Armor Question

[Tanaka Khan]

So I usually have my dwarfs kitted out in Metal Armor...Breastplates, Greaves, Helm, Gauntlets and Boots. But not leggings and mail shirts. Should I? Does it matter for protection? Does it slow them up too much to not be viable? Should I only limit it to certain squads who are front line defenders?

Any input would be appreciated...
Cheers!

[Fel]

What you use is already good enough.
Leggings are "shaped" like the greaves so you can't equip both anyway and mail shirts don't really do much if an attack goes through the much stronger breastplate.

It's not even a matter of slowing down and more that it is barely useful at all.

[RadCon One]

Overlapping armor is useful for full-on military dwarves, as extra layers means extra chances at deflection. If you are trying to kit out every dwarf as a reserve unit / militia type precaution however, I would just hive them a cap/helm, gauntlets, mail shirt, and high boots. The mail shirt actually hangs down a bit and the high boots come up enough that when combined they fully cover a dwarves legs without the need for leggings / greaves unless you want overlapping coverage.

Fen is right about leggings being shaped and unable to be worn with greaves (though it does feel odd since mail-shirts aren't shaped and so can be worn with breastplate), but I'd disagree about it not doing much and not being worth it.

[TPark]

Unless the wiki is wrong on this, there is a portion of the arm that is left exposed between gauntlets and a breastplate, that is covered by the mail shirt.

[Fel]

Only mail shirts protect the upper arms, you are correct.
Kind of easy to forget too.

[RadCon One]

I got bored and did some testing on just how much of a difference the mail shirt makes.

I used humans instead of dwarves for all of these tests as dwarves can go into trances skewing the results, with the armor consisting of a metal helm, metal breastplate, metal greaves, and metal high boots for both sides, with side 1 additionally having a metal chain-mail shirt. Neither side was given shields as the point was not to test blocking, but armor deflection. I did different tests involving metal type and skill level. Swords were used since they can perform all the attack types. In the Grandmaster skills tests the skills upgraded to that level were armor, fighter, and swordsman. All tests were 10 v 10, repeated 3 times.

Copper gear; no skills: 3-0 in favor of side 1, with a survivor count of 7, 7, and 9.

Copper gear; Grand Master skills: 3-0 in favor of side 1, with a survivor count of 5,4,5

Steel gear; no skills: 3-0 in favor of side 1, with a survivor count of 10, 10, and 10.

Steel gear; Grand Master skills: 3-0 in favor of side 1, with a survivor count of 7, 8, 9.

The long story short seems to be that yes, having a mail shirt makes a huge difference, particularly against lower skilled opponents, and with higher protection metals (i.e. the greatest difference is at steel against unskilled enemies, and the least difference is with copper against skilled enemies).

I might try other weapon types sometime later.

[Rat]

you should definitely have mail shirts, as gauntlets only cover up to the elbow and breastplates only cover the torso, so your dwarfs upper arms are uncovered. My favourite uniform at the start is: helm, mail shirt, gauntlets, high boots, leather leggings. This gives you 100% metal armour coverage even with the leather leggings, since high boots reach up to the knee and mail shirt reaches down to the knee from above. Once they get a higher armour user skill and take less encumbrance penalty I add a breast plate and metal greaves instead of leather leggings.

[Tanaka Khan]

Another question then...High Boots. I can only craft Low Boots it seems. Am I missing something?

[Fel]

High boots also protech the lower legs, which is already protected by greaves but since low and high boots both cost the same amount of bars there is very little reason to pick low boots over high boots.
Since you don't have high boots available, it's not too bad to go for low boots since nothing ends up unprotected.

As for missing recipes, each civilisation has a random chance of not being able to craft some things, usually it's mostly clothing (like not having access to shirts or dresses) but sometimes it can affect armor.