Poll: Choose your favourite Dwarf army. There can be only one!

@NIGHTBRINGER I've always had a bit of attention on the physics of Dwarf fighting.

If they have short legs and arms, then they are both close to the ground and have small reach. It doesn't seem to make sense physically that they would outclass a normal size human who is also trained as the human would have far superior reach.

The same two points would also theoretically mean that they would only be able to use short weapons, further limiting their reach.

Thoughts?

 

Let's see your long arms help you now puny human!!

 

Yes, but Bull Centaurs notwithstanding?

 

I know, I know... I apologize but I simply couldn't help it. That image popped into my mind immediately.


More seriously, while humans would indeed enjoy an advantage in terms of reach, speed and agility, the Dwarfs too have attributes that would most certainly swing in their favour. Dwarfs are typically more powerfully built and are certainly more durable (in comparison to normal humans and not those that are Chaos blessed!). What they lack in height they make up for in terms of broader shoulders and musculature. I'd be very curious as to who would have the weight advantage, the taller and leaner humans or the shorter and stockier Dwarfs. In a real world example, combat sports such as boxing and mma separate fighters based on weight and not by height. Weight is by far a greater factor than height. And while these sports typically talk at length about a "reach advantage", there are innumerable examples of the stockier fighter winning the contest against their rangier opponent. Similarly, in the animal kingdom there are quite a few creatures that punch far outside of their weight class. Honey badgers and wolverines are examples of animals that can fend of predators that are many times both their size and weight (and the Dwarfs in Warhammer are likely not giving up a weight advantage at all). Another example is a pit bull which can easily take down most other dogs even if those dogs are bigger than they are. An average chimpanzee is quite a bit shorter and lighter than an average human, but if we discard our intelligence advantage, we know full well how that contest would end.


Real world UFC/MMA example, Mark Hunt (5'10") vs. Stefan Struve (7'0")


Moving back to the topic it hand, I can see many reasons why a Dwarf could contend with a human:

• Dwarfs are stronger and sturdier physically
• Dwarfs have the very best armour and weapons in the form of runic items
• Dwarfs have a much more resilient and disciplined disposition
• Dwarfs' longer lifespan affords them more time to practice and improve their skills
• On the battlefield, army organization, strategy and discipline often overshadow individual prowess, these are all advantages that fall on the Dwarfs' side of the ledger
• Dwarfs have the best warmachines, how's that for reach?

All this is not to say that humans can't compete with Dwarfs. The humans in the Warhammer world have many advantages too (in addition to height & reach). Humans are more numerous, more adaptive (in that they are willing to experiment outside the rigid bounds of tradition), can utilize mounts, can wield magic and so on.

So we're left with our original question, is the height and reach advantage enjoyed by humans insurmountable? For the reasons detailed above, I'd say no.

 

And THIS is the write-up I was expecting! Nice. All good points.

Particularly good are the battle line points. This was highlighted for me in the book Gates of Fire which is a more realistic look at the battle of Thermopylae. The key advantage that the Greeks actually had was their organization, which hadn't really caught on in any other contemporary army. Even if the opponent was much larger, the discipline and organization (not to mention drilling and physical prowess developed over a lot of exercises) of the Spartans was what won the battles, not the hollywood antics in 300.

In my mind, the average Dwarf height would be about 5'. When I actually think the thought through, this would actually enable you to have a fairly decent sized weapon (and if you were strong of arm, you could still have a pretty long spear of halberd, it would just take more physical strength to do stuff with it when you were holding it lower on the shaft due to gravity).

 

Spears can be braced on the ground as well, allowing people (or dwarfs) to wield quite massive ones compared to their own size. So honestly if the dwarves use spears/halberds the difference in range is probably minimal.

Plus, you only really stab with a spear, or in some cases just hold it in place and basicly wait for the enemy to charge into it. Which means a much larger spear can still be wielded effectivly.

Swords/axes/etc. on the other hand you'l actually need to swing around. Which means you'l far sooner find them becoming unwieldy. You simply can't make the same arcs if the weapon gets too big for you, if only cuz of basic things like it being so long that say you start accidently hitting the ground. So reach actually becomes relevant for these types of weapons. Admittadly, a dwarf in superiour gear could just wield a large 2-handed weapon, and be basicly unstoppable. Hell, a human in regular plate armour is already a very tough opponent for other humans, add in magical dwarven armour and there's very little we can do. Even if the human can potentially have a larger range by also wielding a 2-handed weapon, but human-sized.

As for their weight and strength advantage; that's mostly relevant in unarmed combat. A dwarf is probably amazing at wrestling or judo or similar fighting styles. For martial arts where range matters more it mostly depends on the dwarfs resilience and stamina compared to the damage the human can do while maintaining his range, which also holds for armed combat. Can the human actually penetrate the dwarven armour, and cause significant damage, while maintaining the range advantage? If yes, the human has a significant advantage, no matter how experienced or heavy and strong the dwarf is. If no, or at least not reliably, the human is kinda screwed.

