Print

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

[Footkerchief]

Drakale: what you're describing is actually one of the functions of the "contact area" attack parameter.  MAX_EDGE has this note in the raws: "A unitless measure for how sharp the edge is for combat purposes."

[Shinziril]

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.

Humans actually use bronze now.  At least, human adventurers do, and their shops sell only bronze weaponry and armor.  Was a little startling at first, but they seem to be working just fine for my adventurer, so I'm not complaining.

[G-Flex]

More tests with spears confirm something nice: For the most part, whether or not a material can penetrate armor of a different material actually makes sense.

Basically: Tin and gold armor are trash, steel is better than bronze which is better than iron, platinum is sort of on par with iron but can't penetrate it and is absurdly heavy and expensive to use, etc.

Also, I could swear that tin manages to block gold but absorb barely any of the shock, which is interesting. The test dwarves are breaking bones with their gold spears through tin chain, while being totally unable to penetrate. So it seems like different materials absorb shock quite differently in the event of non-penetrating hits.

Adamantine spears penetrate like crazy, tearing up the insides of people's chests straight through steel breastplates, and going right through chain leggings to shatter bones and rip tendons.

Adamantine armor stops even adamantine from penetrating, but golden spears can still manage to break bones through sheer force, through adamantine chain leggings, despite being totally worthless when it comes to penetration. This only seems to happen extremely rarely, though, so it's not a big deal. It's that old "who cares if Frodo's shirt is mithril, that spear should have caved in his chest!" principle at work, I guess, but most of the time the adamantine just plain deflects gold and even platinum.

So the "what can penetrate what?" table, in itself, doesn't seem bad, except that it seems too much like you either can or can't penetrate a given material with a given other material, without much wiggle room where you do rarely, or only sometimes.


[EDIT, AGAIN, I'M BAD AT THIS]
~FURTHER CONCLUSIONS~

It seems that density affects how much force gets transferred through layers. Regular tin chain stops gold spears from penetrating, but the gold still transfers enough force to break bones sometimes. With tin modified to have ten times the density (yowza!), the gold can't do much more than bruise fat through it. Also, this SEEMS to make it slightly more difficult for weapons to penetrate effectively as well, but by how much, I'm not sure.

These conclusions are realistic enough, so I'm pretty happy.

Tin in general seems to still deflect iron sometimes, but that's fine. It doesn't most of the time.

One problem I've noticed, if it's indeed a problem, is that aluminum weapons seem almost entirely useless. A sharpened aluminum spear should be able to significantly injure someone, but it can't.  Same goes for tin, really. Maybe density counts for too much, here? Also, aluminum armor seems less useful than gold armor, which... SEEMS unrealistic, but it's hard for me to tell.


[I DON'T FEEL LIKE DOUBLE-POSTING]
Okay, it seems like dwarven skin might be too weak in general? Aluminum and tine aside (which are strange enough), cheetah claws only dent the skin (no bleeding or bruising at all), and GCS fangs literally glance off every single time.

Conversely, chitin seems too weak. A dwarven fist can easily tear through the fat underneath it. A punching dwarf in arena mode is very easily tearing straight through GCS and antman body parts, despite being unable to do anything but bruise other creatures.



FWIW, on the subject of cumulative damage, bruises getting worse with successive hits should result in some sort of serious internal bleeding and function loss, particularly when it's muscle, not to mention compound organ/brain impairment with each successive strike. I have no idea how much of this exists in the current system, but it would be a way for repeated blunt trauma (e.g. fistfights) to actually matter.

[GD]

Chitin weaker than skin? Hmm i think it should stop weak attacks from damaging internal organs better, but be more brittle itself. And after some value of attack power there no difference between them.

Skin:
[IMPACT_YIELD:10000] As i understand this affect power needed to damage skin seriously and go to next tissue.
[IMPACT_FRACTURE:10000] As i understand this affect power needed to damage skin.
[IMPACT_ELASTICITY:50000] High value means that most of the damage go through skin and apply to internal tissue.

Chitin:
[IMPACT_YIELD:10000]
[IMPACT_FRACTURE:10000]
[IMPACT_ELASTICITY:100]Low value means that most damage applyed to chitin, and if it damaged enough go to internal tissue.

And i think that latch attack only attack with cumulative effect. I should try latching to BC.

[G-Flex]

The thing about chitin is that it's not always the same thing.

Pure chitin is more like... well, caterpillar skin. Bug shells are a slightly different form of it, interlaced with proteins and whatever else (minerals?), and something like a crab carapace goes even more in the direction of being rock-hard.

The shear yield/fracture points for it are pretty nuts though, based on bone, and that's used in combat, right? I'm honestly not sure.

Maybe it's just not thick enough, but it does seem odd that an untrained dwarf can trivially punch straight through a giant cave spider/giant desert scorpion/antman, whereas those things can barely dent unarmored human skin with bites and pincers.

[Orkel]

For some reason copper armor always deflects iron weapons, it seems just wrong. Copper is supposed to be a weak metal.

