Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh, you could do it with luck. Modern no-points embarks can work. Break down the wagon, make a butcher, tanner, and bowyer. Butcher the animals, make a crossbow with their bones and tan the hides. Convert bowyer to craftshop and tanner to leather worker. Make remaining bones into bolts and pray you have enough for hunting something for more bones. Leather worker makes quivers. Repeat as necessary.

For the long term it's not so great, but you can survive for a time this way. Until the first siege, with luck. After that . . . IF you get lucky shots in and kill some enemy axmen, and IF the rules allow some slippage for weapons you've earned by sheer guts, you could potentially wind up with an ax for cutting trees and make an actual fort after a while. I wouldn't ask the rules to slip all the way to "If you killed to get it you can kill with it" but I would ask that you be allowed to chop trees with the weapons you gain. I don't think picks-as-weapons exist for any nation but site dwarves. I've never heard of combat logs involving non-dwarves fighting with picks.

Ah yes, so long as the no metal rule is allowed to be bent a bit to allow for you to be able to utilize the spoils of war then you could get an axe for wood cutting if you were lucky enough to get attacked by a squad of axe goblins. With the ability to chop wood you then can generate both building materials and fuel for your glass and ceramics industries which would allow you to build a proper long term fort. If the no metal rule is iron clad and includes the spoils of war then I think its just a bit too over the top.

With the above mentioned restrictions you should pretty much forgo using melee troops at all and make everyone in the fort a part of the crossbow militia. Actually, come to think of it, could one even run a fortress at all with no stone, metal or trade? That means no wood cutting axes and no picks so you can't even excavate a living space and have no access to wood. Without access to wood you have no carpentry and no fuel for a ceramics or glass industry and without a pick you can't get down to the magma for alternate power sources. With the stated added restriction of no trading this means you literally cannot build any form of shelter or build literally anything outside of simple crafts. I guess you would just have a bunch of dwarves sitting a field waiting for death?

Edit: I guess you could min and max your embark points to bring as much raw glass, wood and ceramic building material as possible and then use that limited supply to build a primitive shelter and then just hole up until something with building destroyer shows up and breaks your door down and murders everyone. It would be a brutal embark scenario because basically you would have to pack the entire fortress in on the backs of your starting 7.

I actually made a thread about this not long ago. I couldn't find even a single large predator, even giant versions, that would be in the slightest bit aggressive towards my dwarves or even their cats. It was ridiculous I had giant jaguars and packs of giant dingos fleeing from completely unarmed civilian dwarfs and the fortress cat over and over again. If you have a save handy please report it on Mantis so Toady can be made aware of the extent of the problem. It's a pretty serious bug that I'm not even sure he is even properly aware of.

Quote from: Toady One

Yeah, your "deflection roll" is based on your armor use skill, but in the first calculation your dodge roll counts more and replaces your deflection roll if it is higher.  That roll is thrown into an equation with the hit roll to get the "squareness" of the attack from 0 to 20.  There's some pure luck at this stage though, and the squareness can sometimes be increased regardless of the rolls.

Later, the same deflection roll is used directly with relevant worn items one by one to modify attack momentum using the material/etc. -- dodge rolls don't enter into this.  Item familiarity can increase this deflection bonus.

In addition to speed, high armor skill also decreases your "clunkiness" with heavy worn objects.  The clunkiness sum applies a minus to many skill rolls (mostly combat, but a few non-combat).

It's not as simple as it not effecting the chances, apparently.

All these years I had an incomplete picture of exactly how armor user worked. I had always thought the benefits of armor user in battle were solely an indirect result of the decrease to your speed and encumbrance penalties from wearing said armor. I also had no idea item familiarity was calculated into the deflection equation or that the armor user skill applied a direct bonus to the initial deflection roll. I should have known Toady would have like half a dozen variables involved. Thanks for the informative heads up. 

I used to live in Michigan.
Now I live in Arizona.

Rattlesnakes, scorpions, black widows, sheesh.

The high desert is beautiful, albeit a bit harsh. I live a few hundred miles to your east in the mountains of new Mexico.

Creatures do suffer penalties for injured body parts. It's why you will often see a skilled fighter wade into battle and just cut down their opponents with seemingly little effort until they finally get tagged by a lucky or well placed hit. Once hurt you will notice how fights will tend to snowball against the injured party as the injuries begin to impair them leading to yet further injuries and even greater impairment.

Being called "light sabers" and having 5x velocity according to the wiki, I always thought whips were very fast weapons. Id imagine myself dual wielding whips and having 10 attacks for each of the oponents (with multi strykes and 5x speed u know?).
But it turns out whips are very slow... when a sword attack is very fast a whip attack is fast, when an axe attack is slow, a whip is very slow... even shields are faster...
Unless i am missing something big here, thats quite disapoiting.

I mean, whips break the sound barrier u know? That crack sound they make is a sonic boom!

How come they are so slow now? 

Your confusing the velocity multiplier and the prepare and recover speed. The velocity multiplier is used basically as a damage multiplier and it simulates the speed the tip of the whip moves at. The prepare and recover speed is how long it takes to execute an attack with the weapon. Whips are quite ungainly weapons to wield.