@Cheese wheel from Skyrim And overall no weapon is realistically going to be useless against inferior material armor. It'll just be more of an obstacle to some relative to others. 1h sword slashes are the worst at it, but those weapons all have stabs, and even if they didn't you could exploit the weaker armor pieces like the gauntlets. And even against armors that you can't penetrate at all, there's always the option to exploit indirect damage, exploit the mail shirt's lack of blunt resistance, or remove an armor piece with wrestling.

@Cheese wheel from Skyrim It depends on the context and weapon. They're a lot less homogeneous and individual edged weapons/attacks have their own strengths and weaknesses. Many are actually better at penetrating armor than in vanilla despite having less momentum because of contact area changes.

How does this change the effectiveness of steel edged/piercing weapons? Can they still penetrate armor made from weaker materials or are they useless against armored enemies?

Oh cool, I didn't know that higher ranged skill decreased block chance. That's some handy data right there, thanks. Looks like it might be optimal to order your dwarves to only shoot at goblins without shields, at least while their skill is still low.

I did testing regarding the block chance of shields vs bolts, with an average of 1,055 bolts worth of data (not including misses) per test. For proficient marksdwarf/archer vs prof shield user, I arrived at 63% block chance. Prof vs GM was 83%, GM vs prof was 34%, and GM vs GM was 73%. These percentages may be lower than the actual raw percentages due to the effects of exhaustion and injury, but such things will realistically happen in combat and I did use armor and GM armor user to reduce their impact.

@eDen Jack970 This mod only edits vanilla equipment and doesn't add any new items.

Hi ! Ty for the great mod ! I'm curious about something, does it add a lot of weapons ?
I got a lot of new items and I don't know which mod they come from. It's a lot of swords like "wavy sword".

I see. I do hope this is simplified once Tarn gets around to combat mechanics.

@Digganob I should be able to clear up coverage affecting penetration by repeating the same sort of test, only with a stronger attack setup. The reason that part wasn't clear before is because although the scimitars damaged the breastplate, the best those scimitars seemed to be doing in terms of penetration through the breastplate before it was broken was bruising (at least at that skill level). I'll need to confirm an attack can do edged penetration through the breastplate pre-coverage change and then see if I can make that stop happening with coverage increases.

@Digganob As for the rest, it's a murky area. I think coverage does affect penetration since the conditions for the occurrence of both damage and penetration are very difficult to separate. Edged penetration will always cause damage and leave a wear marker. You can see damage without penetration (which could perhaps represent partial penetration or maybe it is full penetration but without enough force left to damage the underlying layer) but it’s rare that you see that and not have penetration also be a possibility. Therefore, I’m unsure whether armor damage itself decreases the armor’s resistance to penetration or if it only looks that way because they so often appear under the same conditions. During testing in the past I’ve seen what looked to be nice gradients from initial deflection, to bruising, and then outright edged penetration prior to the armor fully breaking, but ultimately it could’ve been chance or other factors.

@Digganob I didn't determine it exactly at the time since I discovered it by trying out 100,000 and got back below it by removing a zero, but today I've narrowed down that the cap is somewhere between 32,751 and 32,799. As for material size, it only affects cost on armor.

Fascinating. I must have increased the coverage so high in my tests it looped around. What is that cap specifically? Does it only increase durability, or does it also increase resistance to penetration? Does damaging armor make it easier to penetrate, or can you only penetrate once the armor is completely broken?

Also, does material size only matter for weight and resource requirements? Or does it affect anything else?

@Digganob Yeah, it’s doing that and 1v1 combat tests. I also have an “arena mod” that I use to reduce potential randomness caused by creature stat variation. The way I determined that coverage does help was by taking an attack that I knew would frequently damage and eventually get through an armor (which can be checked very quickly over a large volume of tests by looking for wear markers) and increasing the coverage to the point where it was never damaged and never received a wear marker. I did this with iron scimitar slash at adequate skill vs copper breastplate. It’s worth noting that I couldn’t increase coverage infinitely because there’s a cap where it resets back to 100.

