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[tehstefan]

Very informative thread, I have to say, lots of gewd stuff in here.

In any case, so, it seems like more of a problem with how wounds work as opposed to the weapons dealing the damage, bar some odd quirks in the system. Lets hope that he can fix wounds, then, and combat should become more fun!

[G-Flex]

Well that doesn't sound too bad. Maybe make the RNG rolls vary more a bit or something as far as material vs itself.

Well, I'd say to vary them more for a material versus any other material, not just itself, but yeah. "Material vs. itself" is just the most obvious case.

Granted, there's some sort of COVERAGE token for armor that (I think) denotes how much of the body part the piece of armor/clothing actually covers, which leads to armor-bypassing... but for any sort of reasonable armor at all, it's set to 100, and that means full coverage, so it's irrelevant. Besides, a lucky shot with a pointy weapon should have a chance of penetrating even where there is coverage. Causing weapon contact area to affect penetration makes a lot of sense here, as piercing armor that's tougher than (or at least as tough as) your weapon makes a lot more sense when you're using something like a spear, or stabbing with a sword as opposed to slashing.

[Pandarsenic]

It seems if wounds added up damage instead of... doing what they do now... then most of the non-materials problems would be cleared up.

[G-Flex]

Okay, I've done my first tests with ranged weaponry, plus there's some stuff about ribs, skulls and eyelids. And a blurb about warhammers.


First: Blowguns.

These seem pretty much fine, at least for the most part. They barely penetrate much of anything aside from the skin, but that's cool since they aren't really intended to (they're more to cause bleeding and deliver poisons). Even a wooden dart will screw up the tiniest and least defensible parts (You'll shoot your eye out, kid!), but in general, all a dart will do is penetrate the skin and maybe some underlying tissue if you're lucky, and bruise stuff underneath. These bruises also can include organ bruises in the case of harder bolts, including vital organs (heart/lungs), which is off, but only due to ribcage problems I'll get into later. For what it's worth, they can't seem to really do anything to bone, which is fine.

Armor penetration for darts: Wooden darts can't really penetrate anything. Seriously. They cannot penetrate rope reed shirts or coats. Unarmored, they'll pierce skin and bruise stuff underneath, and sometimes tear fat/muscle, but a shirt will stop them. I want to say that maybe this is just the result of them having an extremely low penetration depth. Bronze darts won't penetrate it either, but they'll bruise underlying stuff, making me think that they'll get caught up in almost literally anything between them and the target. It seems like they should be able to penetrate at least a little deeper, then.


Second: Crossbows. (I'm going to assume most of this, or all of it, applies to bows as well, since the ammunition is precisely identical, and literally the only differences between the weapons themselves are the skills used and a bit of size difference)

Penetration: Wooden bolts penetrate leather armor, but not much of anything else, as expected. However, penetration does not seem deep enough for bolts. It seems like it's not enough penetration depth for them to actually pierce through to the organs successfully, even if they otherwise would. Changing the penetration depth to 4000 (from 2000) did the trick. This is the same depth that a slash with a short sword can penetrate, but significantly less than any polearm/spear/pike style weapon, which makes enough sense to me.

Adamantine darts don't do much that bronze darts don't, because of probably a combination of MAX_VEL (Ranged weapons have a maximum speed they can launch something at, since something like a string can only snap back so fast even by itself. This means that adamantine darts don't go as fast as you think. However, the value is high enough for blowguns that it might not be relevant) and the fact that darts don't stick in deep enough for anything like that to even matter (who cares if it penetrates steel armor if it can't get through it?). Adamantine bolts are actually worse, because MAX_VEL matters more with a (cross)bow. Turns out you can't effectively fire something from a bow when it weighs essentially nothing; there should be no surprise there. All of this stuff is mostly realistic, with the possible exception of "darts can't keep going through a target no matter how sharp", which is essentially the same problem as "darts can't just pass through the clothing instead of the clothing counting as penetrative depth".



Now let's talk about ribs.

Ribs are important. They protect your lungs and heart from injury, which is great, because trauma to those is bad news. They're pretty effective at it, too; it's possible to stab someone in the vitals by bypassing their ribcage, but it's not the usual occurrence.

