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[Pirate Bob]

I am utterly nonplussed, PirateBob. The work you do is amazing, and should seriously go in a scientific journal. Maybe you should submit it to MoMA as part of the DF exhibit?

That would only serve to confuse the general public (they would think Toady doesn't understand how his own program works) and draw undue attention to DF's violence. We would prefer that the spotlight stay on Toady, and not on the DF community. It would also never practically happen.

I agree with Urist completely.  While I greatly appreciate the compliment, it is merely a testament to how detailed Dwarf Fortress is that it takes this level of analysis to understand the mechanics. 

It's my hope that our results can be used by modders to balance projectiles to their liking.  I can say that I've playtested my personal set of modifications quite a bit, and it was extremely satisfying to have my demigod adventurer in a full set of iron armor survive a few battles with bandit archers, and then die to a rather beefy night creature. 

Edit:  I also added a note about our results to #5516.  I'm not sure if Toady will want to change the way projectiles work or not, but this should at least provide provide people who are unhappy with the current system with some options for modding.

[Archetype]

Hi Pirate Bob,

edit: nevermind, I was comparing the changes and didn't notice the extra files! Sorry

Thanks for the detailed analysis on this issue. I've looked at the fix you've posted on DFFD, however, I don't see the reactions. Are those in a separate file that's not in the zip file.

I would like to try out your fix in my games, thanks!

[ORCACommander]

Zivilin I hate to bump your topic but i have found a way for you test bolt quality and crossbow quality. You will need to install df hack (https://github.com/peterix/dfhack/) as your first step. next you will need to create your dwarves with their mundane items. next view the dwarves so that their inventory screen is up uses the up and down arrows to cycle through their gear. in the df hack command prompt put in changeitem q 5 where 5 = masterwork.

While this will completely change a stack of bolts to the same quality unfortunately it must be done manually for every item since it relies on the item being selected in the gui

[Pirate Bob]

Zivilin I hate to bump your topic but i have found a way for you test bolt quality and crossbow quality. You will need to install df hack (https://github.com/peterix/dfhack/) as your first step. next you will need to create your dwarves with their mundane items. next view the dwarves so that their inventory screen is up uses the up and down arrows to cycle through their gear. in the df hack command prompt put in changeitem q 5 where 5 = masterwork.

While this will completely change a stack of bolts to the same quality unfortunately it must be done manually for every item since it relies on the item being selected in the gui

Thanks for the suggestion - we actually have already done this (Urist da Vinci of course also thought of the same thing you suggested), and I managed to even figure out how to automate it.  I found no impact at all of bolt quality on damage done.  I believe that I posted these results somewhere in the thread, but the thread has gotten quite long...
I probably should investigate this in more depth at some point, but it's a lot of work and I've been busy.  If you are interested in doing any investigations yourself I'd be happy to provide you with scripts and/or advice.

[crossmr]

Did you take into account skilled weapon uses who can swat bolts out of the air?
I had a miner who was being chased by a squad of goblin archers who deflected 100% of the arrows with his pick.

I've also had small groups of 3 legendary fighters wade into 1 or 2 groups of goblin archers (Sometimes with an elite goblin archer) and just decimate both groups with no injuries at all. Combat logs showed the shield and or weapon deflections to be absolute. Crossbows are meant to be point and click. It makes sense that an archer might have an advantage over someone of equal skill. or even slightly greater skill.
But a truly skilled warrior can survive closing and then obliterate them.

[CognitiveDissonance]

Did you take into account skilled weapon uses who can swat bolts out of the air?
I had a miner who was being chased by a squad of goblin archers who deflected 100% of the arrows with his pick.

I've also had small groups of 3 legendary fighters wade into 1 or 2 groups of goblin archers (Sometimes with an elite goblin archer) and just decimate both groups with no injuries at all. Combat logs showed the shield and or weapon deflections to be absolute. Crossbows are meant to be point and click. It makes sense that an archer might have an advantage over someone of equal skill. or even slightly greater skill.
But a truly skilled warrior can survive closing and then obliterate them.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Skill will always overcome lack of skill. That's the point of shields, and training up your soldiers. Also why danger rooms are so popular, and so effective.
Skill can and should be overcome with numbers. You can only swat so many bolts...

See: Pincushion

[crossmr]

Skill will always overcome lack of skill. That's the point of shields, and training up your soldiers. Also why danger rooms are so popular, and so effective.
Skill can and should be overcome with numbers. You can only swat so many bolts...

People link this thread in their signatures..someone is bound to reply to it.

