Print

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

[Lordinquisitor]

Axes seem to be balanced; As do fights against unarmoured enemies. My axedwarf was able to quickly strike down, bears, wolves, alligators etc.

[Hurion]

I've been playing a lot of adventure mode and on average axes have been able to kill everything much more quickly than any other weapon.

As said before, in this version decapitation/bisection and blood loss seems to be the fastest way to kill something, and puncture wounds stop bleeding much too quickly (even when I've stabbed something through the heart with a spear/sword, more often than not it stops bleeding before the mob dies).

Has anyone tested to see if hammers/maces shatter bones through armour more often than swords/spears/axes do?

Also, something else I miss... No more hitting people so hard they fly away and blow apart against something.

[Raz]

I've found hammers shatter bones very quickly, even through armour, yes.

[G-Flex]

Not even BLEEDING...

You dumped magma on him?

Magma is pretty broken. Here's a bit from IRC:

<G-Flex> ToadyOne: btw, I think the issue with blizzard men not dying in magma might be that they have no blood? Seems like burn wounds aren't enough. This is just speculation
<G-Flex> (where "burn wounds" = "being on fire for a year and all your fat dripping out of you like a rotisserie chicken")
<ToadyOne> burn wounds are very broken, yeah
<ToadyOne> and they rely on bleeding for death
<ToadyOne> like, your guy can sluff all his fat off and still be alive
<ToadyOne> it is very weird
<G-Flex> yeah that would be why magma death isn't instant now
<ToadyOne> but the game doesn't recognize that much is wrong when fat is gone

[Psieye]

After extensive torturing in the arena, I've noticed that strangling isn't the only way to suffocate someone in unarmed combat. Not sure exactly how it works, but whenever someone died from suffocation without strangling, their lungs and heart were bruised or worse. This makes sense, traditionally we rely either on heart or brain damage to get killing blows and DF chooses to make heart damage not-immediate mortal damage as it takes a while for the body to run out of blood oxygen that is no longer coming in.

Also, it's possible to make creatures die of blood loss with bludgeoning attacks. It needs to crit and get a bone to stab through an organ, bonus for the extra rare "and it also tears apart an artery while at it" proc.

Burn damage is as Toady described as quoted above. All my fodder bleed to death before getting killed by the heat when hit by Dragon Fire. Actually no, really huge fodder (Whales, Polar Bears) do have a chance to die to the heat or even MELT (with their life fluids turning into a small explosion of boiled blood). But humanoids? They bleed to death from having their flesh melted away before the heat melts their vital organs.


Incidentally, humanoids (elves and dwarves at least) don't seem to ever kick or bite. They either rely on punching or wrestling. Now if only they get the sense to start strangling once they've broken all the organs they can with their bare fists... then unarmed combat would speed up I think as currently it's waiting on either the random decision to start strangling, or the random proc of a crit hitting the respiratory system or some artery (and neither of these are guaranteed kills either).

[Hurion]

Incidentally, humanoids (elves and dwarves at least) don't seem to ever kick or bite.

Just chop off both their arms, and they bite just fine. I've had an elf latched to my throat like a wolf for 3 or 4 turns.

[G-Flex]

Kicking, scratching, and biting have [ATTACK_PRIORITY:SECOND]. It would be nice to see those things at least sometimes in regular combat, but I think they only do it when necessary right now.


Regarding blood loss, it does seem like things don't bleed enough, or for as long, in certain situations. There's something weird when you get a fractured skull with a pike lodged in it, as well as massive injuries to the rest of your body and its internal organs, and you never bleed out.

[Hurion]

Yeah, it's like blood regenerates at an incredible rate. You have to have multiple arms/legs off to bleed out quickly like in the old versions.

OTOH, I've had odd minor wounds that would stay bleeding forever. A random finger cut that was dribbling blood would not stop bleeding, and eventually killed me, but having an artery opened or a body part stabbed through would heal rather quickly.

[penguinofhonor]

I've had squads of ten wrestlers beat rats and other creatures unconscious, then continue beating them without killing them for a really long time. The wrestlers are all really hungry and thirsty afterwards. I know bare fists shouldn't be the most useful thing in the world, but ten wrestlers kicking an unconscious large rat should take it down relatively easily.

[G-Flex]

Yeah, that's the other thing that seems to confirm my suspicions about cumulative attacks. In this case, a single punch isn't doing anything fatal, so a thousand won't either.

[Footkerchief]

Just wanted to say you are 100% spot on about the lack of cumulative effects.

[Solmyr]

Also, something else I miss... No more hitting people so hard they fly away and blow apart against something.

I've had that happen to my adventurer when a giantess took hold of his nose (!) and flung him into a wall. Seems it's just moved to wrestling now.

[G-Flex]

Just wanted to say you are 100% spot on about the lack of cumulative effects.

Yeah, I just threw a small army of humans armed with slade mauls at one. Tons of dodecaquintuple brass-shatters, no severs.



Also, I noticed that whips are a bit strange!