Maybe copper needs a nerf, or iron needs a buff.

[dreiche2]

Thanks for the interesting info, G-Flex!

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.

Hm, that's an important point actually. I seem to vaguely remember that Toady said higher quality does indeed make weapons sharper, but maybe I'm wrong. But if so, maybe MAX_EDGE refers to the maximal sharpness bonus conveyed by quality?

[G-Flex]

For some reason copper armor always deflects iron weapons, it seems just wrong. Copper is supposed to be a weak metal.

Maybe copper needs a nerf, or iron needs a buff.

Huh, nice catch.

For what it's worth: Iron won't penetrate copper, but copper won't penetrate iron either.

Brass, however, will penetrate both, and can't be penetrated by copper or iron. In fact, bronze won't penetrate brass either! Brass will penetrate bronze, however.

In other words, it seems like brass is actually better than almost every other metal for military matters, which is rather weird.

Hm, that's an important point actually. I seem to vaguely remember that Toady said higher quality does indeed make weapons sharper, but maybe I'm wrong. But if so, maybe MAX_EDGE refers to the maximal sharpness bonus conveyed by quality?

Toady did say that both artifact and masterpiece weapons have the maximum allowed edge, yeah. Presumably, this means lower-quality weapons have a lesser edge.

However, the armor is also no-quality, so it's getting less of a bonus to its deflection rolls as well, I believe.



Further tests with MAX_EDGE show that it does affect how well a weapon penetrates, but only up to a certain (very low) point past which it appears to become irrelevant. Adamantine with MAX_EDGE:1 doesn't penetrate anything at all, with MAX_EDGE:10 it penetrates stuff but not very well at all, and at MAX_EDGE:100 it's almost acting like normal. I could be misremembering the exact numbers, but even if you multiply all those by ten it's still a little strange. Adamantine seems to get its high penetrative power from the fact that it yields to absolutely nothing, rather than from its high MAX_EDGE, at least the way things work now.

[dreiche2]

Maybe that low point is the edge 'bonus' coming from standard quality? I.e. standard quality has sharpness x, masterwork has sharpness y, and you are lowering MAX_EDGE beyond x?

Well I'm just speculating obviously...

[G-Flex]

That would be an extremely weird way for the system to work, though, and would screw up basically any weapon with a significantly high MAX_EDGE. It almost definitely goes by some kind of percentage of MAX_EDGE, or at least I hope to God it does.

In other words, a weapon's effective edge is probably X% the MAX_EDGE, where X increases along with quality. I know it gets to 100% MAX_EDGE at Masterpiece and Artifact levels.

[Wyrm]

Maybe that low point is the edge 'bonus' coming from standard quality? I.e. standard quality has sharpness x, masterwork has sharpness y, and you are lowering MAX_EDGE beyond x?

Well I'm just speculating obviously...

That actually makes a lot of sense. A thin edge is structurally weak for obvious reasons, so if you make a thin edge out of a weak metal, then that edge will go away as soon as it hits. Hell, even a steel blade will lose its edge after a while, which is why you occasionally need to sharpen them — the edge gets physically damaged with each cut. Hence, MAX_EDGE.

[G-Flex]

MAX_EDGE is modulated in some form by quality. Damage to weapons, in itself, doesn't exist yet, at least not in that form.

However, MAX_EDGE should always affect the edge of an object, by which I mean items of a given quality level but materials with different MAX_EDGE should always have different resulting edge values.

Of course, this is also speculation, but it makes the most amount of sense to me.

[Boingboingsplat]

Well it sounds like armor and weapons are working fine. (Other than the disconcerting fact that weapons made from denser materials might have too much of an advantage.)

At least that doesn't have to be fixed along with the wound system. That's a relief. Let's hope that we won't be able to fracture a leg 5000 times without it becoming unusable!

[G-Flex]

Well it sounds like armor and weapons are working fine. (Other than the disconcerting fact that weapons made from denser materials might have too much of an advantage.)

MAX_EDGE also doesn't seem to do a hell of a lot, there are some issues with balance (Why is copper better than iron, or brass better than damn near everything?), and piercing seems almost too predictable; in the real world, dudes wearing steel plate fighting with steel weapons still cut each other.

But yes, the vast majority of the issues seem to be with wounds rather than the weapons and armor themselves.

[Boingboingsplat]

Well it sounds like armor and weapons are working fine. (Other than the disconcerting fact that weapons made from denser materials might have too much of an advantage.)

MAX_EDGE also doesn't seem to do a hell of a lot, there are some issues with balance (Why is copper better than iron, or brass better than damn near everything?), and piercing seems almost too predictable; in the real world, dudes wearing steel plate fighting with steel weapons still cut each other.

But yes, the vast majority of the issues seem to be with wounds rather than the weapons and armor themselves.

Well that doesn't sound too bad. Maybe make the RNG rolls vary more a bit or something as far as material vs itself. I'm sure it'd make more sense in the actual game modes, I think that arena mode is good for testing how things work in general but to sterile to show how things will actually work in either Dwarf or Adventure mode.