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[Meph]

You can give them unique bows with a higher force, or arrows that have a smaller contact area. That still means that bow-skill and relatively normal arrows would be used; without alienating the players.

Another alternative would be to give them harder wood. MasterworkDF has ironbark trees for example; you can take a guess at what material that is equivalent to.

[Taffer]

Released v1.7.0. This will require a brand new DF installation again. The only thing that's changed is I deleted a duplicate reaction file, and I took the opportunity to rename my final not-in-vanilla file. I'm sorry, everyone! I'll try to be less careless. On the plus side, every new file has revised in the name, and things will stay that way. I forgot to review the error log before release, and I usually do.

I've -finally- been looking into dfhack, and I'm hoping that raw-lint will help clean up the files further. It doesn't seem to work in Fedora (it can't find my raw files, even with selinux disabled), but I'll try again in Windows. I have no reason to depend on dfhack yet, but I'm opening the door for requests and suggestions that need it.

They already have their hardened wood, might as well use it for projectiles too.
...
Is it possible to make the elves use poison? Poisoned arrows, or poisoned blowdart thingies would fit well with the overall theme, I think.
...
And you can also make them throw bees. BEES!

I like the poison idea, but there are problems with poison reactions from what I understand. I think Adventurecraft has working poison reactions? I'm not sure. I already have permission to go through Adventurecraft for interesting changes to include, but I'm not sure I want the complexity of poison reactions. I'll think about it. I'd rather give them hardened arrows like you suggested, and then wait to see if people think that fixed it.

No to both darts and bees, sorry! Seems like a controversial change. I already went too far by giving them atlatls. I want to limit controversial changes, as that makes the controversial changes I -do- want to include more palatable

Thank you for the suggestions!

You can give them unique bows with a higher force, or arrows that have a smaller contact area. That still means that bow-skill and relatively normal arrows would be used; without alienating the players.

Another alternative would be to give them harder wood. MasterworkDF has ironbark trees for example; you can take a guess at what material that is equivalent to.

I'll try "hardened" arrows with a smaller contact area. If that's not enough, I can also give them unique bows. Thank you for the suggestion! Ironwood trees might need to come in, if elves are still weak despite everything I've given them.

Oh, and I did remove the SIEGE tag from elves after all.

Thank you for all of the feedback, Meph!

[Meph]

No worries.

Another option, which works without new materials or objects, is to simply give them natural skills. In my launcher (and MasterworkDF), people can pick which level of skill their enemies or allies will have:

Code: [Select]

[NATURAL_SKILL:AXE:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:SWORD:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:MACE:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:HAMMER:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:SPEAR:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:CROSSBOW:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:SHIELD:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:ARMOR:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:PIKE:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:WHIP:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:BOW:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:BLOWGUN:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:MELEE_COMBAT:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:RANGED_COMBAT:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:WRESTLING:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:BITE:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:GRASP_STRIKE:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:STANCE_STRIKE:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
[NATURAL_SKILL:DODGING:0]YESHARDERINVADER_ELF
If you make them good at dodging, bow and ranged combat, they already pose a higher threat, regardless of their silly wooden items.

[Sver]

The problem with their bows is that their wooden arrows are terrible. Perhaps crossbows are a better idea, and leave bows to the goblins. Or have special "elf only" arrows. If anybody has an idea here, let me know.

My mod uses "elf only" arrows (alongside the atlatls, just for the variety), which seem to work fine when made of wood. The most important part is the arrows contact area - an area of '1' is a real killer no matter what the material is.

[Thuellai]

What was the duplicate reaction?  Was it something in 1.6.1 or added in 1.6.2 which I didn't grab yet?

Also, Taffer, would you be okay with me using Revised as a base for a mod I'm working on? (with credit, of course)  I really like your changes and would likely duplicate a lot of them (like the unarmed combat changes) so it'd be faster if I just started from Revised and built on top of it.