Which covers basicly all 1v1 situations.

As for large battlefield formations dwarves have two major disadvantages; first they can't push their shieldwall against the enemy cuz humans would literally be able to just reach over the top of the dwarven shields and just bonk them on the head. And even if dwarven armour is awesome, a warhammer or mace to head is still going to give them at least a concusion.

However, provided they somehow mitigate that flaw, for example by using a phalanx so no-one can reach their heads with a mace, they probably have a significant advantage in this situation. They have better equipment, and their experience, alongside the general dwarven traits of stoicism and stubborness, means they're less likely to break formation. So charging a wall of dwarves headon would be a horrible experience for humans.

Then there's the second disadvantage; there's simply not that many dwarves. Humans can field larger armies and simply flank the dwarves. And unless dwarven armour is essentially impenetrable (and also somehow protects from blunt trauma like a warhammer to the back of their head) they don't really have a response to that. Admittadly, that does require being able to flank them. If they take up a nice defensive position and use war machines or other ranged weapons they become rather difficult to fight for mere humans

Anyway, long story short; don't fight dwarves unless you can flank them and have sufficiently powerfull weapons to crack open their armour otherwise you're going to have a bad time

 

I fully agree that strength is less important when using close combat weapons as compared to unarmed combat, but it is still a big advantage. This is not to say that strength will overcome a major skill deficit, but when the skill levels are similar, strength can often be a deciding factor. How much of an advantage it confers will vary greatly in response to a multitude of factors, but big or small, it is there.

In an unarmoured fight using something like a rapier, strength will not usually be that consequential. But as you add in armour, employ heavier weapons (especially concussive ones) and shift from a civilian to a battlefield setting, it becomes increasingly a factor. Some of the ways strength can impact a fight include:

• providing the stronger combatant an advantage when weapons bind
• ability to wear heavier armour (or wear the same weight of armour more easily)
• better ability to better block incoming attacks (with shield or weapon)
• ability to deal greater blunt force trauma, even through plate armour
• ability to recover more easily from poor positions (won't always work, but there are situations where you can "power through it")
• ability to better maintain formations & shield walls when engaged in close combat
• ability to wrestle (or knock) your opponent to the ground (real life sword fights are not nearly as clean as seen in movies/tv). One major way to defeat a knight in full plate is to take him to ground, and from the top position finish him with a dagger (assuming a 1 vs 1 setting). There is a reason why groups like the Spartans trained wrestling/grappling arts, even as they fought in wars involving weapons. Strength and weight are massive advantages in this regard.

In the warhammer world, I'd say strength is even more important than it is real life as there are also sorts stronger, tougher and larger foes to deal with. It might take minimal strength to inflict a grievous wound on a human, but more strength would certainly be required when facing a Saurus or an Ogre or a Minotaur, etc.


On a side note, strength is a vitally important trait in battlefield archery. War bows are quite different from hunting bows because they have to attain sufficient velocity to penetrate enemy armour. As such, war bows evolved to have some extremely heavy draw weights, which in turn required a huge amount of strength to operate. As armour improves, draw weights tend to increase in response.

 

O sure, there's just one issue. Dwarves usually aren't depicted as that much stronger than a human. The difference is generally small enough that it doesn't really change anything. A dwarf versus a human results in much the same fight as a human versus a human, or a dwarf versus a dwarf. It's not like the difference between an ogre and a human, where the ogre is strong enough to just smash his way through any parry or block.

Simply put, humans and dwarves are still in the same strength class. Which makes the difference largely irrelevant as soon as weapons are involved. Basicly everything else, technique, speed, reach, luck, is more relevant than raw strength at that point.

Also as a bonus; their strength is mostly relevant in situations that require them to be close to the humans. And since their larger reach is their main advantage humans will be trying to avoid those situations regardless.
Obviously, you can't always avoid it, but still an important point to consider.

Not sure if the difference would be large enough to give dwarfs an easier time against ogres though. I'd expect both the dwarf and the human to be equally screwed to be honest.

Makes me curious though, how big exactly is the difference, at least in warhammer. I'm sure there's some geeks somewhere who calculated how much a dwarf can benchpress or some such nonsense

 

Definitely not, for all the reasons I previously listed...

