Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[blue emu]

I have very little Adamantine on my current map, and probably cannot afford to make both Breastplates and Mail Shirts out of that material. I will have to go with either Adamantine Breastplates and Steel Mail Shirts, or else Steel Breastplates and Adamantine Mail Shirts.

Which combination would offer better overall protection? I'm currently leaning towards Steel Breastplates and Adamantine Mail Shirts, since that uses less Adamantine and provides Adamantine-quality coverage over a larger area (arms, elbows).

[Lagslayer]

Do items use more than one bar now? I didn't know they fixed that...

Anyways, adamantine would probably be more valuable as a breastplate, as it is the primary defense against blunt attacks, and is far above and beyond what a steel breastplate can do. Adamantine mail shirts are better, too, but a steel mail shirt can still deflect edge attacks very well so long as the weapon in question is not made of adamantine.

[Hyndis]

You can have them wear 3 chainmail shirts and 1 breastplate all at the same time.

[blue emu]

You can have them wear 3 chainmail shirts and 1 breastplate all at the same time.

Yes, but as stated above, I won't have the Adamantine required for that.

[UnrealJake]

You can have them wear 3 chainmail shirts and 1 breastplate all at the same time.

Yes, but as stated above, I won't have the Adamantine required for that.

I think the point is, go for breastplate since they can only have one. With three chainmail you don't need to worry so much...

[Mister Always]

Breastplates do not cover the arms. Mail shirts do. Go for shirts.

[Dutchling]

Breastplates do not cover the arms. Mail shirts do. Go for shirts.

this, but if you want maximum protection go for 1 candy shirt and 2 steel ones.

btw: I call it candy because I know no other short name and not because I see it as a massive spoiler although one could argue that the time I saved by typing candy instead of adamantine is now wasted by typing this.
btbtw: Chrome thinks I mean Diophantine instead of adamantine.

[Hyndis]

I make a uniform with dwarves aiming for steel armor. Since I almost never have enough steel to actually give everyone full steel armor, including three steel chainmail shirts, they pick up whatever else they can find until the steel becomes available.

Yes, I even buy armor from the elves. A rope reed chainmail shirt (huh?) is better than nothing.

Dwarves happily discard it and get upgrades hot off of the forge if something better is available. They will continue to do so until they are wearing masterwork steel armor.

Its generally only the new recruits who get stuck with the elven junk. Should the new require survive long enough they will be able to get some upgrades, but because they're last in line to the armories they don't get the best selection of gear.

[wuphonsreach]

The key there is whether you allow "partial matches" or not when setting up the uniform.  With partial matches turned on, they'll pickup wood, leather, cloth, even if you say "metal breastplate" or "steel breastplate" in the uniform definition.  With partial matches turned off, you have to have the exact piece / material that they want or they'll turn their nose up at it.

Since I try to avoid needless micromanaging, I always define my uniforms with "metal breastplate" (for instance), and turn off partial matches.  That gets them to at least pickup copper and they will automatically upgrade to bronze, iron then steel as it comes available.  My primary squad quickly ends up kitted out in masterwork iron/steel, the last squad ends up with junky copper/bronze or the not-so-fine iron/steel.  The hand-me-down system works very well.

The only time you run into issues is if there's an artifact copper piece laying around, in which case they get all giddy and hold on to that rare treasure.

[Bognor]

Going by the wiki, chainmail covers the upper legs as well as the upper arms.

An alternative would be to make adamantine robes or dresses, which both cover more-or-less the entire body.  Although I think being clothing rather than armor, they'd eventually wear out.

[Alastar]

It's worth mentioning that adamantine isn't strictly superior to steel. It's not very good at stopping projectiles and may also be infererior against things like scourges/morningstars.

If steel was reliably better against projectiles and adamantine reliably better against blades while being similarly ineffective against blunt weapons, I'd use adamantine for limb armour only... I'm more concerned about slashing hits to the extremities and bolts to the body than the other way round. Unfortunately it may not be this simple, there could be lots of accurately simulated details that wouldn't register in a 'full steel armour vs. full candy armour' arena fight.