[Taffer]

At some point I need to gender every description: creatures shouldn't be described as "it" in the descriptive opening, but then "he" or "she" in the generated text. I started that work, but then reverted the small progress I made for now. It's a lot of work, so it'll have to wait until later. When I do work on that, I'll probably use this as an opportunity to improve my emacs-fu and automate much of the work.

My mod uses "elf only" arrows (alongside the atlatls, just for the variety), which seem to work fine when made of wood. The most important part is the arrows contact area - an area of '1' is a real killer no matter what the material is.

Oh good, that'll save me a bit of work. Thanks!

What was the duplicate reaction?  Was it something in 1.6.1 or added in 1.6.2 which I didn't grab yet?

Also, Taffer, would you be okay with me using Revised as a base for a mod I'm working on? (with credit, of course)  I really like your changes and would likely duplicate a lot of them (like the unarmed combat changes) so it'd be faster if I just started from Revised and built on top of it.

Try GitLab's compare feature. And of course, go ahead!

[Lordsservent-san]

Well, I wish you luck on progress with the mod and in trying to make combat somewhat more balanced, because that is going to be a doozy.

[Taffer]

Well, I wish you luck on progress with the mod and in trying to make combat somewhat more balanced, because that is going to be a doozy.

Being upfront, I'm deferring to Sver for combat balancing at the moment. I'm hoping for feedback after I integrate many of Sver's changes (no new items though), and will find time to test what I can. I have some ideas for simplifying armour and adding some new body parts, but that comes later. On the plus side, I've gotten a lot of feedback on combat balancing, so I'm not trusting blindly here. Its just that balance means different things to different people and fixing it all requires lots of time spent testing things. Sver's done the work testing and actually releasing something, so it doesn't make sense for me to duplicate the work unless I need to. Grimlocke's also done lots of good work, but separating out the balance from the new items isn't easy.

With work getting busy this month and family life, I don't have the energy at the moment to do much combat testing. This week and next is busy in particular, so I've been trying to edit and fix up descriptions more. That way something does get done, and I don't need to think much about it.  I'll probably also find the time to do some more small improvements.

[Taffer]

I reshuffled my git repositories to their final locations. I'd already changed my username, but now they're in a new dwarf-fortress group on Gitlab as a new home, and I have my projects under one namespace.

This also lets me maintain private forks of my work on Gitlab.

Description editing continues well. Not the most exciting work for people, but it still needs to get done.

[Taffer]

I'm about halfway done another full round of description editing. They're really shaping up in my opinion. I've also (finally) started bringing in Sver's DF Combat Reworked. Thank you kindly for your patience, everyone. Things may be progressing slowly, but they're progressing.

You can always follow progress on the repository, linked in the opening topic.

[Prismaa]

Does this work with lazy newb pack? or does it screw around with something if I add it.

[Taffer]

Does this work with lazy newb pack? or does it screw around with something if I add it.

I don't know. I've never used the Lazy Newb Pack.

[Sver]

Does this work with lazy newb pack? or does it screw around with something if I add it.

As far as I know, there shouldn't be any conflicts. Lazy Newb Pack is a collection of tilesets and utilities, while Revised deals with the raws instead.

[Burneddi]

Not sure if this is something that can be done, or if you want to do in the first place, but would it be possible to add more possible actions that can appear on objects? I mean stuff like "X is labouring" or "X is smeared out into a spiral". The default list is kinda limited and is dominated by rather... nasty actions. It'd be nice to have some more positive/neutral actions on there, for instance "X is gleaming" or "X appears overjoyed" and such.

[Taffer]

Not sure if this is something that can be done, or if you want to do in the first place, but would it be possible to add more possible actions that can appear on objects? I mean stuff like "X is labouring" or "X is smeared out into a spiral". The default list is kinda limited and is dominated by rather... nasty actions. It'd be nice to have some more positive/neutral actions on there, for instance "X is gleaming" or "X appears overjoyed" and such.

I'm not sure offhand, but I'll look into it when I'm not at work. Probably not possible? Thank you for the suggestion! Your post also (indirectly) reminded me that speech in Adventure mode could be improved.