicks - which still happen in armed combat.
Metal buckler and bone helm, or wooden shield and metal helm? If we have metal body armour already, I'd feel safer with the latter.