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[Dakk]

They still stood around doing nothing, because it was still failing the personality check for the instructor, who wasn't reckless enough to send such green recruits off to spar.

Minor details like this have a potential to be awesome. However, I'm afraid they aren't awesome, unless the player somehow knows about them. There's a huge difference between, say, these two examples:
- "Why are my recruits wounded? I see! It's because their captain is reckless and let them spar too soon."
- "Why are my recruits wounded? I don't know. The random number generator probably had a bad mood."

I suppose there is plenty of other cases in DF when the personality plays a role. The problem here is that unless the player know about them, he's going to assume they aren't there, and that it was all just randomly generated. What the player can't see is as if it weren't, and it has no effect on his enjoyment of the game. The whole feature is basically pointless and wasted.

This. DF has lots of features like this that, if the game didn't inform the player of, would be considered bugs or not even features at all. Much of DF's depth comes from the message log, describing everything with detail. Image how combat in adventurer mode how be without them! Much less awesome.

So yea, I know its sort of a drag, but it makes everything so much more fun, specially for new players. Maybe a message like "the captain decided the recruits aren't skilled enough to spar yet" and "Your reckless captain allowed the recruits to spar".

[smjjames]

I kind of like that idea Dakk. Actually, that new stuff about not bieng allowed to spar sounds like a great way to help prevent injuries.

Still, should be pretty cool to have your hardened champions act as drill instructors.

Edit: Oh yea, on the not bieng allowed to spar thing, does it take into account equipped armor which would reduce injuries or does it go by skill? Or is it more complex than that?

[Mephansteras]

Well, actually this is a Morning Star and the ball & chain weapon is a Flail. The fact that both can have a spiked head makes for a bit of confusion between the two. Still, it is interesting to think about a weapon that is fundamentally a mass weapon (bludgeoning) that has spikes on it to do a bit more viscous damage.

In the future, it might be good to have a system that allows for attacks with different parts of a weapon based on what you're trying to do. A Bec De Corbin is an interesting weapon that was very popular in late period because it had a tight hammer-head for punching armor, a spear spike on top for stabbing charging or less armored opponents/spots, and a hooked spike on the back for punching through armor or hooking things.

[Suggestion] Right now, the system is pretty much always going to stab and only occasionally bash. That's fine for now, but it'd be neat to have the wielder decide what to do based on what he was fighting. A dwarf in steel plate mail? Bash it in. A goblin wearing leather armor? Stab him. A human maceman with chain mail and shield? Hook the shield or bash him with the hammer-part. Or maybe stab him in the face if you get a chance. This would be a great addition to both the general combat arc and formations. I'd love to see one dwarf hooking shields while his buddy stabbed opponents with his spear.

[Neonivek]

Well it seems like this topic is also being used for small suggestions. I have no problem with it but it only functions on the basis that it isn't overdone.

[smjjames]

Yea, somehow I thought the ball and chain one was the morningstar. I knew there was the spike headed mace and I guess I got the names switched. Morningstar sort of implies something spiky rising up, which made me think of the ball and chain one.

Anyways, thanks for clearing that up.

The advanced tactics thing is going to need a better AI than what we have now. In fact, my legendary wrestlers and legendary shield skill dwarves took to shield bashing the goblins which sent them flying in my last fort.

[Footkerchief]

With the new training, and training weapons, will it still be possible to cross train an (ie) axdwarf first in wrestling (or its new equiv), and other combat skills until they are "safe", then start them with proper weapons? (and still expect a low injury rate). Or will sparring with dummies, and boffers be the only viable approach (that doesnt lead to mass injury)

There isn't any dummy sparring -- the functional equivalent of that right now is the demonstration lessons.  Since the Dodging skill is no longer a part of Wrestling, training them as wrestlers won't raise their dodging skill (or toughness attributes, etc.) any faster than armed sparring would.  Anyway, today's dev log made it clear that "mass injury" should no longer be a grave concern, unless you pick a bad instructor, fail to make use of training weapons, etc.: "Next I did the actual experiment, and they managed to fight non-stop for two game weeks with only a few minor bruises here and there. It records combat logs for sparring in a different color in the reports menu, so you can read what's going on if you like."

I suppose there is plenty of other cases in DF when the personality plays a role. The problem here is that unless the player know about them, he's going to assume they aren't there, and that it was all just randomly generated. What the player can't see is as if it weren't, and it has no effect on his enjoyment of the game. The whole feature is basically pointless and wasted.

