Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Destyvirago]

I love the combat in DF but I have noticed that creatures can take an incredible amount of damage and can often move and fight long after they should have died or gone unconscious in RL. Only effective way of killing something fast in DF is to jam something into their brains. While I don't want to argue the effectiveness of destroying somethings brain in order to kill it, I do have a feeling that bleeding and trauma are greatly undermodeled.
Yesterday I got a good example as my hunter came across a goblin thief. Basically stepping on him, the hunter first shot him with his crossbow at point blank range taking off the Goblins third finger on his right hand. While amusing its not a serious wound. The Goblin starts to run away but 10 squares away the hunter fires off another bolt:

The flying  {capybara bone bolt} strikes The Goblin Thief in the upper body, tearing the muscle and tearing the hearth through the  ({wolf leather cloak})!
A major artery in the heart has been opened by the atttack!
The {capybara bone bolt] has lodged firmly in the wound!

Normally destruction of the heart would result in incapacitation and death in a few seconds and I expected the Goblin would keel over in a few squares and die. The Goblin on the other hand had other ideas and was not about to let something as minor as an impaled heart stop him from escaping. He engaged his turbo and made for the edge of the map like a bat out of hell leaving a river of arterial blood in his wake. after about 80 squares or so he started to look pale and after running just over 100 squares he finally fell over dead, empty of blood. For a moment I seriously feared he would reach the edge of the map.

While certainly fun to watch it did highlight that the damage and wound system could use some tuning in order to make attacks that don't jam stuff into the targets brain more lethal and faster incapacitating.

[Dorsidwarf]

Df could also do with not making surgeons remove the heart and lungs in surgery.

[BlackFlyme]

Code: [Select]

[TISSUE_TEMPLATE:HEART_TEMPLATE]
[TISSUE_NAME:heart tissue:NP]
[FUNCTIONAL]
[STRUCTURAL]
[SCARS]
[TISSUE_MATERIAL:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:HEART]
[RELATIVE_THICKNESS:1]
[HEALING_RATE:100]
[VASCULAR:10]
[PAIN_RECEPTORS:5]
[CONNECTS]
[TISSUE_SHAPE:LAYER]
I can see the problem. It only bleeds about twice as much as muscle. I have no idea on the science behind major arteries bleeding, but taking 100 tiles until he bled out seems a bit much.

Another oddity I've seen is when you destroy someone's upper spine they will still crawl around on the ground trying to attack you for quite some time before they finally suffocate.

[Enemy post]

Well, if you look at the injury list, all you've done is inflict a broken heart. More seriously, only the brain and lungs matter.

[itg]

Do you actually know how long it takes to die, or at least pass out, from a heart wound? I don't know for certain, but it's definitely more than a few seconds. It sounds like you're expecting DF to work like the movies, where shooting someone in the heart is like hitting the "off" switch on his soul. Granted, DF's tissues definitely aren't finely tuned, and 80-100 squares is a pretty long way to go with a wounded heart. Maybe the bolt just nicked it.

A lot of other wounds are actually extremely effective at incapacitating opponents. An enemy with a chipped bone is almost guaranteed to pass out due to pain, for example. Is that realistic? I have no idea.

[Destyvirago]

Do you actually know how long it takes to die, or at least pass out, from a heart wound? I don't know for certain, but it's definitely more than a few seconds. It sounds like you're expecting DF to work like the movies, where shooting someone in the heart is like hitting the "off" switch on his soul. Granted, DF's tissues definitely aren't finely tuned, and 80-100 squares is a pretty long way to go with a wounded heart. Maybe the bolt just nicked it.

A lot of other wounds are actually extremely effective at incapacitating opponents. An enemy with a chipped bone is almost guaranteed to pass out due to pain, for example. Is that realistic? I have no idea.

Well, the combat report said: "A major artery in the heart has been opened by the attack!" so it sounds pretty dire.  Thanks to the power of youtube you can search for "hunting heart shots" and judge the effects for yourself. I tried and saw enough to make myself queasy. While the heart shot does not kill instantaneous like destruction of the brain it would seem that incapacitation happens after about 4-5 seconds when the brain runs out of oxygen due to lack of blood pressure. After that is mostly thoughtless trashing around on the ground and death cramps. A 100 tile run is about 200 meters or so if I remember correctly (a tile is about 2x2x2m?).

[Destyvirago]

Code: [Select]

[TISSUE_TEMPLATE:HEART_TEMPLATE]
[TISSUE_NAME:heart tissue:NP]
[FUNCTIONAL]
[STRUCTURAL]
[SCARS]
[TISSUE_MATERIAL:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:HEART]
[RELATIVE_THICKNESS:1]
[HEALING_RATE:100]
[VASCULAR:10]
[PAIN_RECEPTORS:5]
[CONNECTS]
[TISSUE_SHAPE:LAYER]
I can see the problem. It only bleeds about twice as much as muscle. I have no idea on the science behind major arteries bleeding, but taking 100 tiles until he bled out seems a bit much.

