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[Urist Tilaturist]

While dwarves could be compared to Vikings, given their origins as smiths in Norse myth, I do not think DF is much like mediaeval Europe because of elves, who with their lack of metals and cannibal habits would seem very out of place there. There are a hotchpotch of cultures, some of which are more like mediaeval Europe than others.

Katana would not make much sense if everyone has plate armour and abundant metals, but not everyone in DF has. Their existence would not be outstanding in areas where iron, and therefore iron plate, were rare.

Wooden stakes were also used in mediaeval Europe by archers, who stuck them around camps and in front of their posistions to deter enemy horsemen. In an emergency, they could serve as improvised spears.

Eventually I would like to see elves trading for and using metal, even if they refrain from mining it, but the price of good iron must be higher first to stop it being too abundant.

For unarmed combat, other changes discussed in the other thread were making small body parts internal to slightly improve AI wrestling, and reducing the attacking power of materials like nails and bone to stop scratches from breaking ribs and so on.

[friendguy13]

Why do some of your armor pieces have more than 100% coverage.

[Grimlocke]

Why do some of your armor pieces have more than 100% coverage.

Coverage, for some reason not shared with the public, is factored in to armor thickness and can be larger than 100%. A 50% coverage armor is not only ignored by half the hits, but is also half as thick.

Armor thickness for creatures of the same size is Coverage*Layer size*(1.25*stepping tokens), with this mod I attempted to keep the armor thickness for the various bodyparts the same where it should be.

[Urist Tilaturist]

How is progress on the new mod version? I would like to playtest a version which included both unarmed and armed combat improvements to see how they fitted together, remembering of course the limitations of what modders can do now.

[Grimlocke]

It's mostly done, just wrapping up some last oddities with the weapons, as well as fixing ranged combat from being... weird. Things like bolts breaking bones through armor, which seems to happen regardless of the mass of the bolts.

Punching and kicking no longer breaks bones, which is not entirely realistic as you can break bones if someone is up against the ground or a wall, but increasing force means that punching an armored man in the gut sends him into a vomiting spree. Organ damage and knock-outs overall happen a bit too soon but this is outside of raw modding reach.

Axes and other percussive edged weapons can now inflict substantial blunt damage even if they fail to penetrate, unlike the stock game where any edged weapon failing to cut just results in a bruise.

Small body parts have proven... finicky. Using the body detail plans proved pointless, they are bugged and don't even seem to work right on stock game. Cheeks are supposed to cover the tongue and teeth, but only the tongue gets covered in-game. Making finger/toes embedded lets them be covered by the right armor, but they always break anyway because the bodypart is so tiny. Making all the face parts internal resulted in some exotic combat reports, though all in all it may be the best option.

Anyhow, ill be sure to put something up tomorrow, even if its just a playtest version.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Breaking small bones like jaws and ribs should be possible for legendary fighters, though I am not sure if modders can change how much a skill improves something.

[Grimlocke]

Updated!

The combat balance right now is still not perfect, but certainly a lot better than before. I could not get the small bodyparts to work right, making them internal causes some really messy combat report where every single part of the face gets pulped and somehow it makes it impossible pulp the head with blunt weapons.

I doubt however that I tested every possible combat situation, so if anything odd happens, please do say!

[Urist Tilaturist]

I am about to playtest the new mod version to see how much better it is.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Head biting works very well indeed, with damage only tearing the skin. Removal of the muscle and fat from heads has helped a lot.

In a fight between a completely untrained dwarf and a completely untrained goblin, shaking after biting still seems a little overpowered, as does scratching. What would be better is if the damage of these attacks increased greatly with skill, but I expect that is out of the reach of modders.

The adrenaline syndrome seems to work inconsistently. Some fighters seem to get battle rage, and others seem not to, though they all show as having the syndrome.

2 grand master fighters fought in the same way as 2 dabbling fighters, which seems very odd.

In a clash of grand master axemen, a nasty situation arose where a goblin kicked a dwarf to the ground and hacked at his head over and over again, mangling the skull beyond recognition. Despite this, the dwarf stayed alive and the goblin kept on hacking until he collapsed from over exertion. While this is mostly a bad AI problem, since the goblin should just pull off the helmet, survival with a skull mangled beyond recognition should not be possible. The dwarf finally bled to death after the goblin had collapsed and recovered 3 times. There is still some work to do.

[Grimlocke]

Scratching seems to damage the fat layer, I can probably adjust the penetration depth on the entity creatures to reduce it.

I also just noticed I left in my debug tag in the interaction which turns everything into a blue U when it battle-rages... oops. At least it showed when it works. And yes the AI seems to sporadically fail to actually get the syndrome from the interaction, I am not sure whether or not this is a bug but either way it seems out of raw modding reach. It does at least add an extra incentive to sneak up on enemies as a single good hit on an unaware enemy can make them give into pain.

The unarmed attacks are a bit finicky to work with, either they are bone shattering Dragonball Z ripoffs, or just do bruises no matter what. I will be messing around with it a bit more in the hope of finding a middle ground but I doubt it will ever work perfectly.

There also seems something very wrong with blunt damage to heads, as the skull somehow fails to transfer any momentum to the brain after being hit. I have no idea when this snuck in, I have reversed pretty much every change I made to the head materials, tissues, etc. one by one and the same things keeps happening. Somehow repeatedly hitting unarmored enemies over the head with a maul does not actually kill them.

Also there is annoying 'dented hair' from the changes I made for padded armor... Not sure how to get around that...

[Urist Tilaturist]

The weird invincible skulls are the biggest problem with this. There must be some raws problem which caused it. Finding a balance with unarmed attacks is very hard and will take time, but the skulls need fixing first.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Any progress on the skulls problem?

[Grimlocke]

Ok, following a few days of busyness, procastrination and failing to find out what is causing this, I have found there to be two problems:

One is the head not being pulpable due to the tissue layer changes. Which makes no sense, the muscle and skin material have very similar material and tissue properties. I am trying to find a way to find a way to have cake and eat it too, but for now replacing the modded body detail plan line with [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:HEAD:ARG3:50:ARG2:5:ARG1:1] will solve that problem (which was the main cause of downed enemies being indestructible).

Another seems that for some reason my modded weapons don't seem to want to damage brains with blunt damage. All the organ damage liking breaking ribs and bruising lungs works fine, even knock-outs happen regularly, just the 'brain bruises' don't want to happen. The only difference I can think of is that I use an edged attack with 0 penetration depth for blunt attacks as these are (very annoyingly) also tied to AI behaviour. Edged attacked are used about 100 times more often by the AI so this is really kind of needed for this mod, what with all weapons having secondary attacks and a lot of weapon having both a blunt and edged primary attack.

Anyhow I will be making an update for the current version with whatever I come up with for the head tissues, as well as a slight buff for the lighter battleaxes which did perform a but more weakly than I thought.

[Urist Tilaturist]

How much progress has there been on the new version?

[Grimlocke]

Mostly been busy getting bugs and oddities out. Also increased the contact surface of most blunt weapons to make pulping easier and fights hopefully less prolonged.

I think I at least managed to make the adrenaline interaction work reliably in dwarf mode, adventurer mode I'm still not sure about. In the adventurer-arena mode it works automatically on the player character (Weirdly enough) but tends to have a large delay for enemies. The arena AI in general seems a bit fudged though so perhaps in actual play it will do better.

I have also been trying to get some more mileage out of armored combat, mainly hits on limbs not being very realistic but that didn't work out.

At any rate I will probably have a release this weekend.