• providing the stronger combatant an advantage when weapons bind
• ability to wear heavier armour (or wear the same weight of armour more easily)
• better ability to better block incoming attacks (with shield or weapon)
• ability to deal greater blunt force trauma, even through plate armour
• ability to recover more easily from poor positions (won't always work, but there are situations where you can "power through it")
• ability to better maintain formations & shield walls when engaged in close combat
• ability to wrestle (or knock) your opponent to the ground (real life sword fights are not nearly as clean as seen in movies/tv). One major way to defeat a knight in full plate is to take him to ground, and from the top position finish him with a dagger (assuming a 1 vs 1 setting). There is a reason why groups like the Spartans trained wrestling/grappling arts, even as they fought in wars involving weapons. Strength and weight are massive advantages in this regard.

These examples come from (and are applicable to) a human vs. human fight, so even within the same "strength class", strength still plays a part.

1 v 1 either would be screwed, because the Ogre is that much stronger, heavier and larger. However, assuming equal skill, a group of strong individuals would stand a better chance against the Ogre than a group of weak individuals.

 

My point is that a dwarf isn't superhuman. They merely fall a bit more to the right of our bell-curve in terms of strength. And while that is enough of a difference for the general population, the difference is no longer big enough to be a significant advantage when you start looking at the veteran warriors of both races.

If you'd graph the strength of the general population you'd get something like this (numbers completly made-up I just needed something resembling a bellcurve, ogre thrown in for reference )

And sure, the average dwarf is stronger than the average human. But they're working with more or less the same limits humans have. So while an average dwarf is stronger than an average human it's not like he's twice as strong, nor is it the case that the strongest dwarfs are really stronger then the strongest humans. There's just comparatively more dwarfs at the high end of the spectrum.

So yeah, for the general population the difference would be significant. It'd be equivalent to letting say a group of men fight a group of women. On average one group is stronger than the other, and that will have some advantages like you listed.

However, if you start looking at the veteran warriors things change and You'l see something more akin to this:



The bellcurves are no longer all that different. And while yeah, the dwarfs are still a little bit stronger on average, and there's still relativly more strong dwarfs than strong humans, the difference is no longer anywhere as pronounced as in the general population.

All of this in battlefield terms would essentially translate to; an untrained dwarven levy is far stronger than an untrained human levy, to the point they can wear heavy armour more easily, have an easier time using a shield and heavy weapons etc. But veteran troops of the two races would be more or less comparible.

Or at least, that's how dwarfs seem to generally be depicted in terms of raw strength.

Anyway tl;dr:
I agree with you if we're talking about the races in general here the difference is significant, I disagree if we look at the individuals who'd actually be warriors, here the difference is not significant.

 

An interesting take, but I ultimately disagree with the conclusion.

The average male is stronger than the average female. If we were to take the very best from both of these groups (i.e. the veterans in your example), the veteran males will be stronger than the veteran females. If we were to test actual real world soldiers (males vs. females) from militaries from around the world, we would see exactly this. The exact same will be true for the Dwarfs vs. Humans comparison.

I think your first chart illustrates this...



If we assume that soldiers are selected from the stronger subset of each population (those represented on the right side of the curve), on your own graph we can see that the veteran soldiers from each group still vary significantly in terms of strength... and in favour of the Dwarfs.

 

I think the inaccuracy of my completly made-up graphs gets kind of in the way here. I should probably have made the dwarf graph taller and not just thinner, that wasn't sufficient to get my point across. Plus the comparison of males versus females isn't exactly perfect. Anyway let me explain what I mean.

There's one major difference when comparing male v.s. female compared to the dwarf comparison:
Males don't just have a higher average, they also have a higher maximum potential, and higher minimum potential (for healthy individuals). On the other hand the standard deviation of males and females is comparable.

I don't think that holds for dwarves. They have also have a higher average and a higher minimum (for healthy individuals), but the same (rough) maximum potential. And because of that they get a very different standard deviation, and thus a different curve. Resulting in a spikier bellcurve which in turn means the top X% dwarves aren't necesarly (much) stronger than the top X% humans. I tried to put it in my original graphs, but it isn't very clear so lemme draw another one. Also bear with me, cuz drawing these things precisely is a pain, so I might be off by a little bit, but the idea should be clear

Anyways here we go:



So in this graph, the top % of male is clearly stronger than the top % of females, regardless of how large a chunk of the population we pick, but it is fairly comparable to the top % of dwarves as long as we don't levy too many people.

For example the top 8% of males and the top 8,86% of dwarves have a strength >= 11 in this graph. The human females top ~8% however only has a strength of >= 9. This means that at the very top the humans actually do a little bit better in this graph, but as we levy larger chunks of the population we see that the minimum will drop quicker for the humans than for the dwarfs.

For example if we just levy say the top 50% then the dwarf levy would have a minimum strength of 9 and the human male levy a minimum of 8. So we can see the gap widening as we recruit larger chunks of the population and include more and more untrained individuals.

Hence, in the case of untrained levies the dwarfs have a significant advantage, but in the case of veteran troops the difference really isn't going to be particularly noticeable.