This kinda came up in DF Talk 4:

So right now we have this personality model, so when you're in world generation whenever someone rises to a level where they hold some kind of responsibility [...] it then generates more information about their personalities. [...] Now at first it's all just numbers, like how it adds up the numbers for the thoughts to produce a single happiness number for a dwarf right now, so if it's adding up all those numbers - which it currently does right now when they're deciding to go to war or not - all it needs to do to really lend conflict to the story I think is just tell you what's going on when that stuff happens. So if they're weighing the safety of their family versus whether or not to pull an army out of their home time to a more strategic location on the front or something like that, when they weigh that choice and it's just 'plus twenty here, minus thirty here; go do it'; what really happened there story wise needs to be shown somewhere. This should be an agonising decision sometimes and if it just tells you about that then it's going to make those characters jump off the page a lot more than they currently do I think.

So I think overall he's conscious of the need to actively present subtle mechanics like personality-based decision-making to the player.  The real question of course is how.  One obvious avenue is to make the dwarves talk/write about these happenings and let the player peek over their shoulder -- this is easier during worldgen, since you can just say oh, it's Legends, so a historian wrote it.  Doing it during gameplay via announcements could, as I said in the DF Talk feedback thread, start to look like "Hey player, check out these awesome die rolls!"

With the new system, it is possible to create Martial Arts for weapons, but all attacks will be usable anytime. But you could, for example, allow a high-speed slashing attack with a spear's point that is only useable once you've got to at least Master level with the spear. Same goes for meta-magical weapons (like Artifacts, for example) that would likely act as semi-normal weapons with high stats unless you give them to a Legendary, in which case you'd get devastating elemental attacks. The different energy requirement (for the purposes of fatigue) could be deduced from just the weight and velocity, but for meta-magical weapons it'd make sense if the super-powerful insta-goblin-kebab-flaming-spear-attack used a little more energy than usual.

This strikes me as kind of... I don't know, JRPG-influenced.  Is there any real-world precedent for certain combat maneuvers that can't even be attempted without a high level of skill?  If not, it's an awfully prosaic (predictable, uninspired, derivative) implementation of magic.

I lol'd at the throwing the teeth around part. I bet whoever was left in the training room scrambled for cover since a thrown sword has the potential to be lethal, even if its a training sword.

Me too, that's some good old fashioned DF insanity right there.

Edit: Oh yea, on the not bieng allowed to spar thing, does it take into account equipped armor which would reduce injuries or does it go by skill? Or is it more complex than that?

The dev log has always mentioned skill and not armor, so I'm guessing it's just skill.

Well it seems like this topic is also being used for small suggestions. I have no problem with it but it only functions on the basis that it isn't overdone.

This is true.  This thread is kinda taking over the role of the Small Suggestions Thread.  Remember, Toady reads the Suggestions forum too!

[Mephansteras]

Well it seems like this topic is also being used for small suggestions. I have no problem with it but it only functions on the basis that it isn't overdone.

I agree. If a topic needs more then a few sentences to suggest, or sparks a bigger discussion, it should go to the suggestions forum. Small stuff that is based directly on what Toady says here, though, can fit in this thread just fine.

[Neonivek]

In other words, it can't exceed the speed of light due to relativity

No that isn't what he means unless you were joking.

Basically it is a mechanical limitation due to the fact that projectiles cannot move faster then whatever is pushing them without some form of self-propulsion. In this case it is the string. No matter how light the ammo is, it cannot be pushed faster then the string can retract.

Bullets are pushed by explosions which move very quickly.

[smjjames]

In other words, it can't exceed the speed of light due to relativity

No that isn't what he means unless you were joking.

Basically it is a mechanical limitation due to the fact that projectiles cannot move faster then whatever is pushing them without some form of self-propulsion. In this case it is the string. No matter how light the ammo is, it cannot be pushed faster then the string can retract.

Bullets are pushed by explosions which move very quickly.

Yea it was a joke. For a second the near-weightless object thing made me think of neutrinos or some other near massless particle going at close to the speed of light.

I knew what he meant, since you have to take into account air drag (for small objects, its tiny, but its there), or more realistically for DF (physics simulation wise), you can only pull back a string so far before it breaks.

Its all about how much kinetic energy is being stored, whether with explosions or elastic strings and also how fast it's being released.