My point was, there was some complaint that bolts are "overpowered" because of how easily they can obliterate someone. I guess my point was that against someone unskilled, that should be the case. An unskilled marksdwarf will hit less often, but when he hits, if the target is unskilled, then we expect him to get maimed.
It's the nature of bolts.

We need to consider that a skilled warrior can duck, dodge, weave, block, deflect, and the armor will indeed catch the odd one, but if he actually gets caught, and it's a genuine hit, he should probably suffer for it. I just think that needs to be worked into how overpowered some people feel bolts are.

[Mr S]

The overpowered nature of Crossbow bolts isn't often argued as their ability to hit or be dodged.  What is most frequently argued regarding Crossbow bolts is that they strike with energy roughly equivalent to a planet-like object large enough to maintain its own atmosphere rapidly approaching the event horizon of a gravitational singularity.  Their mass is too high, they leave the crossbow at a constant velocity(energy? impulse?) regrdless of mass/density and a small handful of other physics "assumptions" are made in their calculations which could be handled more cleanly.

[Pirate Bob]

The point of this thread is really not to argue that crossbow bolts are overpowered or not, it is merely to study the effect of armor at stopping bolts.  It was actually somewhat a surprise (at least to me) that the answer is that armor does absolutely nothing against metal bolts.

In my personal opinion, vanilla crossbows are relatively well balanced in fort mode, as on average the fact that armor does nothing is balanced out by shields/dodging being super effective against them.  I played a fort through to see what impact my suggested mods of more realistc bolt masses/energies were, and found that they had almost no impact at all because my (uber skilled) dwarves almost never got hit by bolts.  Furthermore, the amount of damage done by the less massive bolts did not decrease noticeably.  My marksdwarves were still extremely effective against goblins, even though their shots were occasionally deflected by armor.  Overall, the amount of deflections you'd expect realistic armor to produce is low enough that it simply isn't noticeable in fort mode.

That being said, it is VERY noticeable in adventure mode.  Things don't "average out" when players realize this is the tenth time they got shot in the head by a copper bolt, and their iron helm did nothing...again.  Also, in adventure mode archers tend to make a lot of shots "from behind" and such, so dodging/shields and such are less effective.

Bottom line - I think crossbow bolts can be relatively simply modded to allow them to work very well both in fort mode and adventure mode.  For the quick and dirty way, try setting [SHOOT_MAXVEL:833] in [ITEM_WEAPON:ITEM_WEAPON_CROSSBOW] and [ITEM_WEAPON:ITEM_WEAPON_BOW], and [SIZE:11] for [ITEM_AMMO:ITEM_AMMO_BOLTS] and [ITEM_AMMO:ITEM_AMMO_ARROWS] (I also posted a mod somewhere in this thread that uses custom materials to give all bolts the same mass, but this kind of makes a mess in fort mode).  If you can see any difference in fort mode, I'd really like to know about it, and you will almost certainly notice a difference in adventure mode.  In particular, for reasons I don't quite understand, helms seem to be made particularly effective, so this change should drastically reduce the number of one-shot deaths from archers.

[Volfgarix]

(Realized that I posted stupid things, so I deleted this)

[Pirate Bob]

(Realized that I posted stupid things, so I deleted this)

I really wouldn't have called anything you posted "stupid".  This thread has become a massive sprawling 18 page mess, and which I can barely understand even though I wrote much of it.  I was meaning to address some of your questions and comments, but I can't remember what they were.  I did think your animal testing results were interesting.

One thing I can do is direct you to the material science page on the wiki, which has our best attempt to summarize the results so far.  I am hoping to do some more testing to work out some of the open questions with projectiles (effects of creature/body part size, overlapping armor layers, details of protection falloff with increasing momentum, probably many others), and if I do I might start a new thread (linked here) to discuss the results.

[Volfgarix]

(Realized that I posted stupid things, so I deleted this)

I really wouldn't have called anything you posted "stupid".  This thread has become a massive sprawling 18 page mess, and which I can barely understand even though I wrote much of it.  I was meaning to address some of your questions and comments, but I can't remember what they were.  I did think your animal testing results were interesting.

One thing I can do is direct you to the material science page on the wiki, which has our best attempt to summarize the results so far.  I am hoping to do some more testing to work out some of the open questions with projectiles (effects of creature/body part size, overlapping armor layers, details of protection falloff with increasing momentum, probably many others), and if I do I might start a new thread (linked here) to discuss the results.