The problem in DF is that ribs don't protect often enough. Remember what I said about organ-bruising via blowgun? This is why. In effect, there's normally no bone at all in between the surface of a creature's upper body and its heart/lungs/liver. The ribs are supposed to get in the way a certain amount of the time, but that amount is low enough that creatures are constantly getting bruised hearts and lungs, even from blowguns, simply from non-penetrative force transferred through tissues.

Here's the relevant part:

Code: [Select]

[BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:HUMANOID_RIBCAGE_POSITIONS]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_TRUE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:HEART:5]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_TRUE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:LUNG:5]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_FALSE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:HEART:5]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_FALSE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:LUNG:5]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_FALSE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:LIVER:5]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_FLOATING:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:LIVER:5]
The "5" there is how effective that type of part is at actually surrounding the body part in question, with a maximum of 100. Presumably, this is a percentage, but I can't be certain of that.

I tried jacking these numbers up into the 90s or so, to make sure the damn things actually get in the way.

This worked! Blowdarts were no longer bruising the heart, lungs, or liver. They weren't even bruising the ribs, presumably because the bone is too strong or something.

But when an attack of some kind COULD get through the ribs, this happened (testing using a slade bolt):

the flying slade bolt strikes dwarf 22 in the upper body, tearing the muscle, shattering the right false rib, shattering the left floating rib, shattering the right floating rib and bruising the liver!

Okay, apparently this marksdwarf is a pinball wizard. Or he's playing Breakout. Pick the game analogy of your choice, I guess.

This brought me to the following conclusion about how the game chooses whether to "block" a body part (in this case, the liver) with a "surrounding" part (in this case, the various types of ribs):

• Is the part about to be hit surrounded by something (e.g. skull, ribs)? If so, continue.
• Cycle through every part which surrounds that part (like every single rib), rolling a chance for it to get in the way, separately for each part.

In other words, each rib has a totally independent chance of "protecting" the organ in question. This results, in times like the one I posted, in a bunch of different ribs getting in the way at once.

The only way I would propose changing this to make it make more sense is as follows:

• Is the part about to be hit surrounded by something (e.g. skull, ribs)? If so, continue.
• Cycle through every body part category which surrounds that part (e.g. "RIB_TRUE", "RIB_FALSE"), rolling a chance for it to get in the way, separately for each category.
• For each category that succeeds, pick a random (or pick via direction/angle of attack, whenever that stuff goes in) body part within that category to do the blocking.

In other words, using this proposition, if we've got [BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_TRUE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:HEART:5] and the heart is about to get hit, there's a 5% chance that one of the true ribs will protect it, as opposed to a 5% chance for every true rib, and if that chance succeeds, then one of them is picked to do it. This results in different body parts within the same category not blocking the attack at once, which is sort of weird. Unfortunately, it would still result in, say, both a true rib and a false rib getting hit, but the syntax and processing could probably be changed to accommodate somehow.

Anyway, that's just an arbitrary suggestion to illustrate how weird it currently is.

What I've actually done is simply placing the values well in excess of their defaults, but nowhere near 100. Something like this:

Code: [Select]

[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_TRUE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:HEART:50]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_TRUE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:LUNG:50]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_FALSE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:HEART:40]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_FALSE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:LUNG:40]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_FALSE:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:LIVER:50]
[BP_RELATION:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_FLOATING:AROUND:BY_CATEGORY:LIVER:50]
You still get magic bullet syndrome sometimes, of course, but it's a good compromise.

The other oddity about this? Look at that quoted magic-bullet scenario that happened. Why is it that the bolt somehow managed to shatter all three separate ribs? It's incredibly strange to me that it managed, after getting through the skin and fat, to shatter three different bones. I want to say that maybe with "surrounding" parts (and maybe other layers things penetrate, to some degree?) it doesn't actually decrease the momentum of the attack more than once. In other words, if eight ribs get in the way, and the attack still has enough power to shatter one, then maybe it can wind up shattering all eight before the game updates how much momentum the attack still has. I'm not entirely sure (do I say this a lot?), and it matters less if you make Popcorn Kernel Bolts less common by not jacking up the protective value of the surrounding parts too high, but hey, it's a guess.