It is armor layer and shaped, so it'll never be worn with breastplates. I thought it made sense considering it's a lot less flexible than chain. I wish we could designate our own flexibility values.

Thanks for the suggestions.

By the way, how do you do your testing? I tried testing armor penetration by repeating the same attacks with the same modifiers before, and found consistent results that way. Do you use a combination of that and combat tests? I remember trying making the coverage of armor ridiculously high, but found no difference in penetration. Did you find that it did, in some other way? My methodology was probably super flawed, but I couldn't seem to find any way to improve armor strength except for increasing layer size and limbSTEP stats.

@Digganob Is the scalemail armor layer and shaped? I'd maybe raise the layer size to 20 to match the mail shirt, leather armor, and breastplate. I'd probably give it 40 layer permit to be in between the breastplate and leather armor/mail shirt in that regard, then you could give it 125 coverage so that it has more thickness than the mail shirt. This would make it quite heavy. For cost I think mat size 6 would be fair, seeing as how it would be a sidegrade to the mail shirt. If you wanted it to be less of a budget option you could go for mat size 9 and give it more layer permit to stack more clothing underneath (buffs it in a way that doesn't make it even heavier), then reduce its layer size 10 to improve its layering relationship with cloaks while raising coverage to offset the loss of thickness and have it be the premium clothing stacker armor.

Very cool. It's also handy to know how important it is to send in shielded squads when dealing with archers.

@Digganob Sure, I could do a focused test on that and see if I can get some approximate block chance percentages at different skill levels. I could lower skill rates to 0 to eliminate the possibility of the blocker gaining skill level during the test to avoid that skewing the results. And yeah, the bolt thrower might just have to be a "don't abuse if you want challenge" sort of tool, sorta like the almighty cage trap which is also immune to nerfs unless I want to slap trapavoid on every creature. At least there's the new "free friendlies from cages" behavior with siegers, I wonder how that plays out.

By the way, would you examine the balance of the scalemail coat in my A&CO mod? I initially gave it the same stats as your breastplate, with the exceptions of an UB and LBSTEP of 1 each, a layer size of 15, and chain elasticity, with the theory that it should be a little stronger than breastplate due to the extra mass from the limb protection, but without the protection from blunt weapons. However, I found that they weigh significantly less than mail shirts (around 20 vs 30). So I expect that they are significantly weaker than both breastplates and mail shirts, making them redundant.

Do you have any suggestions for balancing scale mail against mail shirts and breastplates?

@lmlsna Have you done/would you do tests for the efficacy of shields against ranged weapons? That's of special interest in considering ranged balance. If they're any more effective than they are at blocking any other attack, then they make more than just a small difference.

The fortunate thing about the bolt thrower is we don't have to use it if we don't have to. Pretty cool idea, though. I hope we get to edit it soon, among other combat mechanics.

Thanks for making this mod.

Over 30 trials, my average hits to kill for crossbows firing iron bolts into unarmored dwarves was 6.6. There was a wide variation and the overall range was 1-18, and the difference was largely just targeting RNG. Kills were typically headshots tearing the brain (and this could be achieved with a single shot), but also included blood loss due to torn hearts or bleeding in general. Tests were done with GM marksdwarf/archer and the target also being GM marksdwarf/archer only without the crossbow. Often they'd waste a bolt or two in the time between the lethal bolt being fired and the bolt killing the target, but otherwise missed shots were virtually nonexistent. I did more than 30 trials but some were invalidated by the marksdwarf choosing to attack the unarmed dwarf with their crossbow or bolts' melee attack and of course I'm trying to gauge the shots in isolation.

@Romping the ♥♥♥ The main struggles ranged weapons seem to have are that they require a good amount of skill to achieve decent accuracy and they have a hard time outright killing very large targets (but they can still render them completely crippled and then have them bleed out).

