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[GreatWyrmGold]

Sad but expected.

[Wrex]

You know, you would expect them to aim for center of mass- the prefered target for ranged weapons throughout the ages. Still, from the distribution of wounds at the end of any battle, those results are entirely suspected.

[Urist Da Vinci]

...
It is certain for now that only light bolts (wood, bone, candy) appear to deflect at all. An interesting question is whether a heavy metal (e.g. iron) bolt could be made to deflect of armor without modifying the bolts weight, only, say, the armors density, or some other parameter.
...

Yes, arena testing reveals that slade armor is required to "deflect" iron bolts. Less heavy/dense armors don't seem to deflect the blunt damage. Implications unknown at this time.

[Zivilin]

What you have done here is a thing of beauty and should be consulted for a long time.  Were you a dwarf, you'd have earned a royal bedroom with some gem encrusted candy furniture and such at least.

I'd like that <wistfully>

WOW..

This is a very impressive test. It reinforces my belief that silver is good. I'm a little surprised that bronze performs better then iron in several cases.

Silver is good. But only slightly better than copper, bronze, iron or steel. So its most economic to go with the cheapest/most abundant resource on the map.

As to bronze, it appears to have shear yield HIGHER than iron:

	Iron	Bronze	Copper
Solid density	7850	8250	8930
Shear yield	155000	172000	70000

(copper added for comparison)

So apparently Bronze is, according to the key parameters solid density and shear yield, "better" than iron.

While we are on the topic, I discovered an interesting anomaly in the average of fired bolts parameter (I'm shortening that to AofB). The reason the AofB plot forms two distinctive levels can be explained through type of death: the one which occur from bolt damage are:

• Head shot (caused 99% by brain tears: "dwarf was shot and killed")
• Suffocation (Tearing/bruising of the Upper/Middle Spine: "dwarf suffocated")
• Bleeding to death (Tearing of the throat/heart: "dwarf bled out")

So bolts of material equal to or "worse" to than the armor they are assaulting cannot directly tear organs or throat (They do sometimes tear muscle, skin, fat, though this mainly happens when they hit extremities, like hands or feet. Oh, and spinal nervous tissue is often teared, for some reason, even if the bolt only bruises the spine itself). Thus only head shots and spinal injuries contribute towards death rate. When the material of the bolt is "better" than the armor, than heart tearing and throat tearing (both inducing bleed out over time) is added to the death toll, significantly increasing the probability of the bolt killing the dwarf.

Here's the interesting part: Take a look at a slice of the AofB part describing how well different bolts do against iron armor:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There is a slight depression in the iron vs iron value as compared to the surrounding metals, right? If You remember the Chips and Jams plot, the combination of bolt and metal of the same type gave rise to "jams", a form of injury where the bolt... pushes the bone it hits/breaks into another bone or organ. Like the heart.

So jams (or should I have been calling them jammings?), these strange injuries which only occur in a narrow sweet spot of conditions, can contribute to the death toll due to bleed out due to bones being jammed into the heart occasionally. It follows that metal armors are slightly less effective against bolts made of the same metal. Still, the difference isn't all that great as to change Your dwarfs equipment.

b) I looked at [BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:HUMANOID_RELSIZES] in b_detail_plan_default.txt.
Each body part has a relative size. If you divide the body part's size by the sum of sizes for all external body parts, you get percentages that are very similar to the Vitruvian dwarf (1-5% error for most main body parts, so I get 18.12% for the upper body etc.). This doesn't hold for heads, hands, and feet, but I probably made a calculation mistake when including the fingers, toes, nose, etc.

A quirk of my data extracting program: Although hits to the fingers and toes were labelled as hand and foot hits, respectively, hits to facial feature were not. Hence, the "Other" category. e.g. A nose, ear, eye, eyelid, tongue etc. hit is defined as "Other". Only pure head shots (both fatal brain-tearing ones and those which merely shatter the skull, of tear a muscle) were defined  as hits to the "Head" region.

Yes, arena testing reveals that slade armor is required to "deflect" iron bolts. Less heavy/dense armors don't seem to deflect the blunt damage. Implications unknown at this time.

If nothing else it confirms that relative density of bolt and armor material influence deflection chance. Modders can tweak the size parameter of ammunition to decrease bolt weight and increase deflection in search of more "realistic" projectile behavior.

[Wrex]

I was personally very surprised that shots were actually deflected by eyeballs of all things.

[Berossus]

Impressive, i must say.
I have some additional queries though, and I hope i havent overread what i am going to ask now, if it has already been answered, forgive me.

