40d:Combat

This guide relates to soldier-level combat, whether applied to military units in Dwarf Fortress mode or the character in Adventurer mode. For organizing your troops, and managing the warfare aspect of Dwarf Fortress, see Military.

Combat Mechanics

Attacking

As an Adventurer, you can attack your opponent by running into him, or by pressing [shift-a] and selecting your target. If you're standing in the same square as your opponent or fighting him across a stairway, you can attack him by pressing 5 on the numpad. In Dwarf Fortress mode, all combat is automatic, but see squads for controlling where your soldiers go.

The attacker rolls to hit, and the defender rolls to parry, block, and/or dodge. If the attack is parried or blocked, the defender attempts a single counter-strike on the attacker. If the counter-strike is blocked, the attacker does not get a counter-counter strike.

If the attacker hits, a random location is struck. It is unclear whether each individual part of a limb (say, upper arm, lower arm, and hand) each have the same chance of being struck as the head, but due to the greater number of limbs, it is more likely to hit a limb than the torso or head. In this light, weapons with critical boost are less effective, because a leg does not have any internal organs to injure.

Damage

Calculation

The amount of damage done by a weapon is affected by nine factors: weapon type, weapon material, weapon quality, weapon wear, attacker strength (presumably), the "degree of success" of the attack roll, the armor worn by the defender, and the toughness of the defender.

Weapon quality can increase your skill by up to double. Each level of quality grants a 20% bonus to skill, plus one skill level.

The exact effects of armor are vague. From the numbers (70 for plate, 40 for chain, vs. about 100 damage for most weapons), we can guess that armor simply subtracts from damage.

Linking damage to the degree of success of an attack roll means that higher skill will usually deal more damage. (It's also possible that damage is linked directly to skill.)

Damage to any particular body part is cumulative; if you attack with a badly worn, wooden mace with no skill for long enough (and your blows aren't simply "glancing off"), you will eventually break somebody's arm, even if the victim thinks it feels like being slowly whipped to death by scented shoelaces. (or, more likely, kills you first.)

Body Part Damage

Damage to a body part comes in six flavors:

unhurt

lightly wounded

moderately wounded

broken

mangled

lopped off

Each weapon causes the "lightly wounded" and "moderately wounded" levels using different messages. For example, a blunt weapon causes bruises and sprains, respectively, while a sword causes cuts and bad gashes. Although these indicators tell you the condition of the limbs, they don't tell you the exact amount of health they have. (ex: A body part can still stay "lightly wounded" sometimes if hit again, if the shot doesn't simply "glace away").

Broken or mangled limbs are useless. Breaking an arm or hand will cause a creature to drop his weapon/shield, or make it unable to attack with that limb. Breaking a leg will cause a two-legged creature to fall, making his extinction much easier. (Oddly, cutting off both arms and both legs of a bipedal creature won't make them fully immobile. Maybe they crawl around with their jaws.) It also takes two broken limbs to make a 4 legged creature fall.

For further information, see Wound.

Falling Down

In a word, don't. A creature's speed will drop to 1/3 of normal while on the ground. Use [s] to stand up again in Adventure Mode.

Bleeding and Pain

In addition to body part damage, weapons also cause bleeding and pain.

Heavy bleeding has three effects: First effect of constant heavy bleeding is that the creature will become faint; the second effect would be that the creature will become pale; lastly, if bleeding still continues, the creature will bleed to death.

Pain causes three effects, in increasing amounts: less combat effective (damage? odds of hitting? slower?) and nausea (even less effective?). If creature is under extreme pain they could also fall unconscious (give into pain). More toughness the creature has, the more damage they can take before giving into pain.

Getting Weapons Stuck

A piercing or slashing weapon can become stuck in an opponent. There are two things you can do when this happens: twist the weapon in the wound, or try to retrieve your weapon. Walking away, or pressing [shift-i] and selecting your weapon (which is red) will attempt to pull the weapon from the wound. Presumably, your strength is compared to your opponent, and grasping the weapon with additional hands/limbs will improve your odds of success. If you fail to wrestle the weapon from your opponent, you will lose hold of it. To try again, grab the weapon (via wrestling) with a hand, and you will again have the option to regain control on the [shift-i] menu.

If you attack a creature while your weapon is stuck in them, you twist the weapon: it causes additional bleeding and pain, but has no other effect (even if stuck in the head!). The advantage to twisting a weapon, on the other hand, is that you never miss. This is often the fastest way to take down a large living creature; they often have great armor, and ignore the majority of your attacks, but twisting a weapon five times will knock them unconscious with heavy bleeding. At this point, you can continue to twist your weapon to ensure death, or retrieve your weapon with no contest in order to attack other creatures. If your opponent has no blood, and is immune to pain (e.g., undead), then twisting your weapon will have no effect.