@Romping the ♥♥♥ There's a lot I can already say for certain about how ranged weapons work in the mod though. They generally don't have any difficulty reaching the organs of humanoid targets. Their effectiveness against armor is solid by this mod's standards, bolts can easily penetrate as long as they're made from a better material than the armor. They aren't useless even when they can't penetrate an armor because they're able to cripple a target's arms through their mail shirt, rendering them unable to hold their weapon or shield. And as far as shields go, even a grand master isn't immune to ranged fire and marksdwarfs can win 1v1s against melee+shield pretty easily if they have the speed to maintain distance, their bolts can penetrate their armor, and they have adequate ammunition. I feel like you're asking me to make changes based on assumptions you've made based on unreliable external sources rather than based on direct observations on how the weapons actually function.

As for the bolt thrower, it seems to be hardcoded like the other siege engines and as such I can't change it directly.

@Romping the ♥♥♥ As for the ranged topic, I'm not inclined to have faith in random experiments from the internet. I've seen them be all sorts of problematic before: low sample size, bad methods of data collection, and outdated game versions (2 years ago is super recent compared to a lot I've seen, and the combat mechanics of DF have changed significantly from how they initially were). I've seen someone do a grand total of 2 chaotic fights as their "experiment" and start drawing conclusions from that. As such, I'll for sure want to do my own shots to kill testing. I'd better work on getting my outdated MVC and FFF patches working first though.

@Romping the ♥♥♥ They use the same equation, it's just that adamantine's density is so low that it does matter. Like I said, it's diminishing returns: the higher the density number, the less additional density gives you. Adamantine is only 200 density and the difference in momentum between 200 and 7,850 density is actually quite significant. Much larger than the difference between 7,850 and 1,000,000 density.

@lmlsna I agree that edge attacks dont benefit from weight much cuz momentum = velocity * mass, and lighter items can be swung faster so it balances out. However, blunt attacks have to be operating on some modified equation cuz adamantine blunt weapons are terrible but silver and platinum is better. Maybe there is a speed cap or something for blunt weapons

Also, bolt thrower nerf > crossbow nerf at this point. This is problem is peanuts compared to our new dwarven machine gun vaporizing 13 goblins

In practice, crossbows are super finicky due to sensitivity to armor material and “ineffectiveness” against unarmored. (Someone did a very good experiment on bolts 2 years ago which is where I am getting this) In vanilla, dwarves with the highest possible marksdwarf and archer skills, it takes around 16 bolts to kill/incapacitate 1 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ completely ♥♥♥♥♥ goblin (its higher for below iron materials). This number hardly changes until the material of the bolt = material of the armor on which the bolts required triples to sextuples. Now with the changes, it would take around 3x as long to shoot the same number of bolts much less incorporating higher tier armor, shields, dodging, and non goblin enemies. Frankly, they were already slow when enemies couldn’t break down walls giving them infinite time to farm. Now that enemies can break down walls + they shoot at 1/3 the speed, I just don’t see how to use them to any degree.

What digganob is saying makes sense to me. Their job should be to apply attrition while your fort is sieged. They are necessary to make you walls actually have value beyond simple delaying. Naturally, if they killed as fast as melee they would be like a bolt thrower (overpowered). The cited 20% losses for a reinforced, solid fortress I think is a solid place to put them at against the average invasion. Balance is dependent on how long the enemy takes to break into your base which isn’t established well yet, but I am fairly certain crossbow were already a bit slow to deal meaningful damage and now are muhc too slow.

I haven't seen any of this work out in-game myself yet, but I think it's fine if ranged weapons are only marginally effective. IRL they're only useful to counter specific types of enemies or in specific circumstances, because of how effective shields are against them. If shields aren't actually that great against them in-game (I don't know how effective they are), then it makes sense that they shouldn't be too effective, or they'll just halve the numbers of an enemy force before they get into melee range.

If currently they only go so far as to cut a 100 strong army down to 80 before breaching the fort, then that's more than enough, I say. If it is much more than that in vanilla, they could probably use a nerf.

I think this really depends on data, though. How effective are they really on the grand scale? How effective are shields at blocking bolts? How many kills can you get with a ten-dwarf squad before your gates are broken down? All important for balance.

