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[Urist Tilaturist]

This mod www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=146737 adds a whole load of new weapons and armour pieces to DF. Unfortunately, not all of it works as it should. Partial plate armour should cover the upper legs, but does not. Here is the raws file:
[ITEM_ARMOR:ITEM_ARMOR_BREASTPLATE]
   [NAME:partial plate armor:partial plate armor]
   [PREPLURAL:suits of]
   [ARMORLEVEL:3]
   [UBSTEP:1]
   [LBSTEP:1]
   [LAYER:COVER]
   [SHAPED]
   [COVERAGE:83]1750
   [LAYER_SIZE:14]
   [LAYER_PERMIT:15]
   [MATERIAL_SIZE:9]
   [METAL]
   [HARD]
I believe LBSTEP 1 should cover the upper legs, so why is it not doing this? My warrior dwarves are running around with bare legs and a grey langur bit one of them, risking infection.

[vjmdhzgr]

It's being worn on the upper body, meaning going down would mean covering the lower body, one more would be needed for upper legs.

[crazyabe]

a grey langur bit one of them, risking infection.

To witch one?

[Halnoth]

It's being worn on the upper body, meaning going down would mean covering the lower body, one more would be needed for upper legs.

The upper and lower body are 0 steps away so lbstep 1 covers the upper legs.  Nothing can be worn on just the upper body. Anything worn on the upper body also covers the lower body.

To the OP regardless of whats covered with bad luck anything can get through armor. Additionally, since the armor piece is worn on the upper body it does not count towards having pants on in terms of thoughts. In short, get your dwarves some leg armor.

Edit: I just noticed that it says coverage 83. This means that the armor only gets in the way of attacks 83% of the time. This might be why the attack got through. You can bump this to 100 to make sure the armor always gets in the way of an attack.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Lower leg armour (greaves) in this mod goes with boots, and upper leg armour (tassets or cuisses) with body armour, as was the case with historical armour; armoured trousers were uncomfortable, expensive, and rare (try riding a horse while sitting on an iron plate).

The problem is not that the dwarf was hurt, but that the injury was inflicted with no mention of "through the armour" as it usually is. Armour coverage is very goofy at the moment; the only way an attack should ignore it is by entering a gap, which is only possible for stabbing attacks and arrows/bolts, not slashes or scratches, hence why knights used half swording to stab precisely through a foe's eye slit or joint.

What does increasing coverage over 100% do?

[crazyabe]

Edit: I just noticed that it says coverage 83. This means that the armor only gets in the way of attacks 83% of the time.

See there's your problem... it didn't go thru it went around! because

coverage 83. This means that the armor only gets in the way of attacks 83% of the time.

You can bump this to 100 to make sure the armor always gets in the way of an attack.

[kiwiphoenix]

The problem is not that the dwarf was hurt, but that the injury was inflicted with no mention of "through the armour" as it usually is.
...
What does increasing coverage over 100% do?

If an armour piece is bypassed due to a failed coverage roll, it effectively vanishes from existence. The attack isn't hitting through the armour at all, hence no message.

Coverage is also a minor determining factor in an armour's mass. Values over 100% will make the armour thicker/heavier/more valuable/more protective, though not nearly as much as increasing LAYER_SIZE.


Coverage is a great way to make subtle tweaks to the armour system, without straying too far away from Vanilla.
I personally use >100% values to create functional padded armour, and values around 98-99% on everything else to make combat more unpredictable and dangerous, and increase the importance of proper layering. In particular, a 2% failure rate on helms allows proper executions of unconscious soldiers in Fort mode.

[Hugo_The_Dwarf]

Code: [Select]

[ITEM_ARMOR:ITEM_ARMOR_BREASTPLATE]
   [NAME:partial plate armor:partial plate armor]
   [PREPLURAL:suits of]
   [ARMORLEVEL:3]
   [UBSTEP:1]
   [LBSTEP:1]
   [LAYER:COVER]
   [SHAPED]
   [COVERAGE:83]1750
   [LAYER_SIZE:14]
   [LAYER_PERMIT:15]
   [MATERIAL_SIZE:9]
   [METAL]
   [HARD]

Body Plan		Covers T/F
Head	F (only a Helm can cover this)
Neck/Upper Arm	T (Neck I can't confirm been too long)
UB	T (as this is where the armor is)
LB	T
Upper Legs	F (to reach this LBSTEP:2 is needed)

As for the Coverage, not sure if that was another question the OP asked or not but it is normally 100% but since the term partial plate, it could be more "open" but that's up to his imagination I suppose

Long Story short if you want this chest plate to also cover the upper legs, increase the LBSTEP to 2

[Urist Tilaturist]

The problem is not that the dwarf was hurt, but that the injury was inflicted with no mention of "through the armour" as it usually is.
...
What does increasing coverage over 100% do?

If an armour piece is bypassed due to a failed coverage roll, it effectively vanishes from existence. The attack isn't hitting through the armour at all, hence no message.

Coverage is also a minor determining factor in an armour's mass. Values over 100% will make the armour thicker/heavier/more valuable/more protective, though not nearly as much as increasing LAYER_SIZE.


