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[HatfieldCW]

Well, to be fair, if you had six unarmed guys on one end of a football field and a guy with a crossbow on the other, and then you blew a whistle, I'm not sure what chance the runners would have of sprinting down there and punching the guy out.  We should try it.

[igdfilm]

Well, to be fair, if you had six unarmed guys on one end of a football field and a guy with a crossbow on the other, and then you blew a whistle, I'm not sure what chance the runners would have of sprinting down there and punching the guy out.  We should try it.

That sounds like a ridiculous fight scene from a Stephen Chow movie.

[Shoku]

I consider stunning someone to be a damaging effect of an attack even if it doesn't deal hit point damage.

Still with the new system getting struck by crappy shots shouldn't have nearly so strong an effect, and Toady has set up a little arena mode for testing things so we know he'd balancing this stuff to the point he thinks it's at least decent 1v1.

Well, to be fair, if you had six unarmed guys on one end of a football field and a guy with a crossbow on the other, and then you blew a whistle, I'm not sure what chance the runners would have of sprinting down there and punching the guy out.  We should try it.

Actually going by how footkerchief has been insisting these crossbows work it should be four football fields.

[Footkerchief]

Actually going by how footkerchief has been insisting these crossbows work it should be four football fields.

Tiles in DF don't have a defined size, so maybe they already have a range of four football fields.  Fortress mode timescales are also highly inconsistent.  It's not useful to pretend these metrics have any absolute meaning when comparing DF to real life.

Also, are you implying that my view on how crossbows work is just my idiosyncratic opinion?

[Shoku]

Aha, the problem here is that I get easily sidetracked.

My original point was not how fast the crossbows should operate but how fast they actually do. These ones go at the same speed as melee weapons. If you were using repeating style darts with a repeating style mechanism to prepare the string and placing the bolts yourself you'd see results very much like the in game accuracy and firing rate but I meant to only object about you saying it was like a machine gun.

Continuing with the more recent line or argument the damage dealt by these bolts is an inappropriate mix of the sorts of bolts of both of these types of crossbow. The regular damage from the bolts is well enough in line with the small bolts used by a repeating crossbow but these bolts behave as if they have the penetrating power of heavy arbalest shots and as such cause frequent organ damage that is unintended. The actual balistas in the game are closer to what you've described and the damage they deal is close to as unfair as people's opinions of arbalests in the era we're talking.

As has been Toady is reworking the way damage is dealt and the dev logs have pointed me to the understanding that he just wants these to hit organs less as they do realistic damage when they miss organs and realistic damage when they hit organs, it's just the frequency per bolt that makes them stupid.


As for size of tiles, that doesn't matter. Four football fields and the time it takes to run that distance loaded up with however much armor should indicate how many shots should be fired. If you trusted your sources you wouldn't have had to resort to backpedaling to undefined tile sizes because with the average speed a human runs (and assuming trained/fit armored dwarves would run at a similar speed,) this would still mean 2 shots in that amount of time. It should only take one bolt like that to take down a plate armored unit if it hit them in the chest but you would have the right rate.
-Did you think I was going to say that if that distance was 400 yards that I'd made dining rooms big enough for a five thousand dwarf party?

I hope we're on the same page now.

[Footkerchief]

As for size of tiles, that doesn't matter. Four football fields and the time it takes to run that distance loaded up with however much armor should indicate how many shots should be fired. If you trusted your sources you wouldn't have had to resort to backpedaling to undefined tile sizes because with the average speed a human runs (and assuming trained/fit armored dwarves would run at a similar speed,) this would still mean 2 shots in that amount of time. It should only take one bolt like that to take down a plate armored unit if it hit them in the chest but you would have the right rate.
-Did you think I was going to say that if that distance was 400 yards that I'd made dining rooms big enough for a five thousand dwarf party?

I'm utterly confused as to what you're actually arguing.  Are you saying that dwarves should run slower, or that crossbows should fire 400 tiles, or just that my sources suck, or what?

[cephalo]

Another factor is that these are moving targets probably trying to dodge your shots and throw your aim. No matter what range the encounter starts, there's no way you are going to take down six attackers before they reach you. They would be easier to hit when they get closer, but then you have no time.

[Shoku]

As for size of tiles, that doesn't matter. Four football fields and the time it takes to run that distance loaded up with however much armor should indicate how many shots should be fired. If you trusted your sources you wouldn't have had to resort to backpedaling to undefined tile sizes because with the average speed a human runs (and assuming trained/fit armored dwarves would run at a similar speed,) this would still mean 2 shots in that amount of time. It should only take one bolt like that to take down a plate armored unit if it hit them in the chest but you would have the right rate.
-Did you think I was going to say that if that distance was 400 yards that I'd made dining rooms big enough for a five thousand dwarf party?

I'm utterly confused as to what you're actually arguing.  Are you saying that dwarves should run slower, or that crossbows should fire 400 tiles, or just that my sources suck, or what?