Another oddity I've seen is when you destroy someone's upper spine they will still crawl around on the ground trying to attack you for quite some time before they finally suffocate.

That could explain a few things. Seems the hearts function is not simulated as is blood pressure. So the Goblin basically had to bleed himself dry in order to die. I have seen that upper spine destruction thing myself too. Seems while DF can track an amazing amount of different wounds inflicted on a character it does not simulate that the incapacitating and lethal effect of several wounds are greater than their individual parts. Therefore some creatures end up as pincushions as they suck up an incredible amount of bolts from your marksdwarfs. 

[Sutremaine]

Heart tissue itself only bleeds twice as much as muscle tissue, but creature entries add major arteries to the heart and throat. I currently have a glassmaker who got shot in the heart and was kept alive on a whim by a quick modification of the 'slayrace' DFHack script (changed the desired blood level from 0 to 500000, and removed the vanish countdown). She has 1474 Recuperation and loses a shade over 5 units of blood per tick. Her natural blood level is 6240, which combined with her 1462 Agility would normally see her bleeding out in... *much fiddling with Notepad and a calculator* ...~180 to ~200 steps?

So, the next step is observing muscle injuries and seeing how much blood they lose (I don't have any qualifying creatures). Given DF's wacky approach to bleeding, I suspect that a number of individually minor muscle injuries will add up to more blood loss than a single punctured heart.

[smjjames]

Df could also do with not making surgeons remove the heart and lungs in surgery.

Haven't had that happen yet.

DF could also try to make dwarves actually try to clean infected parts.

[Dyret]

Do you actually know how long it takes to die, or at least pass out, from a heart wound?

You lose consciousness after about ten seconds, I believe. It's difficult to tell exactly how well that is represented in DF... anyone know how long a turn of combat in adventure mode is supposed to be?

[smjjames]

Do you actually know how long it takes to die, or at least pass out, from a heart wound?

You lose consciousness after about ten seconds, I believe. It's difficult to tell exactly how well that is represented in DF... anyone know how long a turn of combat in adventure mode is supposed to be?

A turn of combat is also determined by the speed of the creature, so it's even more vague.

[chevil]

The flying  {capybara bone bolt} strikes The Goblin Thief in the upper body, tearing the muscle and tearing the hearth through the  ({wolf leather cloak})!
A major artery in the heart has been opened by the attack!
The {capybara bone bolt] has lodged firmly in the wound!

Your hunter tore that heart not pierced. If I remember correctly then a pierced heart is a instakill but a torn heart causes massive bleeding.

[Crinkles]

A more sensible system, I think, would remove dying from bleeding out or suffocating. Instead, each organ would require oxygen to function, with oxygen being entering the body through the lungs or skin (depending on the creature) and being transported through the blood. An internal blood pressure value would simulate the rate of oxygen transport. Wounds reduce blood pressure and a loss of heart function stops it completely. A lack of oxygenation of a body part causes its paralysis, with no oxygenation of the brain causing unconsciousness quickly and death soon after. Low levels of oxygenation causes impaired function. Long-term low-level of oxygenation in a body part of a living being causes necrosis.

It sounds a bit complex, but it actually simplifies things--the whole combat system revolves around destroying the brain, and every aspect of combat becomes a different approach to doing so.

[Telgin]

The flying  {capybara bone bolt} strikes The Goblin Thief in the upper body, tearing the muscle and tearing the hearth through the  ({wolf leather cloak})!
A major artery in the heart has been opened by the attack!
The {capybara bone bolt] has lodged firmly in the wound!

Your hunter tore that heart not pierced. If I remember correctly then a pierced heart is a instakill but a torn heart causes massive bleeding.

I'm pretty sure the only true instakills in DF are loss of all brain function (if you dont' have tags that exempt it), having your head cut off (I do believe this is separate from brain damage oddly) and being bisected.  No amount of damage to the heart could kill you in a single tick in game unless it caused you to lose all of your blood, and I don't know if that's even possible.

Do you actually know how long it takes to die, or at least pass out, from a heart wound?

You lose consciousness after about ten seconds, I believe. It's difficult to tell exactly how well that is represented in DF... anyone know how long a turn of combat in adventure mode is supposed to be?

A turn of combat is also determined by the speed of the creature, so it's even more vague.

That's true, but I believe a single tick is supposed to be a second long in adventure mode.  So, presumably a creature with standard speed, 1,000 agility and no encumbrance would get a turn once per second.  Fort mode is completely crazy in timing, so that goblin probably ran for what amounted to about 12 hours of spewing blood from a heart wound.


Back to the topic at hand, I'm all for more realism.  Broken bones are very effective at incapacitating from pain, but so far as I've seen pretty much no other injuries will ever cause enough pain to knock someone out, and of course, creatures are willing to fight on despite having lost three limbs and having most of their blood on the ground.  I think that will be improved in the next version actually.

[PDF urist master]

cave-ins, atom smashers, freezing and obsidianizing are also insta-kills, but they ignore the damage system.