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[Ifeno]

2 things i was wondering.

1.  Is the "if it has claws and fangs it sucks" bug still around?  In my current version anything that had claws and fangs was useless.  7 war cheetahs could easily be beaten by a Kobold thief which as obviously a typo of some sort in the code.

2.  Are scourges still overpowered?  I remember that was a typo that set their value to 1 making them incredibly deadly?  Has this been fixed or will i have to go back into the raws and edit myself with the new version?  Also, what's the value SUPPOSED to be?

Thanks for the replies! I'm really excited to try out all the updates =)

[_DivideByZero_]

1.  Is the "if it has claws and fangs it sucks" bug still around?  In my current version anything that had claws and fangs was useless.  7 war cheetahs could easily be beaten by a Kobold thief which as obviously a typo of some sort in the code.

I have never encountered this issue in DF2010.

2.  Are scourges still overpowered?  I remember that was a typo that set their value to 1 making them incredibly deadly?  Has this been fixed or will i have to go back into the raws and edit myself with the new version?  Also, what's the value SUPPOSED to be?

It's not necessarily a typo... but their deadliness comes from their low contact area and their high velocity. You can reduce their velocity to a sensible 2000 from 5000, or you can increase the contact area if you wish.

[Lagslayer]

1. No. Claws and teeth are now comparable to bone instead of leather.
2. Scourges were never really a threat, but whips are still the ultimate can openers. Acceptable solutions include reducing velocity or increasing contact area (both unrealistic) or reducing weapon size (having the side effect of the unit swinging it faster, up to a certain point).

[kotekzot]

Wait, what? Swinging it faster? The only way that could happen is due to lesser weight-induced speed penalties, and even then, don't scourges weigh like 1 Urist?

[Alastar]

The RAWs aren't wrong as such, but the game makes certain assumptions for its calculations - namely that the weapons are rigid, that the entire weapon moves at the speed of the business end and that it'll be made out of only one material.
In the case of whips, that means roughly 1kg of supersonic metal hitting point on, making them equivalent to rather large (40mm-ish) autocannons.

Mod size to 1 or 2 and you have a decent approximation of a metal-tipped whip: We don't even care what the rest of it is made of, it just exists to accelerate the bullet-like tip and doesn't add its mass to the force of the blows. These remain very good at disabling through pain but don't punch through heavy armour.
If you assume it to be a chain whip, contact area and size will both be larger but and the extreme speed is slightly dubious.

Scourges aren't actually very good weapons, just annoying (not very lethal because of their low maximum penetration depth. Small contact area equals good anti-armour performance in DF, needle-like stabs don't simply get turned aside. Daggers and morningstars are more legitimately scary but have the decency to kill outright rather than slowly flay a still-twiching victim and occasionally lop off some small bits).

[Sir Iryn]

What effect does changing damage type from BLUNT to EDGE have on the whip?

Really, whips don't make much sense doing BLUNT damage to begin with.

EDIT: Just tested it, that actually made it worse. Hrm, Whips probably need some sort of new tag to tone them down. Without making them tiny or doing other weird things, there doesn't seem to be any particularly good way of fixing them.

[Lagslayer]

What effect does changing damage type from BLUNT to EDGE have on the whip?

Really, whips don't make much sense doing BLUNT damage to begin with.

EDIT: Just tested it, that actually made it worse. Hrm, Whips probably need some sort of new tag to tone them down. Without making them tiny or doing other weird things, there doesn't seem to be any particularly good way of fixing them.

How about making them edge but reducing the penetration?

[_DivideByZero_]

It makes sense as a blunt weapon... it's not designed to slice or stab through skin but rather to hit it really really hard.

[Ifeno]

ty for the replies!  I'm still unsure how best to fix the whip dilema though....thoughts? :S

[Ampersand]

The best thing would be for Tarn to code in support for non-rigid bodied weapons. The best you can do now is mod it until the damage it deals seems in line with what a whip ought do. Make it behave as if it's a tiny but very quick and light weight knife, I would guess. Slashing damage,

[Alastar]

Ask yourself what the whip would actually be like, then mod it that way. Keep in mind that slack parts before the striking tip won't contribute (much) to the energy of the blows, which imo is more important than having the right weight for purposes of lugging it around.

Metal-tipped whip: Contact area 1, size 2, velocity 5000.
This makes it the least lethal weapon in the game, but it remains good at disabling via pain and chipping bone. Realistic and seems least arbitrary: reduced size as a straightforward workaround for a modeling quirk. If you want to be fancy, mod it to require 1 unit of leather as well as the tip material.

Chain whip: Contact area 10, size 20, velocity 3000?

Untipped leather whip: Actually the most tricky one in my opinion and probably not what Toady had in mind. Something like Contact area 10 edged, size 20, Penetration 10, Velocity 5000, leather only?