.) Has the performance of different qualities of bolts been tested?
.) What of mood-crafted non-mundane material bolts like gold?
.) Is material/quality of the crossbow of concern? Does a steel crossbow launch bolts at higher muzzlespeed than lets say a wooden one?
.) Do different material bolts operate at the same level of efficiency for all distances? Or does lets say a steel bolt penetrate better at point blank whereas a silver bolt has higher penetration at higher distance?
.) Is material or quality a factor in accuracy?

[GreatWyrmGold]

About iron and bronze: Historically, bronze was better than iron. Iron was just more common than say, tin.

[Urist Da Vinci]

...
Here's the interesting part: Take a look at a slice of the AofB part describing how well different bolts do against iron armor:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There is a slight depression in the iron vs iron value as compared to the surrounding metals, right? If You remember the Chips and Jams plot, the combination of bolt and metal of the same type gave rise to "jams", a form of injury where the bolt... pushes the bone it hits/breaks into another bone or organ. Like the heart.
...

The image is that of iron bolts vs various armor types, unless you were firing leather bolts.

...
So jams (or should I have been calling them jammings?), these strange injuries which only occur in a narrow sweet spot of conditions, can contribute to the death toll due to bleed out due to bones being jammed into the heart occasionally. It follows that metal armors are slightly less effective against bolts made of the same metal. Still, the difference isn't all that great as to change Your dwarfs equipment.
...

A possible explanation for jamming:
-Regardless of damage type, some body parts have a chance of being around another body part (see [BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:HUMANOID_RIBCAGE_POSITIONS] for an example). The skull is 100% around the brain.
-So you bash around unarmored targets in the arena a lot and get messages like this on occasion: "You bash Dwarf 1 in the upper body with your platinum war hammer, bruising the muscle, jamming the right false ribs through the liver and tearing the liver"
-You then stab unarmored targets in the arena a lot and get messages like this on occasion: "You stab Dwarf 5 in the upper body with your steel short sword, tearing apart the muscle, shattering the right false ribs and tearing apart the liver!"
-I guess that bolts which impact a stronger ("better") armor convert to blunt damage, but some of the energy is absorbed and spread out over a larger contact area. Bolts which completely penetrate armor with lots of energy/momentum to spare will tear and shatter the underlying tissue themselves. However, bolts which just barely penetrate armor (the case where the materials are equal) will deliver focused blunt damage to underlying tissue, and the armor isn't absorbing/spreading any blunt energy.

[Zivilin]

I was personally very surprised that shots were actually deflected by eyeballs of all things.

Baffles me as well, though it did "glance off", not "deflect", which are different mechanisms, apparently. Also, for every bolt that glanced off tens and hundreds skewered eyeballs, so its not as if they are impervious to projectiles.

1) Has the performance of different qualities of bolts been tested?
2) What of mood-crafted non-mundane material bolts like gold?
3) Is material/quality of the crossbow of concern? Does a steel crossbow launch bolts at higher muzzlespeed than lets say a wooden one?
4) Do different material bolts operate at the same level of efficiency for all distances? Or does lets say a steel bolt penetrate better at point blank whereas a silver bolt has higher penetration at higher distance?
5) Is material or quality a factor in accuracy?

[Numbers added to better identify when answering]

1), 5) - To my knowledge, there is no way of changing quality parameters of items in arena mode (If someone knows otherwise, please chime in). As much as I would love to perform a study on the effects of quality level on crossbow performance, this seems to be an impossible venture - at least on a scale which would produce reliable results. I could train up 10 Marksdwarfs and try to set up a small scale experiment in Fortress mode, but this simply wouldn't be enough to be able to perform even basic statistical analysis and achieve meaningful results.
2) I could have tested standard (as in standard quality) gold, zinc, billon etc. bolts. However, note that a single experiment consisted of 1000 dwarfs firing at another 1000 dwarfs. That means placing 2000 dwarfs per X vs Y experiment. With only the standard materials used for bolts and armor, this gave 8x7=56 experiment blocks = 112'000 dwarfs had to be placed. And while I automated the process to the best of my ability, it still took 3 days to gather the data, and another few to organize it. HOWEVER! if You are interested in how well a particular X vs Y combination does, I can perform it with fairly little effort. I just do not think I will be performing a massive 8x7 study any time soon. As for gold bolts, I predict they would do better than silver due to its higher weight. Note that silver didn't penetrate (i.e. deal more tearing damage than bruising damage) to anything except Leather-armored dwarfs and unarmored dwarfs, so shear yield probably isn't an issue in this case.
3) I can test if crossbow material affects crossbow performance (I've heard it doesn't, buy I have seen no science), but quality tests, as I have explained above, elude my abilities.
4) This is an interesting problem which I would like to test. However, I am constrained by the abilities of the Arena and/or my own knowledge. You see, the current setup works before the defending dwarf is characterized the following properties:

• he stays in exactly the same range from the Marksdwarf
• he cannot attack the marksdwarf
• he is effectively immobilized and cannot dodge shots

To test larger distances, I would need another setup. To my knowledge, fortification can only be fired through if the marksdwarf is adjacent to the fortification tile (I haven't actually tested this - am I wrong?). So I assume that I can't just put multiple fortification in a line. If I have just one fortification next to the Marksdwarf, and then a line of floor space, then the defender has freedom of movement and can dodge, and also I cannot control the range. I can't put the defender on a tile behind a pit, because dwarfs dodge into pits. The best way would be if I could construct vertical bars in Arena mode. But I cannot. Only walls, fortifications, floors, and various ramps and magma/water tiles. If anyone has any suggestions on the design of a range test using arena mode, I am eager to hear from them.

...
Here's the interesting part: Take a look at a slice of the AofB part describing how well different bolts do against iron armor:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There is a slight depression in the iron vs iron value as compared to the surrounding metals, right? If You remember the Chips and Jams plot, the combination of bolt and metal of the same type gave rise to "jams", a form of injury where the bolt... pushes the bone it hits/breaks into another bone or organ. Like the heart.
...

The image is that of iron bolts vs various armor types, unless you were firing leather bolts.

Indeed, it is Iron Bolts against different armor types. I misspoke (and miswrote).

I also agree with Your analysis of the occurrence of jamming. I do still find it interesting that an increase in jamming incidents produces a decrease in chipping incidents by practically the same amount. As I understand it, chipping chiefly occurs for whips and projectiles, due to a combination of small contact area and Blunt damage type? I do find it interesting how all these systems (bolt and armor material, damage absorption by armor, edge-to-blunt conversion) interact with each other.


Also, I am sitting on a considerable amount of data on wound types which I haven't posted - there's simply so much of it. I can upload the Excel file with all gathered data, if there is any interest. Is sharing download links allowed on DF forums?
I also have 240 MB of gamelogs from 56 arena experiments, so if someone would come up with better criteria for weapon performance, I can test it out as long as it pertains to the logs. Unfortunately, excludes criteria based on reload time and such, since logs do not have timestamps counted in game ticks (or any timestamps at all, for that matter)

[misko27]

I was personally very surprised that shots were actually deflected by eyeballs of all things.

Fairly well known in adventure mode, where cheek stabbing barely cuts the skin. It makes sense if you think about it. Since the game doesn't allow multi-bodypart injuries, the expected "into the eye" doesn't occur. Therefore all the damage is limited too how much damage a bolt could do to a eye without even bruising the eyeball. The answer is not much, sometimes none at all, because any attack that would hurt the eyeball was prevented.

[blue sam3]

To test larger distances, I would need another setup. To my knowledge, fortification can only be fired through if the marksdwarf is adjacent to the fortification tile (I haven't actually tested this - am I wrong?). So I assume that I can't just put multiple fortification in a line. If I have just one fortification next to the Marksdwarf, and then a line of floor space, then the defender has freedom of movement and can dodge, and also I cannot control the range. I can't put the defender on a tile behind a pit, because dwarfs dodge into pits. The best way would be if I could construct vertical bars in Arena mode. But I cannot. Only walls, fortifications, floors, and various ramps and magma/water tiles. If anyone has any suggestions on the design of a range test using arena mode, I am eager to hear from them.

Legendary marksdwarfs ignore fortifications entirely.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I think normal crosslords do, too. Markslords?

[rhesusmacabre]

Elite marksdwarves. Anything with "accomplished crossbowman" and above (or equivalent).

Also, I am sitting on a considerable amount of data on wound types which I haven't posted - there's simply so much of it. I can upload the Excel file with all gathered data, if there is any interest. Is sharing download links allowed on DF forums?

For this kind of thing, yes. DFFD works well for anything DF related.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I like crosslords better.

[Urist Da Vinci]

I'm wondering what else we can squeeze out of the existing data.

For one type of bolt and one type of armor, what percentage chance is there of each damage description? To simplify, choose one piercing case (Steel bolts vs Copper armor) and one blunt case (Copper bolts vs Steel armor).

I'm trying to determine how likely each individual bolt is to cause a certain type of damage (i.e. brain tear instant death (i.e. BOOM HEADSHOT) is about 0.0528*0.60=0.032 or 3.2% probability). Or even more detailed - for all steel bolts which penetrated copper greaves on the right upper leg, did they all cause the same damage or was there randomness? We can at least detect the presence or absence of extra variables using existing data.

Again, I'm not asking for a new experiment, but to look at the data collected differently.