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[Zivilin]

I'd suggest that some sort of minecart shotgun full of unstacked wooden bolts/arrows, which are set on fire during the launch sequence, would be a devastating antipersonnel weapon.

...And now I cannot envision my next fortress without a firebolt minegun shotgun at the entrance

[MaximumZero]

That would be awesome.

[Pirate Bob]

Sorry this response is rather late - I was sick this weekend and didn't get around to checking the forums or doing much else  .

I'm vaguely curious if dual-wielding shields increases the chases of successfully blocking them. I once had an adventurer who was pretty much unkillable with legendary shield user + misc object user. If you could post your macros/report scripts, I would be interested in running the test.

Why stop with one shield in both hands?  Why not ten?  This is a well-known expliot.

I haven't done what I would call !!SCIENCE!! on this, but at least in DF2010 when my adventurer wielded 10 or so shields nothing could hit him.  I assume this has not changed.  Wood/leather shields are the best for this, as they are lightest, and material has no influence on shield performance according to the wiki.  Confirming that material does not matter is on my long to-do list (possibly from earlier in this thread?), and if I get around to that I might as well see exactly how much having two shields improves blocking chance.  My guess is that each shield tries to block one after the other, so that
total bock chance = 1-(1-block chance)^{N shields}.
Therefore, if you use two shields, and each gives a block chance of 30% (this is the base chance, and I have no idea how this is modified by shield user skill - more !!SCIENCE!! needed ), then you should have a 51% chance of blocking with two shields.

Again, this is just me guessing based on the assumptions that
1) You block with each shield independently, and using multiple has no influence on the chances of each one blocking.
2) Dwarf Fortress follows the laws of real world probability.
Neither of these is necessarily true...

...I am saying that, in the real world, a crossbow will impart constant kinetic energy, neglecting bowstring mass and any motion of the bow itself.  Dwarf Fortress may or may not follow real world physics here.

Excluding air resistance, of course.

Technically, I said that crossbows will impart bolts with constant energy.  I.e., this is the energy they will have when leaving the bow.  Air resistance doesn't have anything to do with this, unless you want to consider the minute air resistance that the bow/arrow experiences during firing .  Sorry I couldn't resist...

There will of course be significant air resistance during flight in the real world.  I can't yet say either way if DF considers this, although my current guess would be that it does not, as I have not yet seen any impact from changing shooter to target distance.

[Zivilin]

Why stop with one shield in both hands?  Why not ten?  This is a well-known expliot.

Note that by Arena rules (which I assume are based on Fortress mode) dwarves can carry only one weapon/shield per hand, so dual wielding is the most that can be tested in the Arena. I tried assuming control and picking up additional shields, but I couldn't grasp. Since there is no backpack in Arena mode, I couldn't try equipping items from the inventory.

[omg_scout]

Well multigrasping is a bug and will be removed sooner or later.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Just wanted to point out that the bronze colossus has some interesting raws:

Code: [Select]

[ITEMCORPSE:STATUE:NO_SUBTYPE:INORGANIC:BRONZE]
[ITEMCORPSE_QUALITY:5]

So place a modded creature in one side of each testing cell prior to a main test, where the modded creature was designed to die quickly (such as a fish out of water) and leave an item of quality (such as a high-quality crossbow or bolts) as a corpse. The catch is that you have to create the weapon-user in the test first and then possess him to pick up the item laying at his feet. Not sure if this is viable for a 1000-dwarf test.

[Pirate Bob]

Just wanted to point out that the bronze colossus has some interesting raws:

Code: [Select]

[ITEMCORPSE:STATUE:NO_SUBTYPE:INORGANIC:BRONZE]
[ITEMCORPSE_QUALITY:5]

So place a modded creature in one side of each testing cell prior to a main test, where the modded creature was designed to die quickly (such as a fish out of water) and leave an item of quality (such as a high-quality crossbow or bolts) as a corpse. The catch is that you have to create the weapon-user in the test first and then possess him to pick up the item laying at his feet. Not sure if this is viable for a 1000-dwarf test.

This is theoretically possible with my form of scripting.  I would have my perl script call one macro that places the creatures designed to die, then the script would wait until there were no more updates to gamelog.txt (from creatures dying - I already do this for my main testing).  Then it would call another macro to place the dwarves and possess them one at a time to have them pick up the items. 

This should definitely be possible.  The only potential issue is that sometimes DF seems to miss a keypress or two from complicated macros, so with something this long it would be more likely to happen.  I might want to scale back the size of such a test to maybe 100 at a time at first.

In any case, this is a brilliant idea, and much easier to do than trying to acquire the items in fortress/adventurer mode.  Thanks very much for pointing this out!

Why stop with one shield in both hands?  Why not ten?  This is a well-known expliot.

Note that by Arena rules (which I assume are based on Fortress mode) dwarves can carry only one weapon/shield per hand, so dual wielding is the most that can be tested in the Arena. I tried assuming control and picking up additional shields, but I couldn't grasp. Since there is no backpack in Arena mode, I couldn't try equipping items from the inventory.

I hadn't really thought about how to actually get dwarves to equip more than one shield in arena mode, and as you pointed out it would be difficult.  I guess if I really wanted to do it I could use Urist Da Vinci's method to get custom creatures to drop backpacks for the dwarves, and then have them pick up and take out multiple shields. 

Also, I reread NCommander's post, and realized he asked for my macros etc.  I did post a link to those on DFFD at some point in this thread, but the thread is getting pretty long now.  I will post an updated version within the next few days when I post my results of varying crossbow force.  Spoiler alert - they are confusing...

