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[Digganob]

Hey, suppose I made chain shirts level 3, and gambesons level 2, think that might make it more likely more skilled warriors will have chain, and less skilled ones to have gambesons? Just considering the apparent hierarchy of armors, like plate being less likely to be worn, could that be influenced by armor level? Otherwise, yeah, I suppose it'd not be feasible to have both chain and gambesons be under-armor.

[Splint]

It might have a factor, might not. All I can really offer is what I've observed, I have no idea what actually influences the gear. And you can always have gambesons as a possible alternative to the chain armor if you're inclined, just gotta make sure its layer size will play nice with other armor. It'll almost certainly have some kind of effect.

I've never tried shuffling around the armor like that though, just went with what was there or winged it.

[Digganob]

Well, what you have observed is far more than what I could hope for, with how mysterious world generation mechanics are. Thanks again for the help.

[Digganob]

UPDATE: I have done testing on the variables of armor which could possibly influence its protectiveness. What I have found is that armor level, layer size, layer permit, coverage, and material size have either absolutely nothing to do with protectiveness, or have a negligible impact on it.

I found this by increasing these values to absurd amounts (excepting armor level, which I just put to 3) on the mail shirt in version 47 in the armor items raw, and then attempting to pierce through the armor with a steel spear using a pair of spawned humans in the object testing arena, both with the same equipment (iron mail and a steel spear) as well as the same skills (max fighter and spear user). The result, every time, was that the spear went right through the mail, tore the upper or lower body of the targeted human, and damaged the mail shirt itself.

By absurd amounts, I mean degrees of magnitude. Two of them, in the case of layer size. There is no apparent difference between a mail shirt with layer size 15 and one with layer size 1500.

The obvious conclusion is that the only ways to change an armor's effectiveness are either by making it chainmail, which makes it worse of course against blunt weapons, or by of course making it of a stronger material. There is apparently no way of making one kind of armor weaker than another by any other methods. Though, using the layering system, and making some armors shaped, you can still influence the strength of worldgen soldiers, for instance by giving their civilization only shaped armor, and no chainmail equivalent.

This is indeed exceedingly disappointing, as I was hoping for some method of creating differing effectiveness for different armors, but oh well. Though, you can still utilize layer size to make some armor heavier than others.

Please do tell me, anyone, if my !!SCIENCE!! is flawed to any degree, or if you have anything to add to the conclusions reached.

[Splint]

Most tests for weapons and such unless specifically testing materials default to iron for both weapons and armor. Steel is better than iron, and spears are piercing weapons due to how the game models contact areas, and chain armor doesn't offer great protection against stabs in gameplay terms in general.

In this case you basically gave the test subjects ideal weapons for punching through the chain armor used. It's part of why whips are so dangerous even against heavily armored dwarves (in vanilla they have a contact area of 1, which means they can basically go through anything, though this might have changed in v50.)

That said I don't know what else to say on it. Could try downgrading the spears to iron, see if that has any effect.

Apart from that though, I can't really fault the attempt, and I did say I'd done "a monkey see monkey do" kind of deal. Guess whatever effects it has is negligible when all else is equal, encumberance aside (and that by itself can be a trade off to consider.)

For player gear, material costs can also be fiddled with to make some armors more attractive than others for certain roles (cheap light junk with sub-100 coverage for instance if you need to outfit lots of dudes quickly, while more expensive, all-encompassing gear needs more metal to make.) Obviously there's little we can do to keep world-gen guys from generating unintended combinations of stuff though.

[Digganob]

I suppose I should have put this into my science post, but I tried doing the same test with beforehand with an iron spear instead to get an idea of how likely a spear was to pierce. With standard, "fairly solid" strikes, the spear was consistently blocked by the mail. That is a good point though, I ought to have tested it, so I just tried doing the same test with layer size, layer permit, and material size extremely low, but it resulted in the same, even with heavy attacks.

I figured that if I could increase the strength of the armor using those variables enough to make it difficult for steel to pierce, then they really should make a difference, and they would be useful for balancing mod armor. If iron chainmail still won't block steel spears when it's literally a hundred times heavier, I don't think that layer size is very useful, lol.

I do wish there were options for item quality in the object testing arena. That might be a little useful, at least for seeing generally how far off you are from being able to reliably pierce given different factors.

Anywho, yeah, the material costs and encumbrance seem to be the best ways to go as far as balance goes, perhaps the only way. A shame.

It was inevitable.

[Madde]

Yeah, layer size only seems to effect weight and price, as weapon attack momentum only decreases when it crosses layers and one piece of armor is only considered one layer AFAIK.

What you could do is take advantage of the separate layer UNDER, OVER, ARMOR and COVER options, e.g.: a breastplate that only covers the upper body, a low coverage "shoulderpads and bevor" that extends to the neck and upper arms, and so on. It's a bit tacky because hits to the lower body will still occasionally be protected by the "shoulder" armor but hey, we're modding a game wherein by default the eyes and ears of a creature are technically covered by a mail shirt instead of the helmet they're wearing.

[chipathingy]

Late to the conversation, but I saw Putnam write this on the discord:
50% chance for a generated uniform to use ARMORLEVEL:3 items, otherwise 50% chance to use ARMORLEVEL:2 if available, otherwise uses ARMORLEVEL:1 if available

I read somewhere that coverage affects both the chance of the armour being hit AND the thickness of the armour. So a 50% coverage armor piece will be half as thick as a 100. The block chance stops at 100 but increasing coverage past this keeps increasing the thickness

[Digganob]

Late to the conversation, but I saw Putnam write this on the discord:
50% chance for a generated uniform to use ARMORLEVEL:3 items, otherwise 50% chance to use ARMORLEVEL:2 if available, otherwise uses ARMORLEVEL:1 if available

I read somewhere that coverage affects both the chance of the armour being hit AND the thickness of the armour. So a 50% coverage armor piece will be half as thick as a 100. The block chance stops at 100 but increasing coverage past this keeps increasing the thickness

You're never too late to a conversation if you have something useful to say.

Those chances for generated uniforms are interesting. I suppose that if the soldier has level 3 armor, they'll also use level 2 under layers? Because so far as I've seen, soldiers wearing breastplates will usually have chainmail too. Anyways, this is helpful to know, thank you.

As for coverage, I believe that what you read about coverage was false. I tried increasing the coverage of the chainmail in my test to very high amounts, at least 600%, and it did not appear to make any difference whether it reduced damage after piercing, let alone whether it increased deflection chance.

That's one of the things I like about this game, the code behind it and our knowledge of it are a mystery. It's like the wild west of modding, lol.

[Splint]

Legit the only person who could confirm it at this point for us is Putnam, but it sounds like all he'd do is confirm what's already been figured out.

The point about the uniform generation is indeed interesting, I've only ever really noticed the difference between melee and ranged guys I mentioned before, since I've never seen rangers with breastplates that didn't come from a player fortress but I do see mail armor on them once in a while which I've (apparently possibly erroneously?) conflated with the skill/status of those rangers.

It also explains why bucklers never appear, they're level 1, and only rangers use predominantly level 1 equipment and never spawn with shields.