Bay 12 Games Forum

For blunt weapons I think all the material properties make a difference, just not really enough to matter.  Its hard to tell the difference between a broken bone and a brokener bone and it takes alot of data to reliably tell the difference between different materials getting stopped by armor 3% of the time vs 2% of the time, or whatever.     

As far as anyone can tell a shield just blocks or doesn't block and material does not effect that.  Now when your soldier decides to hit something with a shield, material will likely matter. 

Our sciencesmiths have a couple of theories about ranged weapon performance.  Heavier metals may perform better because ranged weapons have a value in the raws that determines the maximum projectile velocity.  A light arrow and a heavy arrow will both be going at this maximum velocity, so the heavier arrow will just have more energy behind it.  Alternatively arrows are almost as pointy as the whip (contact area 2, whip is 1), so its possible that just about any metal is sharp/hard/inelastic enough to penetrate armor arbitrarily well.  The only remaining thing that makes a difference is weight (density). 

Try fishing in the cavern water.  Murky pools seem to be lifeless fairly often, whats your embark biome BTW? 

Anyway I use my military to feed my dwarfs.  At first they can wrestle to death groundhogs and crundles and stuff.  Once they have metal armor and weapons everything butcherable becomes a food animal. 

Military is SLOW at first if you don't have anyone with military skills to teach them.  Individual drills seem to be more useful for dorfs who already have some experience. 

Get them wearing a few cloaks each and then set up a danger room, or make some real armor and training weapons and have them go beat groundhogs and horses to death. 

I guess you could think of it as a training hammer? 

I used to build my barracks with a room for steel weapons and a room for silver weapons.  To switch between them you had to disallow weapons, dump the ones they were holding, lock them in the correct room and reassign weapons.

Also, I used to set up a whole plumbing system to drain water from a stream, through my dining hall as a waterfall and down into a chasm, now I just set up one of those quantum mist generators. 

Sounds similar to my idea. Did you put serrated discs to "pre-process" them?

Yea our ideas basically did the same thing.  I set up mine for live capture and breeding, but I did use serrated disc traps for "post-processing".  In 40d each piece of a creature produced a separate usable bone stack so at harvest time I would drop things onto a weapon trap.  Did you ever get yours to work?  One that could run continuously AND push everything to the workshop location would be pretty neat. 

Alas.. The world map SAYS I should have an aquifer, but when I dig down into the beach I can't seem to find it. The other biome is an evil sand desert, and doesn't have one either. Guess I'll have to resort to pumps instead.

Aquifers are kindof strange like that.  Pumps might work, but its easier to just drain the water off the map, since pressure should drain all the top layers instantly while the rest hopefully oozes into the device carrying any sea life with it. 

If you have an aquifer somewhere (ocean = you do), channel out some tiles of it on the lowest level you can and put a bridge that is larger then the hole, connected to a lever.  Surround this bridge with cage traps, connect this room to the ocean and include floodgates or something to close it back off.  Basically, the aquifer acts like a singularity when the lever is pulled all the ocean water is pressurized into the aquifer, and the continuous flow should push water creatures into the cage traps which you can later collect.  I built one directly under an ocean that froze in winter, and the thing would suck up all kinds of fish and mermaids and stuff.

I have noticed that too.  Veins seem to act 3d, at least in a limited way.  It might just be because there is so much of it you cant help but have veins of stuff pile up on top of each other.