I've always been interested in the mechanics behind weapons, armour and materials. But the more !!science!! I do in the arena, the more overwhelming it becomes and the less hard-and-fast rules/hierarchies seem to hold. Every test of an observed trend just raises more questions...
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The established hierarchy of edged weapons by shear strength seems to apply to moderate-velocity weapons with a reasonable contact are.
The first deviation I noticed applied to projectiles... copper, bronze and silver performed well, lighter materials didn't. Not a big mystery, variable velocity with a hard cap suggests density will become important at a point - and in the real world, density is often favoured over strength too.
I also got strange results on scourges and morningstars, edged weapons with a tiny contact area and very high velocity. Against full iron armour, steel seemed to outperform adamantine and silver, which seemed better than iron. Ok, not entirely unreasonable... these weapons don't necessarily need a strong material to penetrate and again we may want a combination of strength and density, with less bias towards weight than ranged weapons because there's no hard cap. Still strange to see two radically different materials so close together in overall effectiveness.
More extensive testing of morningstars hinted at something strange about shields that I didn't know before. The relative advantage of heavier materials would be decisive when combatants used shields, to fade away when they didn't. Again, quite reasonable from a real-life perspective but how would this be modeled in-game? Relative mass of weapon and shield would be a natural assumption... but earlier and unrelated tests by me and others implied that wooden shields do quite adequately in many situations.
Then there's armour. Adamantine protects well against blades but not so much against projectiles. Testing with multiple materials, including those not normally available as armour, pointed towards density but elasticity/ductility should also matter. Going by modern military applications, hard but brittle armour (like adamantine: doesn't deform at all before it snaps) for the best chance to deflect a hit entirely, softer armour when absorbing energy and not shattering are important.
Just how intricate is the simulation? Are scaling effects in the game? Do velocity and mass have independent effects, or does the game only care about total force? Does the relative importance of strength and rigidity of the armour depend on the relative strength and rigidity of the weapon or just the contact area? How exactly are non-penetrating edged hits treated - they seem weaker than directly equivalent blunt hits?
While I may see patterns where there's mostly randomness, I can't help being impressed. It truly feels like a clever and highly complex simulation and not a dessed-up 'base damage + bonuses'
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Topic: Combat mechanics: ARGH! (Read 1085 times)