Print

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

[carewolf]

As shadiversity can confirm gambesons are awesome.

I suggest they can be made out of 10 units of plant or silk-cloth and is worn like mail-shirts and protects like them, just with less protection against punctures, and more against blunt, but equal against all but the sharpest of cutting attacks.

[Dorsidwarf]

Or wear under mail so that mail actually has some value against blunt attacks?

[Ninjabread]

DF doesn't have stats like edge defence or blunt defence, it has physical properties of the material and the item. Not sure if it simulates thickness in terms of armour the same way it does for tissue layers, but if it does that's a pretty important facet of gambesons.

It would certainly be nice to have some armour that cushions blunt attacks, since currently anything short of steel plate is futile, and the only somewhat reliable defences either require an adventurer or run the risk of HFS.

[GoblinCookie]

We could already mod them in I think.

[Splint]

We could already mod them in I think.

We... Can? Kinda?

I've tried it, but it seems unless it's made of a faux-metal material, which is what the Haberdasher mod does, civilians will wear them like regular clothes (requiring producing them in potentially massive numbers just so your soldiers can have some.) I'd have to see how Grimlocke and Stal's mods do it because I never used the former and I never bothered using gambesons in the latter.

My guess is the intent of the suggestion is to basically allow cloth armor to be... Vanillized I guess? Without making them be a faux-metal material or something civvies will wear like a regular ol' t-shirt.

Plus, on the upside, an actual vanilla consideration for cloth armor could make more primitively equipped civs like the elves a bit hardier with that extra layer of protection, and militias in resource poor areas could at least have something to wear under leather until better equipment can be provided via imported gear or raw materials, cause it's entirely plausible to embark in a place where the only metal on map is adamantine.

Sort of related and proves my point there, I added metal axe and hammer pendants as cape slot items so I could issue them to militia officers as a badge of office sort of thing. At present I would need to manufacture 200 or so of the things so the militia could actually get any, as the civilians gobbled the 10 I had made up before I could assign them because as far as the game cares, they aren't "actual" armor. It's the same deal for gambesons far as I can tell, barring those two mods I assume.

[catoblepas]

I think the existing leather armors are supposed to fill that purpose, but they are rather...unsatisfactory in that regard, I think.

Not only because animals only produce one unit of leather regardless of the size of the animal (while producing multiple units of bone, meat etc) meaning that leather can easily be of shorter supply than metal. For that matter, animal hide thickness had no effect on the thickness of the armor it's made into either, and all leathers are equal.

Weaker materials get reduced to rags in seconds in combat. Bone/shell/leather armor was never really great in DF, but with armor taking damage now- you tend to end up with XXHorse Leather ArmorXX within seconds of contact with the enemy. And there's no way to repair those damaged armors now either.

Articles of clothing all seem to have the same thickness, I think there is an effect on the clothing size on thickness, but that's it- bigger creatures have thicker clothing/armor (not sure why humans need thicker shirts than dwarves, but there it is) clothing/armor probably needs some sort of RAW tag to control material thickness before cloth/leather armor could be useful.

It's a great idea, and I remember with some fondness going out of my way to equip some squads with exotic leather armors in the past, but I think for something like this to get off the ground it would have to be part of a larger clothing overhaul by Toady in the (hopefully not to distant) future.

Your suggestion ha my support though!

[GoblinCookie]

We... Can? Kinda?

I've tried it, but it seems unless it's made of a faux-metal material, which is what the Haberdasher mod does, civilians will wear them like regular clothes (requiring producing them in potentially massive numbers just so your soldiers can have some.) I'd have to see how Grimlocke and Stal's mods do it because I never used the former and I never bothered using gambesons in the latter.

Leather armor is considered armor, so what you are saying is that we cannot make armor our of cloth or wool correct?

[Ulfarr]

I've tried it, but it seems unless it's made of a faux-metal material, which is what the Haberdasher mod does, civilians will wear them like regular clothes (requiring producing them in potentially massive numbers just so your soldiers can have some.)