Oh well, thanks, I thought that experiments like mine were did anyway, so I thought I didn't show nothing new.
So as I remember I said about your mod:
-Silver, copper are fine against unarmored targets, mostly bounced off metal armors. Probably damaged addy claded targets, but I don't remember.
-Adamantine bolts are bullshit even against unarmored targets (5-6 marksdwarves killed by elephant and alligator)
-Iron, steel works good if I did remember good..
-Wood bolts are weak as intended, but probably still better than addy ones.

I said then that the problem is wrong, hardcoded momentum calculation, which, as I did read, makes all bolts flying with that same speed, so silver bolts will have more momentum that the steel ones.

[Hague]

Sorry for thread necro, but has anyone attempted comparisons of cloth values. For instance, I know silk has incredible resistance to penetration. Has anyone tested whether candy thread clothes provide protection against bolts?

EDIT: Reading up on tags, the [STRUCTURAL_ELASTICITY_CHAIN_ALL] tag makes it so chain armor will blunt edged damage.

Also, [STRUCTURAL_ELASTICITY_WOVEN_THREAD] adds caps that prevent cloth armor from being too effective against edged weapons.

Has anyone tried reducing the SIZE value of crossbow bolts? They are currently 150, what if that were a quarter what it is now? Would that make bruising less prevalent and penetration more common?

[Pirate Bob]

Sorry for thread necro, but has anyone attempted comparisons of cloth values. For instance, I know silk has incredible resistance to penetration. Has anyone tested whether candy thread clothes provide protection against bolts?

EDIT: Reading up on tags, the [STRUCTURAL_ELASTICITY_CHAIN_ALL] tag makes it so chain armor will blunt edged damage.

Also, [STRUCTURAL_ELASTICITY_WOVEN_THREAD] adds caps that prevent cloth armor from being too effective against edged weapons.

Has anyone tried reducing the SIZE value of crossbow bolts? They are currently 150, what if that were a quarter what it is now? Would that make bruising less prevalent and penetration more common?

The mass of crossbow bolts is linearly proportional to the SIZE value, and mass is very important for penetration and damage.  It's in this thread, but the thread has gotten to be 18 pages long it's somewhat hard to find.  You can find a decent summary on the Material Science page of the wiki.  Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

I have not tried anything with cloth armor, and I don't think anyone else has done much if anything.  I doubt it would do much against standard bolts, since adamantium plate does nothing, but it would be interesting to see if low momentum bolts could be stopped by cloth at some point.  I'll keep it in mind if I ever have time to do more testing, which sadly won't be any time soon.  If anyone else wants to try I'd be more than happy to help though.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Sorry for thread necro, but has anyone attempted comparisons of cloth values. For instance, I know silk has incredible resistance to penetration. Has anyone tested whether candy thread clothes provide protection against bolts?

EDIT: Reading up on tags, the [STRUCTURAL_ELASTICITY_CHAIN_ALL] tag makes it so chain armor will blunt edged damage.

Also, [STRUCTURAL_ELASTICITY_WOVEN_THREAD] adds caps that prevent cloth armor from being too effective against edged weapons.

Has anyone tried reducing the SIZE value of crossbow bolts? They are currently 150, what if that were a quarter what it is now? Would that make bruising less prevalent and penetration more common?

The mass of crossbow bolts is linearly proportional to the SIZE value, and mass is very important for penetration and damage.  It's in this thread, but the thread has gotten to be 18 pages long it's somewhat hard to find.  You can find a decent summary on the Material Science page of the wiki.  Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

I have not tried anything with cloth armor, and I don't think anyone else has done much if anything.  I doubt it would do much against standard bolts, since adamantium plate does nothing, but it would be interesting to see if low momentum bolts could be stopped by cloth at some point.  I'll keep it in mind if I ever have time to do more testing, which sadly won't be any time soon.  If anyone else wants to try I'd be more than happy to help though.

I added the notes in the wiki about the [STRUCTURAL_ELASTICITY_*] tokens. All of them set the *_STRAIN_AT_YIELD properties of the armor to 50000 if not already higher, making the armor as flexible as skin. Also, [STRUCTURAL_ELASTICITY_WOVEN_THREAD] caps SHEAR_YIELD at 20000 and SHEAR_FRACTURE at 30000. This means that silk's strength is nerfed when used in flexible clothing rather than as (theoretical) solid silk plates.

If you didn't understand the above, know that clothing is almost useless against slashing/stabbing weapons, even adamantine clothing.

Prior to 0.31.06, silk clothing was overpowered. Toady fixed the issue and boosted the ability of animal bites/claws to penetrate clothing.