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[thriftshopmusketeer]

A issue I've had for years now is that somewhere along the line of combat update it feels like raw size has lost a lot of its strength. Unarmed dwarves will die to giant animals and the like, but even a mediocre military with a basic set of kit can reliably kill anything fleshy regardless of size. I kind of miss the thrill of danger from elephants, giants, and basic forgotten beasts. Hell, war elephants when I last employed them were unable to scratch the bronze-clad goblins. Am I alone in this, am I remembering things wrong, or was there genuinely an update along the way?

[Kait]

I agree. I need to confirm this but I'm not even sure most wild creatures have any combat skills at all.
Huge creatures can potentially cause massive damage but since skills matter so much, most of them can't really hit anything.

However, I don't think anything has changed about it recently (on a Dwarf Fortress timescale).

[betaking]

size should matter more when there's formations that can counter it;

example being that even elephants; though maybe not giant elephants; can be cornered and killed by a group of skilled speardwarves.

[anewaname]

Giant herbivores have always been bad at fighting unless they have risen from the dead. It is just that now they are more likely to charge into combat.

[lcy03406]

in my fort size do matter much in combat. some giant wilds killed my steel clad recruits by grab-and-twist. plain big size is more deadly than the deadly bites or poison spits or 9 heads and 6 legs or something.

[Panando]

The main reason size "doesn't matter" is because of opposed skill checks: block, parry and dodge all completely negate damage. So a legendary shield user will easily block an attack from a dabbling kicker giant because it's just an opposed skill check.

The reason size does matter, is because if an attack gets past the damage-negating skills, then attacks from large creatures are devastating and armor often does little, like giant birds grabbing a dwarf by their head which is protected by an iron helm and shaking the dwarf to spinal injury death, or a kick from a human zombie shattering the joint of a dwarf.

To be honest one of the better ways of handling this would be to make blocking and parrying let some damage through if the attack is particularly powerful, or sending the dwarf flying causing them to impact the ground and take injury that way.

[Vattic]

There are ways it could matter more realistically. A bunch have come up on the suggestions board before.

I think it would make sense to have special attacks only available with a large size difference. Like a giant being able to stomp it's foes, hitting them all over.

Also it seems strange to me that a dwarf can choke a giant to death. How'd you get your hands around a giant's neck?

from a DF Talk episode (emphasis mine):

Will you be able to climb things in the future, like climb a dragon and punch its brain?

There's the issue with ... It's a question of multi-tile creatures partially - which is a difficult problem - but just the fact that there's the wrestling, and even without multi-tile creatures you've got things like groundhogs that can currently jump up and bite your eyes. That's one of the problems I'm having when I was doing my groundhog tests: twenty versus a guy with a knife, who wins? If the groundhog problem is solved, which it needs to be solved - not for this release most likely but at some point - then that means that that same thing will happen to you when you're fighting a giant creature. I think it would be cool to jump up on things, beyond just Shadow of the Colossus it's a common thing in Ray Harryhausen stuff and so on. So with the large creatures I think it'd be really cool to jump up on them and climb them and swing from them and so on. It wouldn't be as dramatic visually of course as Shadow of the Colossus but it certainly would be a lot of fun.

[IronGremlin]

I think the reason it matters more is because dwarves train so damned fast now.


Not that I'm complaining -exactly-, dwarves being able to train to at least 'professional' in combat skills in a reasonable amount of time is really important to make dwarf military seem worth it, but it does feel a little ridiculous to have ~20 legendary dwarves with like 2-3 years of training.


As far as combat skill vs. size - yeah I absolutely think a legendary warrior should make mincemeat out of an elephant. That makes sense, it's a high fantasy game. Would you bet on Guts, or a large tiger?


But also a 1200 year old dragon should probably ALSO be legendary in everything, and probably it should be a bit more difficult to have an army of legendary swordsdwarves.