[Urist Da Vinci]

Potential new discovery:

It has been generally known, given comments made by Toady One and various testing, that the IMPACT_YIELD property of an armor material has an effect on blunt damage received. AFAIK (and general forum wisdom) was that blunt damage depended only on blunt weapon density.

Take a silver bolt, and shoot it at a dwarf wearing steel armor. According to previous research and testing, the victim will suffer blunt damage, likely chipping a bone and with a chance of instant death due to skull=>brain damage.

Now mod silver to have a reduced IMPACT_YIELD of 350 instead of 350000. These silver bolts will deflect off the steel armor, but will still penetrate wood/leather armor and cut flesh. These modded silver bolts will deflect off any armor that they can't penetrate, including Silver or Candy - it's almost as if the bolts can no longer deal blunt damage. However, since we modded the material, this may have unintended consequences for armor properties or melee combat.

Some verification testing and additional research is requested.

TLDR; SOLID_DENSITY and IMPACT_YIELD both matter for blunt damage

[Zivilin]

Interesting find. I'll run a few "Copper vs Steel" scenarios with various IMPACT_YIELD values for copper. I'll concentrate on damage type and deflections.

[Edit]
And here are the results.

I have ascertained that the Bolt-Armor interaction has a binary response to changes to IMPACT_YIELD. In this case, I gradually continued to decrease copper's IMPACT_YIELD and tested it against steel armor. At 11% of its original IMPACT_YIELD, all copper11 bolts deflected off steel armor. At 12% of its original IMPACT_YIELD, all copper12 bolts behaved exactly as regular copper against steel armor. I put the tentative threshold of Copper vs Steel at 11.5% of the IMPACT_YIELD of copper.

I repeated this experiment for copper vs copper, and the threshold was 12.5% - copper12 bolts deflected of copper armor, whilst copper13 bolts behaved like regular copper.

Although IMPACT_YIELD definitely has an effect on deflections, it might not be very useful due to the binary nature of its effect on deflections.

[vadia]

How does this thread parallel/contrast with the broken arrow thread?http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=115448.msg3559195#msg3559195

[Zivilin]

How does this thread parallel/contrast with the broken arrow thread?http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=115448.msg3559195#msg3559195

Parallels:

• Both threads concern ranged performance against armor

Non-parallels (perpendiculars? Divergents?):

• This thread merely presents obtained data, the Broken Arrow thread endeavors to change game mechanics to obtain more realistic interactions
• This thread is mainly concerned with Bolt Material vs Armor Material combinations and their parameters (SOLID_DENSITY, SHEAR_YIELD etc). The Broken Arrow thread is based on changing ranged weapon SHOOT_FORCE and SHOOT_MAXVEL, and ammunition's penetration and edge.
• This thread has only crossbows. The Broken Arrow thread contains crossbows and bows

I know that the findings of this thread are known to the creator of the Broken Arrow thread, since A) He posted here, B) Pirate Bob, who has done the same research as me (if not more), has used the analysis methods developed here to test out how the Broken Arrow mod works. This thread is probably a good database for comparing the modded results with those obtained from vanilla.

[misko27]

I have a possible research topic. Are bows as effective as crossbows?

[Noodz]

I do believe this is the finest scientific paper ever written in this board. And by science i don't simply mean dorf science, i mean true, systematic analysis of the game mechanics.

I wish i had to the time and expertise to creat the Annals of Dwarven Research. This thread would certainly count as one of it's finest papers.

[Urist Da Vinci]

I have a possible research topic. Are bows as effective as crossbows?

The only difference in the raws between crossbow+bolt and bow+arrow are the names, skills used, and the launcher size. The launcher size and strength is generally believed to not affect the projectile performance, except rate-of-fire in the case of a very heavy launcher.

The difference, if any, would likely lie in some hardcoding difference between the skills. The elven civilization (not creature) gets [IMPROVED_BOWS]. I don't exactly know what that does. It adds decorations to bows.

EDIT:

...I put the tentative threshold of Copper vs Steel at 11.5% of the IMPACT_YIELD of copper.

I repeated this experiment for copper vs copper, and the threshold was 12.5% - copper12 bolts deflected of copper armor, whilst copper13 bolts behaved like regular copper.

Although IMPACT_YIELD definitely has an effect on deflections, it might not be very useful due to the binary nature of its effect on deflections.

A bit more testing suggests that the bolt material's threshhold IMPACT_YIELD is 3.4x the number used for the armor material's density, though this relationship is only valid for vanilla bolts and changes in an unknown manner when a few other properties are varied.

I.e. Copper bolts at [IMPACT_YIELD:26500] deflect off steel armor. Copper bolts at [IMPACT_YIELD:27000] deal damage through steel armor. Steel density 7850 * 3.4 = 26690.

I.e. Vanilla aluminum bolts at [IMPACT_YIELD:70000] deflect off platinum armor. Aluminum bolts with [IMPACT_YIELD:74000] deal damage through platinum armor. 21400 * 3.4 = 72760.

I.e. Vanilla iron bolts at [IMPACT_YIELD:542500] deflect off slade armor. Iron bolts with [IMPACT_YIELD:690000] deal damage through slade armor. 200000 * 3.4 = 680000.

Amusingly, crossbows modded to have very high shoot force and maxvel ("railguns") can still have their projectiles deflect off armor and cause no harm, but if the projectile does deal damage then the victim is typically propelled backwards a huge distance. I wanted to see if impact energy was responsible for deflections. Apparently not.

[nordak]

can we get a minecart impact study started... surely has some parallels with your research. 1000 dwarfs on track and run carts over them... should have enough results after every cart and trap of each material has been ran.... sorry just jumped on here to see if toady had tossed up an update, and found a good read.