One last bit about warhammers: It seems like warhammers have a surprising amount of trouble getting past chain. Personally, I feel that chain shouldn't have so much of an impact on blunt damage, because it doesn't deflect it very well, or redistribute the force very well either. However, this problem seems to go away fairly readily as hammer skill gets high, implying that skill in hammers matters a bit more than skill in something penetrative, like spears. Perhaps getting a squarer hit is more important with hammers? Again, not necessarily unrealistic, but I guess nobody should expect their hammerdwarves (and possibly macedwarves by extension, although I haven't tested this) to break bones through mail at low skill whatsoever. Plate, on the other hand, is damn near impervious to warhammers completely. Even grandmaster hammerdwarves armed with bronze warhammers can't do any damage past bruising a bit of muscle through breastplate. This is true even if the breastplate is made out of tin. Mauls, on the other hand, work fine. A bit of rebalancing is in order, perhaps, but I'm not sure what warhammers need: A bit more size, a bit more velocity multiplier? Not sure yet.

For what it's worth, "bruising the muscle and bruising the (organ)" is a lot better than it sounds. "Bruising" an organ doesn't sound like much, but in terms of combat descriptions, it's second only to flat-out tearing them apart. A bruise to the guts/lungs/heart can do wonders, which is why I advocate making ribs more protective: By default, a bronze dart can easily bruise your lungs and cause you to suffocate. Of course, I think this also indicates a balance problem with organ damage, especially since a single lung being the victim of blunt trauma shouldn't entirely prevent you from breathing (unless it's so bad everything's just plain filling with blood for a long time).


Oh, I said I would say something about eyelids? They're another example of a "surrounding" body part, but I hardly ever see them get in the way (their "chance"/coverage value is 50), but maybe there's a reason for that. At any rate, there's some raw typo that results in both eyelids cleaning the left eye, while both of them protect the right eye, instead of doing both to each. I'm not even going to try figuring out the logistics of that, because it's kind of scary.

[dreiche2]

Couple of things:

Are you saying an iron sword should penetrate an iron plate mail (when stabbing)? Because I'm not sure about that.
 
Also, I'm not sure if I'd follow your conclusion about something being wrong with ribs after you increased that value to 100. Maybe that made them overlap or at least touch each other? In that case the bolt hitting several at once would make sense...

[G-Flex]

The thing that's wrong with the ribs is that there's absolutely no (useful) sense of relative position. There's essentially no chance that you can shoot, say, an arrow at a person and have that arrow hit four ribs at once, on different sides of the body, and the liver as well.

It's got nothing to do with them overlapping or anything like that. The problem is that they're all handled completely independently, so there's effectively no way to say "I want ribs to cover the chest 90% of the time, but without them overlapping". It's just impossible. The best you can do is find a sort of probabilistic "happy place" where the chance of at least one rib getting in the way is reasonably high, but the chance of 3-4 ribs at once getting hurt is reasonably low.

Are you saying an iron sword should penetrate an iron plate mail (when stabbing)? Because I'm not sure about that.

Hrm? Not necessarily. But it should have a better chance to penetrate materials in general when stabbing than what it's slashing. After all, that's one of the reasons you stab. The point is that the same force applied to a smaller area should have a better chance of penetration (e.g. a spear versus a sword).

[Raz]

Maille isn't designed to deflect. It is mostly designed to absorb the blows and by having the links breaking underneath the force, furthermore it's historically made out of iron because of the fact that iron is a relatively soft metal. That's why medieval swords were usually primarily made out of steel with an iron core. An iron plate armour should in fact be steel, because plate armour was designed to deflect blows.

Should hammers immediately shatter anything beneath a layer of iron or steel armour? Likely, yes. That's why DF should have padded jacks (thick tunic made out of multiple layers of cloth), to absorb blunt force.

Also, the fact that forearms are protected by maille shirts annoys me. That's why we should have more armour types like maille hauberks and maille coifs.

[Orkel]

How do I use underground creatures like crundles and such in arena mode?

[G-Flex]

Many/most of the new creatures (mostly in the creature_next_underground.txt raw file in /raw/objects) have this tag:

Code: [Select]

[ARENA_RESTRICTED]
Remove that and you should be able to use them in the arena.