"a single novice marksdwarf can machine-gun down a large number of similarly skilled melee enemies"
"novice marksdwarf can machine-gun down a large number"
"marksdwarf can machine-gun"
"machine-gun"

That's where I took offense and tried to say "they're only shooting a bolt as often as a melee unit swings their weapon, it's not nearly a machine gun rate."
And then I'm nit picking everything else I feel like as we go along.

[Bricks]

I was really hoping my "Toady is on it" post would prevent this giganto argument.  The update to how speed works isn't in this version.  Toady wants to make fewer actions dependent upon that one statistic, and I'm sure he plans to do it all at once.

[Footkerchief]

"they're only shooting a bolt as often as a melee unit swings their weapon, it's not nearly a machine gun rate."

And I cited some sources to show that it doesn't make any sense for a crossbow sans magazine to shoot as fast as a melee unit swings, and then you accused me of backpedaling because this stuff about football fields supposedly has some relevance to my prior arguments?  I'll let it go if you will, but I'm still clueless as to what that relevance was.

[Shoku]

"You should fire twice before they're stabbing you."
"Well we've got four football fields they need to run, does it sound like that would take the right amount of time?"
To this you muddied things up with "we can't know how far they're running because tiles are silly."
NO. We know how far they're running because of the range of the crossbow. Depending on how heavy the projectiles are it's either the 400 yards you've said or the reduced range lighter tension and lighter bolts are good for.

This was a bad way for you to bring things up though. I said I got side tracked. The main point has not been how realistic these crossbows are. My problem was that you're acting like they shoot many times faster that melee units attack. It's the same rate in the game and the damage outputs would be fine if piercing organs wasn't done with the simple random numbers it has been.

It's not possible to put heavy crossbows into the game like that yet. You'll have to settle for these faster firing ones having less penetration power and hope maybe later that they only fire about half as fast as melee units attack (as at that point you would likely be able to mod in arbalests of the sort your sources describe.)

[Footkerchief]

NO. We know how far they're running because of the range of the crossbow.

If you mean the current range of the in-game crossbows, that's not worth basing any argument on.  It's not some carefully chosen canonical number.  It's going to be obliterated in a future combat overhaul, like basically everything about combat.  In fact, the max range only seems to exist as a manifestation of the 20-tile LOS distance limit, which is pretty much in place for performance reasons.

My problem was that you're acting like they shoot many times faster that melee units attack.

When did I say or imply this?  For the nth time, what I argued was that it's unreasonable for them to shoot as fast as melee units attack.

[Reese]

I don't know that the operation speed of a crossbow is all that improbable compared to melee combat, if you are willing to consider that the dorfs are using a "light" crossbow with an attached cocking lever; it should be possible to cock and load a crossbow in 3-6 seconds, and fire it in within the next 1-5 depending on how long you spend aiming, and assuming you don't fire from the hip.

(I have a light crossbow, not very powerful, that's cocked by placing the butt against the hip or gut and pulling the string back with your hands; it takes half a second to pull the string back, and I could probably fire it every six seconds if I didn't worry too much about aiming and practiced quickly loading it a little.)

Compared to melee fighting with large, cumbersome weapons like an axe or hammer, where a warrior might only be able to swing the weapon every 3-6 seconds due to weight and inertia, and that's without concerns like leaving yourself open.  Errol Flynning broadswords around only ever works in movies.

[Nexii Malthus]

Melee fighting isn't about just wildly slashing about a big metal stick in the air hoping to hit your enemy, it is far, far more deeply complicated with high and low level tactics and strategy, say like martial arts. Response time and strength is very important, but so is lean mean smart thinking, otherwise those two seconds on a miss might cost your very life.

[Shoku]

NO. We know how far they're running because of the range of the crossbow.

If you mean the current range of the in-game crossbows, that's not worth basing any argument on.  It's not some carefully chosen canonical number.  It's going to be obliterated in a future combat overhaul, like basically everything about combat.  In fact, the max range only seems to exist as a manifestation of the 20-tile LOS distance limit, which is pretty much in place for performance reasons.

My problem was that you're acting like they shoot many times faster that melee units attack.

When did I say or imply this?  For the nth time, what I argued was that it's unreasonable for them to shoot as fast as melee units attack.

So now you're saying that machine guns shoot a number of bullets per second that a person could reasonably count?

Ok, maybe this will clear up what I've been saying:
If you mean the current firing rate of the in-game crossbows, that's not worth basing any argument on.  It's not some carefully chosen canonical number. The rate only seems to exist as a manifestation of the agility & encumbrance based action rate which is pretty much in place for performance reasons.

So basically tell me you think machine gun was a poor choice of words and we'll be in agreement about most of this.
Or you can say that a legendary hammerdwarf hit people in the face at the same rate early machine guns shot bullets.

Looks like we've got some better constructed arguments about why we should consider the melee attacks to take long enough that same attack rate is realistic though so if you still want to argue it's unrealistic I'll probably just step down and let them take over that line of the argument.