Bay 12 Games Forum

According to research being made in the weapons research thread any metal armor is good enough to stop iron.. but only bronze and steel pierces iron effectively.

So, if you want to kill goblins with ease, aim for bronze or better weapons while keeping your iron suits.

Actually im using more magma than ever. And no i dont mind having some dwarves haul stuff betwen all those z layers.

So... in sum... bludgeoning weapons work almost equally well, with a marginal advantage going for the more primal materials, such as silver and copper, with adamantine making lousy hammers but outstanding armor even against bashing stuff.

Slashing and piercing weapons can be divided betwen adamantine pierces steel, steel pierces bronze and bronze pierces iron. Everything else sucks as it is too brittle to pierce even copper armor. And the factor of suckyness is about the same (10%), wich i wonder if it doesnt extend to rock swords, wooden and glass weapons being similar to iron in regards to spears and "lucky" axe hits...

Similarly i wonder if stonefall traps follow the statistics of all bludgeoning weapons. It would certainly explain the loss of efectiveness of those "cheap" traps.

p.s. was watching this monty python video and thinking about the present state of dwarf fortress combat...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjEcj8KpuJw

So, there I was, a fortress with 5 artifacts done, food stockpiles so overflowing that i had to turn off farming, an underground spanning 171 z-levels wich i only started to graze as of yet (found a cave almost 20 levels high with only a single giant olm at the bottom, fending off the ocasional kobold...

...and then the goblins came. Ambush! , almost on top of my main gates. First unpleasant surprise: the option to disallow civilians into outdoors isnt there anymore, so a few got slain by the approaching creatures. Then came the equipment hurdles: axedwarves that stubornly refused to let go of their wooden axes, hammerdwarves wich are good at breaking every limb of enemies but lowsy at actually killing (on my arena tests in most of my one-vs-one armored fights the dwarf with the hammer almost always won...taking a rather long time doing it), and hunters-turned-crossbowmen wich decided that bolts are for pansies and "crosshammers" being the true dwarven way... 3x5 dwarf squads, this against about 5 goblins, almost each of them a spearman.

Results: 8 dwarven deaths, 1 being a baby and 4 civilians caught outside, 3 axe lords dead (clad in iron chain) and 5 other warriors wounded (im impressed with hospitals by the way... except for one critically wounded dwarf, still bed-ridden, all the others recovered in a fraction of the time they would before.

So... some adjustements were in order. Made my main fortress into one major burrow, allowing only Woodcutters/Hunters and Engiminers outside (in the future im clading them at the very least in leather armor+shields and give them training). Placed some Wardogs in strategic positions and carpeted the entrance with cage/weapon/stonefall traps.

Another Ambush quickly sprung, with double the numbers of goblins, featuring 4 ranged goblins and an assortement of about 5-6 meleers. Ive let them test my traps before reaching my defenders. While they sucessfully bypassed a number of traps that in 40d would have probably killed 2 or 3 sieges worth of goblins, the surviving ones were severly weakened before engaging war dog/dwarf and mandrill alike. While i still had some equipment problems, this battle was sucessfully fought with 2 canine losses and a single civilian woodcutter death.
To add insult to injury, the ranged goblins got surprised by the guards of the first human caravan to reach my fortress... one of them literally whiping a goblin crossbowman to death.

And then i crashed. I have a seasonal save, but i'll have to redo this last battle all over again assuming they came again :p

Not my fault, it's been out for a month.

You could probably symlink version seven to libs/libjpeg.so.8, though. It won't actually be used either, assuming nobody is using jpeg tilesets.

You aren't, are you?

Nope. Im just testing df_28_181_40d17_linux.tar.bz2  df-40d17-head.tar.bz2 as linked. Havent placed any graphical stuff in this linux version yet. The previous error mentioned is gone (TIFFReadRGBAImage) *shrug*. And yes, as far as i know people use either png or bmp tilesets. Im yet to see a jpeg one.

Im on 9.10. Same error on my case, so i assume its the same in all versions post 8

Reclaimed. 3 wood spiders spawned in my previous initial embarked and swiftly made a webbed meal out of my initial 7-man team. Orc mod really spices things up a bit :p