Knock Away

Occasionally when fighting, a weapon strike will connect with enough force to propel the victim several tiles away. This is a fairly common occurrence on killing blows, but can happen during normal combat as well. That can prove to be an advantage, especially in adventure mode, since that creature will be out of commission for a short time while you deal with his friends.

Blunt weapons (maces and hammers) are supreme at causing this effect. With enough strength and a good weapon it'll be common even during normal combat, and upon killing blow, the creature may fly up to 20 tiles away. Unless there is something in the way, of course.

Swords and axes can also cause this if the weapon is of high enough quality, and the attacker is skilled enough. However, it never happens to the degree it does with blunt weaponry.

Once in the air, the victim is surrounded by a blue background to signify that is flying. It will fly at a very rapid pace until it hits an object, a creature, or the ground. If a creature is hit by the flying victim, he'll be stunned and knocked prone, but uninjured. Additionally, if the victim hits an obstacle with enough force, he will blow apart and disassemble into a pile of body parts, some of which might fly a couple tiles away from the impact zone.

Weapon Analysis

Bows and Crossbows

These weapons have a significant critical boost (single attacks have been seen to injure 3 different organs), but their main advantage is that they have range. Much as the common availability of rifles allowed every soldier to attack simultaneously (as opposed to merely the front rank of a unit actually attacking the enemy), a legion of bowmen will all strike at once. The poor performance of crossbows, and especially bows, in close combat suggests that ranged weapons are better with a "skirmish screen" of melee troops.

The effectiveness of ranged weapons is greatly affected by the geometry of the area: an Adventurer is walking around blind corners on a regular basis, but a fortress can easily set up a corridor where enemies must face a long, unobstructed march through withering fire. Ideally, this corridor should occur right after a blind corner the invading force must follow.

Crossbows are used by dwarves and humans; bows are used by elves and humans.

Maces, Hammers, Flails, Mauls, and Morningstars

Considering that you're going to be hitting limbs most of the time, blunt weapons do the most damage and are most likely to break or mangle a limb, reducing the creature's ability to carve you a second throat. Blunt weapons don't hurt internal organs much, so they're less ideal for getting a quick kill on large or heavily-armored enemies, but their high damage makes them perfect for killing weak or small enemies.
Blunt weapons are also supreme at causing enemies to fly away when struck with enough force.

Dwarves cannot build flails, morningstars, or mauls. The maul is a human weapon, and dwarves cannot wield it, as it is two-handed even for a human. Morningstars and flails can be wielded by dwarves.

Swords and Axes

Slashing damage causes more bleeding (presumably), but does less damage than blunt weapons. Slashing weapons are more likely to cut off limbs, though the exact mechanics are unclear. Removing a limb means you can't hit it again, so if you are cutting off limbs, the odds of hitting the torso or head increase. Axes do slightly more damage, while swords have a slight critical boost, causing more internal damage on the head and torso. Thus, swords are slightly geared more towards large creatures, while axes are slightly better for small creatures. Axes weigh more than swords, but it is unclear if this has any effect on the combat mechanics.

Only humans can wield two-handed swords or halberds, and dwarves cannot build scimitars, even though they can wield them.

Spears and Pikes

Piercing damage appears to remove limbs only rarely; it is better for torso and head hits. Since torso and head hits are uncommon, due to the number of limbs that can be hit instead, a spear is somewhat of a luck-based weapon. It gets stuck on a fairly regular basis, (again, usually in a limb where it can't do as much), but when it hits a torso or head, the victim usually takes organ damage. In this light, a spear is best when fighting large creatures, who are best killed via organectomies rather than cumulative damage.

Dwarves cannot wield a pike; it is a two-handed weapon, even for a human.

Whips

Whips do, by far, the least damage, and do "gore" type damage, the effect of which is unknown; perhaps it causes extra bleeding. Whips are rarely used, but presumably they're good against unarmored, small, living creatures. These kind of weapons are pointless against the undead and other non-living creatures.

Burning

There are no burning weapons, or weapons with "burn" type attack, in the game (however you can mod them in). There are, however, creatures that can do burn damage. It is believed that what makes BURN attacks special is that they inflict more pain. Strangly, burn-type damage isn't really related to fire, so fire-immune creatures can be harmed with burning attacks.