@Romping the ♥♥♥ I'd agree that they're worse than melee dwarves in terms of those things. The issue is that if they were as good as a melee dwarf in those things, I feel they'd completely overshadow melee. How should ranged weapons ideally be balanced in your opinion?

@ImIsna Quite surprised you feel so. I have always felt that marksdwarf are ♥♥♥♥ compared to a melee dwarf in terms of per dwarf efficiency, effectiveness, and micromanaging. They take over a dozen shots to kill anything particularly armored and take far longer than any competent melee dwarf. Especially now fortifications arent invulnerable so the time costs does matter as sieges will bypass your defences. Versatility be damned, they wont kill a troll if we waited a season lmao. Also, not your fault, but these new bolt throwers shoot like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MG42, so I cant see anyone ever using these modified crossbows. Unironically, bolt throwers probably have 80x the firepower of a crossbow in vanilla and maybe 250x in this mod and they can be manned by any dorf

@lmlsna I think your design is really well thought out and expressive. Thanks for your hard work!

@Romping the ♥♥♥ Nuge nerf for ranged weapons was necessary imo. They're not intended to blow you away with their raw stats, they're already strong because of their tactical applications. As it is you can trivialize an SA&M giant elephant with one marksdwarf. Kiting is very strong, and so is sitting safe behind fortifications. As for the max velocity cap, I could raise it but it doesn't seem too harsh to me. I added a couple zeroes to it to see what would happen and it didn't cause any immediately obvious change in the performance of metal bolts.

TLDR the bolt changes dont seem like they make bolts any better but you cut fire rate to 33% at high levels. Seems like a huge nerf.

I am curious about the crossbow changes. Afaik, it seems you simply cut fire rate to 1/3 and then side graded projectile attacks. You increased max velocity to 1500 but cut bolt size to 10. So pretty much you are only ever gonna hit the max velocity cap and never the shoot force cap. Altogether, it you halved momentum of bolts which halves the armor penetration. But you reduced contact area so you end up with like 80% of the original armor penetration. Maybe the speed will help do more damage to unarmored targets? However you did reduce penetration depth so its less effective against big enemies?

Makes sense. I'm looking forward to any updates, the balance is nice to see after vanilla's weirdness.

@Digganob I'll consider pushing axes further in that direction in the next update, I think that separating axe and sword slashing more would be ideal. I'll have to see how they perform relative to other weapons like that.

Ah, kind of something in between the damage of a slash, and the penetration of a stab, I suppose. Why not make axes more like that too? For dismemberment of larger creatures? I wish there were more tools for nuanced combat.

@Digganob/Romping the ♥♥♥ The idea with the chop is that it is a slashing attack which makes contact with less of the blade compared to the slash (I envision a perpendicular impact made close to the tip of the weapon), concentrating the force onto a smaller area (essentially making the attack more axe-like in profile, which is why it has a name that makes you think of axes). It penetrates layers more easily and makes it easier to reach organs as a result.

True, maybe just a badly named attack. there is no sword based attack that I can think of which fits this. Maybe a lunging attack of some sort.

Oh I understand the extra pen depth, I'm mostly wondering why the contact area is so much lower. I expected it to be higher for a "chop" attack, like with axes.

@Digganob the short sword chop attack has 2000 pen depth vs 1000 pen depth for slash. Its for when your dwarves go arm deep in some forgotten beast. Also contact area is helpful for lopping off body parts which isnt the only way to kill enemies. Spears have 10 contact area or something. This attack gives swords more versatility against different targets

What is the reason behind the chop attack for short swords? I see that it's got stats which are better for penetrating a little armor, but worse for purely damaging more layers, with its worse contact area. But I had imagined that was the role of axes.

Anyways, I'll not critique your balance broadly, but I am really curious as to what the chop attack is for. I would have expected something more like the axe's cleave, with a greater area.

Praise Be! Thank Armok for your expeditious update!

Damn fast update, thx

Awesome. Thank you, I do appreciate it. Hopefully I can be so swift, hah.

@Digganob It should be sometime today. Within a couple hours, ideally.