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[Hotaru]

Just a quick anecdote on something that I thought was interesting. I haven't seen many threads around on either misc. object use or propelling force.

Impaledlocks (his RNG-given name he earned after killing around 15 bronze colossi, most of them at once) was a steelclad sperm whale man wielding a platinum shield, platinum maul, and a bronze colossus lower body. He was gigantic and had black eyes. He was originally known as Sperm Whale Man 1, and he was a grand master of all combat skills, later turned legendary fighter. His grand quest in life was to learn to propel away things.

In his latter years his arena was evaporated and he was turned into an earth-walking lumbering zombie by a lynx man necromancer. In this state, he fought an unremarkable novice human by bashing it repeatedly in the lower body. The human was unconscious most of the time, hence test was ethical and hits largely perfect.

Stupidly enough, only 1 of 20 hits with the bronze colossus lower body (weight 99712 urists) propelled the human away. Even then, it was only for 1 square. Hits mostly caused bruising of skin and internal organs. The platinum warhammer's performance was exactly the same. Meanwhile, with punches, the propelling away success rate was 7/20, and the human was awake for this. Tail slap seems like the grand winner - it was slamming the human into obstacles so consistently I didn't even count. Something like 90% success, I spent a long time slapping the human around for fun.

So assuming it was not a fluke, it would seem like: Misc. object size is not handled in any interesting way. Hitting him with a bronze colossus body did not result in cleaving the human in twain or similar. Nor does sperm whale size combined with a human sized weapon do much. On the other hand it would seem with natural weapons size is handled consistently, the huge whale tail being the ultimate weapon.

Can anyone explain the game mechanics here?

Adventure mode forum, because adventure mode situation.

[acetech09]

Tail slap was working well because it was just a nice match of contact area to speed. A maul and lower body don't work as well most likely because of contact area. It's like hitting a baseball with the tip of a needle compared to a baseball bat.

Science could possibly be done to find the formula of speed to contact area to target size to hit chance.

[TFBeyond]

...Impaledlocks was a steelclad sperm whale man...

...he fought an unremarkable novice human by bashing it repeatedly in the lower body. The human was unconscious most of the time, hence test was ethical...

I love these forums.

[imperium3]

From what you said it sounds like the human was unconscious when you tested the maul, shield and lower body, and conscious when you tested the fist and tail (which were more successful). Could it be that it's easier to propel someone away when they're standing up? Just a thought.

[Hotaru]

From what you said it sounds like the human was unconscious when you tested the maul, shield and lower body, and conscious when you tested the fist and tail (which were more successful). Could it be that it's easier to propel someone away when they're standing up? Just a thought.

Excellent thought. It wasn't as straightforward as that, though, because the human WAS occasionally waking up and I did test then, too. I only counted swings unconscious, though, but I didn't notice...

However, this bears testing. Brb, leveling up a super sperm whale man with a vampire giant sponge, then removing a human's legs and trying it out

Edit: whoops, made the sponge a grandmaster fighter also by accident and now it's actually a tough opponent

[Hotaru]

So yeah, long story short, I now have a named giant sponge called "Scalyrifts" in the water who keeps communicating to me telepathically about his kills.

I was also able to do some actual research. No, being standing does not seem to help at all. In fact, I had a superior strength sperm whale man vampire bashing around both standing and lying kobolds with the platinum maul - these he knocked consistently a square or two back with his tail - for, well, an approximation of 20 hits in each pose. I was getting kind of impatient as I failed to score one single knockback.

I created an experimental weapon called a "whale cudgel" to see if big sized weapons SHOULD hit for more. This is just a mace that's been scaled to sperm whale man size, 360 times larger than the human version. Now with this thing you could send kobolds flying. And from bashing around the kobolds a while with it, it seemed like it knocked back more with good, probable hits (and up to 3 squares from the prone position when unconsious). That's just an impression though, I didn't even attempt numeric research. But even this one was a failure at sending the humans flying. In fact, no matter what I did, this whale adventurer could not knock back humans with his tail. It may have been the strength boost from reanimation that pushed it over the edge last time? That's why I switched to kobolds, and made sure the tail strike was comparable to compare maul efficiency.