[Sean Mirrsen]

This strikes me as kind of... I don't know, JRPG-influenced.  Is there any real-world precedent for certain combat maneuvers that can't even be attempted without a high level of skill?  If not, it's an awfully prosaic (predictable, uninspired, derivative) implementation of magic.

Not JRPG. Plain Action/Slasher, Blade of Darkness. The most fun third-person slasher game for quite a while now. No, there's no literal application of the principle in real life - since if you know how to do something you can at least try to do it. However, if you try to perform the spear-slash trick I mentioned, you'll quite likely miss or bash the opponent with the haft unless your aim with the thing is near-perfect. 'course, the move is only useful because it strikes everything around (which is not implemented yet), but there are probably better examples. The biggest reason for the suggestion is, as is almost always the case with my suggestions, the ability to add flavor. Say, a beginning swordsman will "clumsily slash" and miss often, an experienced one will just slash/stab, a legendary one will perform hideous roundhouse slashes, "fiercely skewer" things, and perform various overkill.

[Mephansteras]

In my experience master swordsmen don't do stupid giant flashy maneuvers. They have the ability to hit you very quickly, many many times, and bypass your guard with just about every single hit. The better you get, the better you are at blocking, dodging and attacking quickly and accurately. Generally with extreme economy of motion, so they waste very little time and energy getting the job done. I've seen good fighters go out onto the war field with a sword and buckler and trounce groups of average fighters that had larger shields and polearms to back them up. They do that the way Champions in DF do it now, by being damn near impossible to hit and almost never missing.

Considering that this is Dwarf Fortress and not a flashy graphics-fest game, I think we should avoid the ridiculous maneuvers unless someone is actually using an artifact or something that makes such things practical. Otherwise, all you're doing is leaving yourself open to attacks and tiring yourself out needlessly.

[Typoman]

In my experience master swordsmen don't do stupid giant flashy maneuvers. They have the ability to hit you very quickly, many many times, and bypass your guard with just about every single hit. The better you get, the better you are at blocking, dodging and attacking quickly and accurately. Generally with extreme economy of motion, so they waste very little time and energy getting the job done. I've seen good fighters go out onto the war field with a sword and buckler and trounce groups of average fighters that had larger shields and polearms to back them up. They do that the way Champions in DF do it now, by being damn near impossible to hit and almost never missing.

Considering that this is Dwarf Fortress and not a flashy graphics-fest game, I think we should avoid the ridiculous maneuvers unless someone is actually using an artifact or something that makes such things practical. Otherwise, all you're doing is leaving yourself open to attacks and tiring yourself out needlessly.

This.

[dreiche2]

Yea, somehow I thought the ball and chain one was the morningstar. I knew there was the spike headed mace and I guess I got the names switched. Morningstar sort of implies something spiky rising up, which made me think of the ball and chain one.

Hm, there seems to be some conflicting information on wikipedia. The article on morning star basically says it's anything with spikes, including a mace with spikes and the ball on a chain with spikes, the latter also being referred to as one kind of flail in the same article. The article on flail however says that a morning star is sometimes wrongly declared as a flail (with "citation needed").

So I guess it's not clear one way or another. The only distinctive thing seems to be that a morning star comes with spikes in whatever form, which makes sense.

Not that it matters much

[Mephansteras]

In truth, I doubt most modern classification of weapons is truly an accurate representation of what things were called at the time. Most weapons assuredly had many names in many different regions around Europe and probably had different names over the years. But for game purposes it helps to hammer out an agreement of what things are so we're all talking about the same thing.

[Cruxador]

Yea, somehow I thought the ball and chain one was the morningstar. I knew there was the spike headed mace and I guess I got the names switched. Morningstar sort of implies something spiky rising up, which made me think of the ball and chain one.

Hm, there seems to be some conflicting information on wikipedia. The article on morning star basically says it's anything with spikes, including a mace with spikes and the ball on a chain with spikes, the latter also being referred to as one kind of flail in the same article. The article on flail however says that a morning star is sometimes wrongly declared as a flail (with "citation needed").

So I guess it's not clear one way or another. The only distinctive thing seems to be that a morning star comes with spikes in whatever form, which makes sense.

Not that it matters much

I don't see how it's unclear. A morning star has a spiked head. That includes flails. A flail is a type of morning star.
Sometimes, people are unclear on the distinction between the two, and use the term "flail" to include things which are morning stars, but are not flails.