Mod: Warhammer Nation: Lizardmen - v0.75 minor update

[HoneyBadger]

Thought I'd chime in here: The very best stone weapons of Neolithic actual reality, earth, right now, as in: down the street some guy with a degree dug it up and carbon tested it to be over 10,000 years old, are pretty amazing.

For one thing, they're as much as 5 TIMES as sharp as the average modern scalpel. Obsidian can be manufactured, right now, today, this very minute, in the real world, sharp enough that it's used instead of metal for eye surgery.

As for bronze...well, let's step back a minute from bronze and consider copper. Copper's a pretty amazing metal. For one thing, the ancient Egyptians-6000 something years ago, at the time of the Great Pyramid, old dynasty, could manufacture copper chisels that were every bit as hard as steel. They did that by compressing the copper, under extreme pressure, using wood that they soaked in water. The copper atoms compacted, creating a highly tensile surface suitable for carving even the most royal of cartouches.

Bronze, itself, is not a bad metal at all. It's a lot better than poor quality iron, and it's way better than even good iron for the purpose of making armour. With the added bonus that it doesn't rust. The problem with bronze is that tin is expensive and relatively rare. We don't even use tin cans anymore because aluminum is so plentiful.

Another problem with bronze is that it's harder to make large blades out of it than it is to make them from decent quality steel, and so an additional pressure to use iron occurred, since the Romans, when they went all Byzantine, were feeling a little insecure after losing the western Empire, and getting into phallus symbols in a AHEM *big way*, they shifted their armies to larger and larger weapons.

Actually, that's not entirely true. It'd be kindof funny (atleast to me) if it was the whole answer, but bronze was pretty much on the way out when the Hittites showed up, having invented iron, and really stuck it to the old bronze-using empires. Iron was a fad. Iron was popular, iron was successful, and iron was cheap. With the added bonus that iron, ultimately, was the better invention, because it could be refined into steel, in all it's myriad excellent forms.

We still use bronze today, though. It's tough, it's-especially in the case of beryllium bronze-extremely corrosion resistant, even to salt water, it's easy to work with and melt down, and it's a good looking metal.

I've seen some outstanding modern bronze knives manufactured using freezing processes, special mouldings, and magnetic fields. If we can do all that today, surely we can imagine magic also enhancing bronze.

And consider that in Dominions, magic has the tendancy to become less and less powerful, over time. Entropy definitely exists. So, old bronze, stone, wood, bone weapons might very well be several degrees more magically powerful, and common, than iron weapons, even if you don't factor in the common belief that iron was anti-magic.