However, I have to say about knockback...

this system is broken. Nevermind that the bronze colossus thing didn't work; that was expected since misc. fighting is not necessarily very refined (although hitting something with something that's made of metal and weighs dozens of times more than the thing itself SHOULD do more than bruise). But in this latest test with the "whale cudgel", I am a freaking sperm whale man vampire, of "superior" strength compared to even my own species, 360 times larger than the human standing in front of me, and I swing at him with a mace that's a LOT heavier than him, being 4 times larger than he is and made of iron, and he still does not even BUDGE. That thing did cause deep tissue injury every time, on the positive side.

Edit: To give a comparison of what these characters are otherwise capable of, I grabbed the human by the tongue and threw him. He landed literally on the other side of the arena map, diagonally. Another wasn't so lucky, he was thrown by the throat from the bottom left corner of the map, slammed into the round wall in the center after flying 48 squares by my calculations and blew to pieces.

[Halconnen]

For the bronze collossus piece, I think you may be experiencing a problem of the 'weapon' having too much weight.

Even with lots of strength, it's hard to accelerate large objects to enough speed to actually be harmful. As far as I can tell, you're lightly shoving people at a speed of centimeters per second with something that has an extremely large contact area. The force just doesn't transfer well.

I'm surprised the platinum hammer has the same problem, though. Have you tried lead/steel/slade for comparison?

[Hotaru]

No, but consider that since the 'whale cudgel' is a mace scaled to whale size (its size and contact areas were scaled by [sperm whale man size]/[human size]), it's really not logical the whale would have trouble swinging it. The relative size is same as a human swinging a mace.

Well, actually it is because muscle strength ~ r^2 while weight ~ r^3, so a sperm whale man would actually probably have a lot of trouble standing, but I'm not sure DF has thought about it that far. Especially since the whale has no problem swinging the human fast enough to throw him across the whole arena map.

[Halconnen]

As far as I can tell, the overall size of the weapon determines mass, whereas the contact area is a twodimensional surface.

Scaling both by the same amount probably throws the ratio off? E.g. an object with eight times the mass should only have four times the contact surface.

[Hotaru]

As far as I can tell, the overall size of the weapon determines mass, whereas the contact area is a twodimensional surface.

Scaling both by the same amount probably throws the ratio off? E.g. an object with eight times the mass should only have four times the contact surface.

Well understood. Thanks for pointing it out. As I see it, you may or may not be right - it depends on whether contact area is at this time represented in logical units of size by the game. Which it's tempting to assume, but I'm not too confident in, as for example there's no apparent correlation to size in the contact areas of bashing with the shaft of a pike, spear, and halberd (halberd's is 2x larger, but a halberd has 1,5x the size of the pike. ca(pike)=ca(spear) while size(pike)=2*size(spear)), and a maul's contact area is 10x a hammer's while only having 3x the size.

Nonetheless, to test it, I tried reducing the whale cudgel's contact area by a factor of 19 since it was originally a mace's scaled up by approximately 360. I didn't see an appreciable difference. I also tried giving it the contact area of a maul, and still did not see an appreciable difference in propelling away power. Ie: humans were never sent flying, kobolds always one square or two (contrast to how even humans can be thrown closer to 100 than 50 squares unless they hit something and explode by these guys). It really does not seem to me like this is working properly.

Having a sperm whale adventurer I bashed kobolds around systematically a bit more, comparing how far they fly when hit unconscious and conscious, and contrary to what I said before (it must have been a random occurrence) a perfect hit does not seem to propel them further than a non-perfect one. Of course this is all a bit rough without runesmith, currently I'm using a vampire sperm whale man that has been bashing on a vampire giant sponge with a mace for 20 minutes as the standard.