Without their bowmen as a threat, elves won't even pose as much danger in battle as a kobold with an iron dagger.
Elves use wooden arrows, which are just as useless against *all* armors as they were in 34.11. Look at the "fake_wood" column in the OP. All armors besides adamantine deflect wood 100% of the time. At least in 34.11, this is because the arrow breaks on impact with dense armors.
I would prefer this not turn into a large debate about whether we like the new changes. I think it is well established that the changes are generally an improvement, but that many people would prefer that steel plate was not 100% impenetrable against projectiles. One goal of this thread *is* to tell you how to mod bolts to make this happen. My initial results suggest that setting [SHOOT_FORCE] between 1500 and 1700 will give partial penetration of steel armor, but this has only been tested for copper bolts (I have run other tests, but I messed them up - I've been doing most of my testing when I'm up in the middle of the night feeding my 6 week old baby...)
Pirate Bob and I came up with these odd empirical (testing-based) equations for 0.34.11 in a long thread which attempted to definitively answer the question of which bolt materials were better. Since then, I did some independant research and disassembly-code-reading to produce the thread on the modding forum for the 0.34.11 combat physics and material usage: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=131995.0 . It has some better explanations of the calculations and quirks than we were able to obtain via arena testing.
I would like to do something similar for 0.40.xx, but as far as I know there is no DFHack for 0.40.xx
I would likely update the combat calculation lua script (currently working for 0.34.11) and spend some time trying to figure out new features such as pulping.
This is amazing! I somehow never saw your detailed results for 34.11. I will have to read and try to understand them later when I have time. Very fine work indeed!
I am very glad to hear you will be working on this. I will continue my testing, but will assume that it is only to lay initial groundwork and that you will eventually get a more complete picture using DFHack. Is there anything in particular that you would like me to test now? Also, when you do obtain a complete model I would be more than happy to test predictions on a large scale if this would be useful.
One thing I can say now is that the bolt velocity calculation is definitely different. For one, now bolts of different materials appear to have the same momentum:
As you can see, there is absolutely no difference in deflection of copper (mass 1.34) and silver (mass 1.57) bolts off adamantine armor. This is consistent with
6262 being fixed.
Also, the velocity produced by a given [SHOOT_FORCE] is much lower. When I increase the [CONTACT_AREA] of bolts
I see that the deflection vs. [SHOOT_FORCE] curves do not plateau until at shoot force is > 5000. This means that the momenta of bolts are at least 25 times less than in 34.11, as 5000/[SHOOT_MAXVEL=200] = 25.
The contact area curves appear to confirm that a factor of round100([CONTACT_AREA]*[LAYER_SIZE]) enters the calculation for the maximum momentum which can be stopped by armor. Round100(x) is equal to x rounded down to the nearest 100, with a minimum value of 100. Helms have [LAYER_SIZE]=30, breastplates 20, and everything else 15. With [CONTACT_AREA] less than 7, round100(x) is equal to 100 for all armor. At [CONTACT_AREA]=7, round100(x) is equal to 200 for helms, and we see that deflection continue to occur at about 5% rate out to about double the force. I looked through the raws and confirmed that all these deflection are off of helms. At [CONTACT_AREA]=10, now breastplates have round100(x)=200, helms 300, and everything else 100, and accordingly there are 3 steps in the curve. We would expect helms to protect up to a force of approximately 7500 (3 times the protection at [CONTACT_AREA]=5), but I measure ~5% protection all the way up to SHOOT_FORCE=100,000. This means that at some point between force=5000 and 7500 the bolt velocity becomes capped by [SHOOT_MAXVEL=200]. This puts bolt momenta somewhere between 25 and 37.5 times less than for the same raws in 34.11.
If it is of significant interest to figure out exactly how momenta are calculated from [SHOOT_FORCE], I can set [SHOOT_FORCE] very high and vary [SHOOT_MAXVEL] and see what deflection results. Then by looking on my deflection vs. force curves I can estimate the velocity which results from a given force. Urist can of course get this number much more accurately and directly with DFHack, but maybe a rough estimate would be useful in the meantime?