They're defined as a blunt instrument with moderate contact area (higher than spears/pikes, lower than swords and whatnot) and very very low penetration size, with low size but a very fast velocity multiplier.

This makes sense until you realize that this basically makes them really fast, tiny hammers.

So iron whips weren't giving me that sort of skin-flaying, pain/bleeding-inducing quality that they have in prior versions. They tend to beat the hell out of creatures, though, and they're blunt, meaning that penetration size is totally ignored, and they transfer a lot of momentum to lower layers. Basically, the result is a lot of shattered bones and stuff.


I changed them to EDGE instead of BLUNT (turns out, scourges actually have EDGE themselves), and the results made a bit more sense. Pretty much every hit tore skin but didn't tear anything else, and even leather armor seemed to stop it from tearing skin most of the time, since the penetration size is so low.

The only problems with this fix seem to be that whips then rely on a material's MAX_EDGE property (presumably), which is a tad silly since leather whips should work fine. I can definitely see why Toady made them BLUNT, but in practice, EDGE seems to work better except for this one fact.

Of course, even with EDGE, they still transfer a lot of force, bruising muscle/fat and even shattering bones sometimes, although mostly just in smaller body parts. Granted, I've seen at least one spine shatter from the sheer impact, despite lack of penetration... probably with armor.

I'm not sure how this could be made better, though, unless Toady makes mass count far more than velocity when it comes to transferring momentum between flesh/armor layers.

Oh, and you can have metal whips, and whips made out of wood, but not leather. Granted, even wooden whips seemed to work okay against unarmored targets, despite the wood template having 1/10 the MAX_EDGE of metals.

[G-Flex]

Okay, moving on from whips, let's check out spears and some more MAX_EDGE stuff.

Spears and pikes seem like a good example of how armor is too strong: Iron pikes/spears simply cannot penetrate iron mail shirts, much less breastplates. This renders the purpose of a spear pretty moot. I'd think that the low contact area of a spear plus its sharpness would help it penetrate armor, but this might not be working as well as it should, perhaps?

However, spears and pikes seem great against unarmored and lightly armored opponents. Against no armor, or even leather armor, they're great at stabbing straight through a body and tearing into organs, not just bruising them. Against tin chain, they also seem to do okay at this, even if a tin breastplate is placed over.

I think the main problem is just that they can't seem to penetrate armor at all once it reaches a certain level. Adamantine can pierce straight through iron chain+breastplate, despite its lack of weight, and that's good.

Steel spears vs. iron mail+plate seems to result in a lot of piercing below to the fat and sometimes muscle, along with a few (but significant number of) hits to organs. Organ tears happen much, much more often when it's just an iron mail shirt and no breastplate, or a breastplate with no mail. The second I change the armor to being steel as well, though (even just chain), the steel spears start to completely suck at penetrating at all. Lots of deflection and force-transfer bruising results (this is true for pikes as well as spears, it seems).

Conclusion: Spears and pikes kick all kinds of ass, tearing up organs and shattering skulls and brains, but only when the armor is worse than the spear in terms of material. Once the armor reaches the same material quality as the weapon, though, serious wounding through penetration becomes all but impossible. Highly-skilled dwarves will still break bones every now and then, but not through penetration, only inter-layer force transference.


To some degree, I think these results might be realistic. I don't know how good spears are in real life for piercing through similar-quality armor, but I want to say that penetration should happen at least every once in a while, as opposed to never.


Keep in mind that, as with all these tests, I'm using the arena mode, so item quality isn't coming into play at all. I have no idea how much it would matter if the spears and armor pieces were all exceptional-quality, or anything like that. Presumably, the weapon's edge would be sharper, but I don't know about the armor.



Also, I did some tests mucking about with weapon density and MAX_EDGE. Changing gold to have a density of 1 understandably resulted in them basically having LARP boffer weapons, never doing any damage to anything. If I do this and also give the metal a MAX_EDGE twice that of adamantine, they still only dent skin. Just food for thought, trying to figure out how this works.

However, changing gold's MAX_EDGE to extremely low values seems to do very little, testing out golden shortswords and spears. This goes for other materials as well: I changed steel's MAX_EDGE from 10,000 to 50 (!), and it's still tearing organs straight through iron mail shirts. I'm not sure what's going on here, unless MAX_EDGE just isn't actually affecting much.


[EDIT]
Seems that bronze spears can pierce iron chain/plate surprisingly well. So, bronze edged weapons seem to beat iron weapons in terms of penetrating armor. This is probably realistic, actually, but it seems that maybe humans and goblins should use bronze more often in light of this.

Really, it seems that spears/pikes are mostly okay except for the pandemic problem in the new version of armor getting way, way too good at resisting penetration past a certain threshold.

[Drakale]

I think max edge mainly deal with the maximum size of the part that could in theory be severed, i.e. arrows can sever finger but nothing bigger, a short sword can cut off a goblin head and a 2h axe could cut a giants head. Your 50 max edge sword is , in fact, like a tiny dagger. I bet you aren't cuting much body parts with it.