Coverage is a great way to make subtle tweaks to the armour system, without straying too far away from Vanilla.
I personally use >100% values to create functional padded armour, and values around 98-99% on everything else to make combat more unpredictable and dangerous, and increase the importance of proper layering. In particular, a 2% failure rate on helms allows proper executions of unconscious soldiers in Fort mode.

Coverage as it is now, remembering the game is still a work in progress, is a fairly stupid system because all attack types (stab, slash, bash) have equal chance to bypass armour completely. Sure, armour had gaps, but a small gap could only be stabbed through, not slashed or bashed through. The arts of harnischfechten (fighting in armour) did not much feature slashing for that reason; people either stabbed through gaps or bashed the armour and inflicted blunt damage beneath. Slashing was useless. To execute an unconscious soldier, the foe should remove armour pieces and slay him that way, or bash him with sufficient force that he is killed despite the armour (even a steel helm might not stop the huge blunt damage to the brain of a poleaxe strike if the soldier was lying still and could not glance the blow at all by dodging). Killing men in armour was hard without guns, hence why armour was popular.

Partial plate usually meant that the soldier only wore certain plates and not all of them, not that the armour had holes in it! For example, a soldier might wear only the cuirass and tassets, but not pauldrons, greaves, or vambraces. The silly part for me was not having a mail shirt underneath, but my metalsmith's forge is actually unable to produce mail shirts, or indeed any kind of torso armour other than partial plate armour. If I could make better armour, I would and ignore this problem, but I cannot. I believe this may be a bug in the mod that different armour styles are not available, because mail shirts long predated partial plate and should be available before, if anything.

[kiwiphoenix]

...

I'm fairly interested in history, too, as it happens. I am aware that armour didn't have unnecessary holes in it for enemies to poke their weapons into. I am aware that people wore armour despite the weight and expense because it worked. I am aware that even early firearms had trouble against good steel, to the point of being used to leave proofing marks.

...To execute an unconscious soldier, the foe should remove armour pieces and slay him that way, or bash him with sufficient force that he is killed despite the armour...

You're right. Historical soldiers did prefer to go around armour, or remove it if they had the opportunity, rather than bash away uselessly like mindless machines.
The problem here is that we're talking about DF, in which our soldiers are mindless machines. Nobody will pull a misericorde, nobody will go for an eye slit, nobody will crush anyone's throat... nobody will do anything but flail randomly at each other until one drops, at which point the other will hit them in the head until they die.

If you go into Arena Mode and pit two steel-armoured swordsmen against each other, they will futilely biff at each other until one passes out from exhaustion, at which point the other will relentlessly chop at the helmet until he too collapses. One will come to, scrape at the other's helm, pass out, repeat. This can continue almost indefinitely.

In Vanilla, an elite soldier with an iron weapon can almost literally never beat an unskilled conscript in full steel armour.
Try it - in the arena, plonk down two guys. Give both iron short swords. Give one full steel armour. Give the other a buckler and master-level sword/shield/wrestling skills. Watch as the former beats the latter. Repeat as many times as you like. Get the same result almost without fail.
I think we can agree that this is ahistorical.

Now, if 2% of hits ignore armour, then a warrior that can casually land a hundred blows to the enemy's one will reliably win, despite inferior equipment. And a heavily-armoured veteran will be vulnerable to getting swamped and killed by overwhelming numbers. Neither of these are really represented in Vanilla.
The miniscule failure rate is not meant to represent a gaping hole in the armour. It's a compromise, meant to cover the deficiencies of the DF combat system, in which soldiers will blindly attempt to hack through the masterwork adamantine helm of a downed opponent rather than open an unprotected femoral artery.

I assumed that since you're clearly already open to modding, you might appreciate a suggestion on making the results of combat more closely reflect reality.
And it was just that: a suggestion. If it violates your principles, nobody will force you to use it. Was trying to be helpful - sorry.


P.S.: Mail shirts are by default marked as COMMON in the entity file. This means that virtually all Dwarven civs will be able to make them... but not all. You probably just got unlucky and picked the rare Dwarven civ that never invented the hauberk. FORCED will ensure that every instance of that civ in every universe will be able to make that item.

[Urist Tilaturist]

I just misunderstood your intentions. Using coverage in that way is convenient to stop fights lasting forever, and I can see it making the best of a bad situation.

[kiwiphoenix]

Fair enough, that happens. Sorry for the confusion, then.

The system is most definitely broken, and that's a bit frustrating, since Adventure Mode clearly shows the potential that could be achieved by a more flexible AI...
Not that I'm volunteering to fix it, heh; heard DF's source code is a labyrinthine nightmare of C++.

[Urist Tilaturist]

It is also closed source, so it may be impossible anyway. Adventure mode shows the possibilities of DF's combat system if it were not so broken.

[Lymia]

It is also closed source, so it may be impossible anyway.

Don't underestimate what a determined programmer with a disassembler can do. It being closed source isn't the hard part, the hard part is that you have to program any mods like that on basically a C level, rather than being able to access the C++ templates and stuff. That'll make it difficult to do overhauls like implementing moving siege engines for Toady, but, like, it probably won't get in the way of AI improvements like that.