Wouldn't the ARMORLEVEL token be able to fix this exact issue?

[Splint]

We... Can? Kinda?

I've tried it, but it seems unless it's made of a faux-metal material, which is what the Haberdasher mod does, civilians will wear them like regular clothes (requiring producing them in potentially massive numbers just so your soldiers can have some.) I'd have to see how Grimlocke and Stal's mods do it because I never used the former and I never bothered using gambesons in the latter.

Leather armor is considered armor, so what you are saying is that we cannot make armor our of cloth or wool correct?

Leather armor's like a breastplate, worn over clothing and chain armor. And for whatever reason we can make leather armor boots, but not cloth ones in an unmodded game (granted, they'd be about as effective but still, a thick pad of cloth or leather is better than nothing between you and sharp objects.)

I've tried it, but it seems unless it's made of a faux-metal material, which is what the Haberdasher mod does, civilians will wear them like regular clothes (requiring producing them in potentially massive numbers just so your soldiers can have some.)

Wouldn't the ARMORLEVEL token be able to fix this exact issue?

Now see, this is one of the best things about this board. I must've completely missed that when I was looking my own raws over to see why the damned civvies were taking them. I learned something vaguely useful today! Gonna be useful for a project I'm planning.

[Miles_Umbrae]

We can decorate most things in the game with random details, so why shouldn't we be able to either repair broken/torn armor, or at the least turn cloth/leather into for example studded cloth/leather?

[AceSV]

Studded armor isn't a real thing.  Made up RPG nonsense (as is leather armor, actually).  The real armor that this idea comes from is Jack of Plates and Brigandine, which has metal plates sewn into or riveted into cloth (wool or linen).  From the cloth side, you can only see the rivets, thus it looks like studded armor, but the actual protection comes from a series of metal plates, more like lamellar armor. 

China, at one time, had a similar idea with paper armor.  Their paper at the time was made of hemp cloth, so pretty strong compared to modern wood pulp paper.  Mythbusters tested paper armor and found that it worked thanks to its bulkiness, but this also caused issues when performing combat-related tasks. 

Some African countries were famous for deploying "quilted" armor, which I think is essentially gambeson.  Some pictures:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Egan_BW]

Damn that quilted armor looks cool. Block sword blades by looking FABULOUS in a very thick sort of way.

[AceSV]

^Right?  It seems like something that should have a place in a fantasy world. 

[SixOfSpades]

Studded armor isn't a real thing.  Made up RPG nonsense (as is leather armor, actually).

This deserves to be a bit more specific. Soft leather, the kind used for most garments, won't do jack against any kind of weapon, and is only moderately useful to ward off animals with small claws & teeth, and plants with smallish thorns. But boiled leather (boiled in wax, usually), and other types of thick, hardened leather (think boots & saddles), would provide decent protection in combat--definitely less than an equivalent piece of plate armor, but it would at least be reasonably effective. Historically, it was always cut into small segments, ostensibly for the purposes of flexibility, though it's also sometimes done on armor pieces that are themselves quite rigid.

Yes, studded armor is essentially BS. The only possible benefit I can think of is that if a slashing weapon is sliding over the surface of the armor, the stud can catch the blade and keep it there--as opposed to letting the weapon continue on, possibly striking some part of you that isn't armored.

Useful link, featuring some thoughts from scholagladiatoria: https://www.quora.com/Did-leather-armor-ever-exist

Long story short, I think "soft" armor like gambesons, quilted armor, and boiled leather would be more useful for civilians, while your actual warriors use the "real" stuff (with a gambeson underneath, ideally). High boots, vambraces, and a breastplate of boiled leather might be cumbersome, but an Herbalist or whatever would feel a lot better wearing them when there are dingoes wandering through the area.

Historically, some cultures had armor made out of bark/wood, and even paper.

[Egan_BW]

Might be helpful to have alternatives like quilted armor for worlds that have not a lot of metal in them.