And this is how I think the strength of humans and dwarfs relates, or well the general idea behind it given that all the numbers are nonsense I made up

But hopefully you get the point.

 

I think the main point here is that all of the data about Dwarves are ENTIRELY made up, so it doesn't exactly break down well to scientific inspection.

 

They are lovely graphs.

That's the assumption from which our disagreement stems. If I were to adopt your original assumption, then the rest of your argument does hold true. Personally, I am assuming that the entire curve for the Dwarfs would be shifted to the right, meaning that they would have a higher minimum, higher average and a higher maximum (the same as we see between men and women).

If am to be fair, I cannot recall an instance where such a thing is discussed in Warhammer lore, and definitely not to this level of detail (although I am far from being a Dwarf expert, maybe @Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl can shed some light on the strength of men vs. Dwarfs). Without textual in-universe evidence, we can only speculate. The closest real world example I can think of are differences between species. Dwarfs and Humans are "essentially" different species. With that in mind, a chimpanzee (for instance, but it would equally apply to a multitude of different animals) is on average stronger than a human, but additionally, in line with my assumption, their maximum strength is also greater. I think most species differences look something like this, which is why I make the same assumption for Dwarfs.

That is truth of it.

 

As if that ever stopped anyone from making up stuff and discussing it on the internet in a pseudo scientific manner

I haven't seen any stories of dwarfs doing anything a human can't do though. If they also had a higher maximum I would expect some stories, or just bits of fluff, like we see with for example greenskins. Fluff for orks is filled with feats of strength a human can't copy.

So yeah, unless you can show me some stories where dwarfs achieve superhuman feats I think you're assumption about them having a significantly higher maximum is wrong. So if @Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl has some official fluff laying around to show me otherwise that'd be most usefull

Minor caveat, it doesn't count if the dwarf in question is magically empowered. E.g. fyreslayers are probably consistently stronger than humans, but they're no longer regular dwarfs they all got their magic gold tattoos to empower them.

 

Admittedly there is no real direct answer (that I know of). We've both got our assumptions. I base mine off of:

• the fact that there aren't very many real life instances where two species have different mean strength levels but the exact same ceiling in terms of maximum strength. Usually, when a species enjoys an average strength advantage over another, also enjoys a greater maximum level
• Dwarf models typically seem more beefy and muscularly defined as opposed to Empire or Bretonnian ones. (I'm purposely ignoring tribes in the Chaos wastes and WoC along similar lines of reasoning as your fair point on discounting Fyreslayers)
• reading quite a few Gotrek & Felix novels (yes, I admit that Gotrek is a special case). There are a few other Slayers described as well though and that leads me to...
• Slayers. That's the closest fluff example I can think of. They seem to perform feats that are beyond normal humans. They take on (and often defeat) monsters and creatures many times their size.
• Dwarfs are more hard working and disciplined. Whether that be mining all day or military training, I'd imagine that they would attain and maintain higher levels of strength.

I should note, I don't believe that Dwarfs have an extreme superiority in terms of the strength, but even an extra 20%-50% makes a difference.

 

What's also important to consider is that dwarfs are simply smaller.
So even if they're stronger in a relative sense, they might not be stronger in an absolute sense.

Simply put, a tall dwarf will probably be stronger than a short human. But a tall human will have enough muscle mass to overpower the dwarf again.

Which is also something you can find about chimpansees online. Relativly speaking they're stronger. But they're also generally smaller than humans. And because of that a human can still overpower them in absolute terms. Modern sources seem to put the chimps at 30-50% stronger (and older sources at 4-5 times stronger...) and with an adult chimp weighing 30-60kg that'd mean that say a big adult of 60kg would definitly overpower the average human. But athletes who are 80kg or more, start to be able to beat the chimp again. And of course, a small 30kg chimp would even struggle against an average human (provided the human is actually physically fit... bit unfair to compare a chimp with say a bored housewife who does nothing besides drinking wine and yelling at the kids )

Also, coincidently chimps are about the right size for dwarfs. So that's kinda funny, didn't realize that thought the chimps were a bit taller.

As for slayers; they come closest. But while their feats are impressive they are 1) not impossible for human champions and 2) they don't necessarily do anything special to achieve them. It's not like they kill giants barehanded or wrestle with minotaurs. They still just hit the monsters with their axe. And 3) most slayers get hopelessly slaughtered, much like anyone else stupid enough to try and fight a dragon on their own. The ones that survive tend to be (un)lucky.

But yeah, I'd definitly expect that if you can find examples of superhuman strength it'l probably be by a slayer.

Not sure how representative a slayer is of general dwarf population, but that's a detail we can worry about later

Minor caveat, that's of course ignoring the slayers like Gotrek who live through a combination of plot-armour, divine intervention and magical boons