I'm not sure if the "combat tweaking" you mention in the March report will involve ranged combat, but if it does you might find the testing a group of us did helpful. The results are summarized on the Material Science page of the wiki and in this bug report. Urist da Vinci also found that some unusual rounding was occurring when determining projectile velocities, which is reported here. If this does interest you and you would like any explanation and/or further testing, please let me know.
Edit: I forgot to mention that I also wrote a summary in a Google doc as well. I will try to have a look at this document this weekend to make sure it is up-to-date.
I echo this Toady, will you consider taking a look at that research and maybe change bows and crossbows so they are not railguns anymore?
1. This is a suggestion not a question.
2. He already made these weapons much slower in this release. As he mentioned in the recent FotF answers, they now have a delay after firing, though he plans to replace that with a proper reloading mechanic at some point.
2. I am nearly certain this is not true. Crossbows and bows have always had a huge delay after they are fired (edit - at least since DF2010 - I can't say before that), and I don't believe anything has changed about this yet. The change is that with the new combat mechanics Toady
could break down the firing of ranged weapons into loading, aiming etc, and he indicated in the last FotF that he might do so:
The only example I remember from upthread about an ability taking "dozens" of turns was the post-fire period of a ranged weapon, which probably shouldn't exist as such. That needs to be replaced by loading.
If he does this, then it stands to reason he might balance ranged attacks at the same time. I figured it couldn't hurt to mention that we have a mountain of testing results that he could look at if he wants to balance ranged weapons. Or not. I don't know if he will find our results useful or if he even wants to balance ranged weapons. That's up to him.
If you want to debate whether ranged weapons should be balanced, I don't believe this is the place, as Toady doesn't have time to read long debates (a.k.a. flaming
). Consider another thread, such as our original
testing thread (or start your own).