[LoSboccacc]

the idea of grouping them in functional units is very good indeed, and will allow to do some even more complex stuff like piercing going trough one surrounding item at random with full force, bashing to effect all of them with divided force, and slashing affecting one at a time with progressively decreasing force (or something like that)

[Andeerz]

Maille isn't designed to deflect. It is mostly designed to absorb the blows and by having the links breaking underneath the force, furthermore it's historically made out of iron because of the fact that iron is a relatively soft metal. That's why medieval swords were usually primarily made out of steel with an iron core. An iron plate armour should in fact be steel, because plate armour was designed to deflect blows.

Should hammers immediately shatter anything beneath a layer of iron or steel armour? Likely, yes. That's why DF should have padded jacks (thick tunic made out of multiple layers of cloth), to absorb blunt force.

Also, the fact that forearms are protected by maille shirts annoys me. That's why we should have more armour types like maille hauberks and maille coifs.

Also, there is no plate armor for the upper arms or shoulders... this is sort of annoying, too, though you can sort of co-opt the breast plate to do this by changing the raws.

As for the maille, I see where you are coming from.  I am under the impression that maille was primarily designed to in essence to defend against cuts, basically converting cutting damage (and even some piercing damage) to bludgeoning damage in addition to offering some shock absorption in combination with a padded jack/aketon/gambeson/whatever underneath.  Check this test out to see what I mean: http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=11131 

Your statement about iron is intersting, especially with regard to chain maille.  If the steel is of lower carbon content and is not hardened, it might as well be iron as it behaves similarly.  So non-hardened steel maille and iron maille in reality are pretty much exactly the same in performance.  However, there are examples of hardened steel maille hauberks in the late medieval times as steel production became more consistent.  Whether or not this actually performs better is an unanswered question AFAIK.

As for plate, wrought iron used for plate back when iron plate was first emerging (late 1200's, early 1300's) in post-Roman Europe wasn't necessarily hardened (carbon content wasn't right) but was still useful in reinforcing maille defenses and deflecting shots that would otherwise be caught in the maille.  Case hardened iron that was available later (late 1300's) could have higher carbon content and then be case-hardened into a steely-iron (Read Techniques of Medieval Armor Reproduction, or The Knight and the Blast Furnace for more info).  This is what I think of as the steel used by dorfs in this game and the non-hardened wrought iron is what I think of as the iron used.  That's how I justify the properties of iron vs. steel in this game and am able to sleep at night.   

[G-Flex]

I accidentally locked the topic for a while. Don't ask me how.

For a while I thought someone, somewhere, was mad at me. But it was me all along!

[Rafal99]

Combat is really strange now.

I just had wolf bite glance of skin of my woodcutter...
Also war hammers are underpowered, it takes ridiculously long time for my dwarf to kill a wolf with his exceptional steel war hammer.

[G-Flex]

Are you breaking the bones? Breaking bones and internal injuries in general don't seem to do a lot (they should be more incapacitating and painful, and should probably cause internal bleeding if they don't yet). One reason that edged weapons, especially axes, are so overpowered right now is because it's hard to get anything immediately-disabling to happen to a creature aside from flat-out severing parts or piercing straight through important organs. There are other ways, but those are the prominent ones.



Okay, I did some more tests. Yeesh.

Fire, heat damage to organs/tissues, and tissue properties

(note: Some of the following medically-oriented information I got from Djohaal, aka Kefka, on IRC, because he seems to know what he's talking about)

Okay, fire is one of those things in DF that's Traditionally Messed Up, by this point. I'm not going to mention any of the obvious stuff like dwarves not caring about it enough.

One thing that's obvious is that temperature transfer simply doesn't happen quickly enough. This manifests itself in a few situations, but I've heard that Toady is already planning to up that rate. Don't quote me on this, because I can't confirm it myself. This is a fairly mundane "tweak" sort of problem, at any rate.

Another thing is that bodily tissues act really weird when it comes to fire. Have you ever noticed that fat seems to melt off creatures really easily? It's one of the first effects of magma submersion, and probably happens easily when the "acid rain" bug comes into play. Ever wonder why, though? It's because the fatty tissue inside creatures uses the "fat" material template. The "fat" material template uses the same thermal/phase characteristics as the "tallow" material template (with some odd exceptions). It melts at 110°F (about 43.3°C). Basically, in DF terms, walking on hot enough sand should cause the fatty tissue in your feet to melt, slough through your skin and off your body onto the ground, and cause severe bleeding (since the fatty tissue has vascular stuff in it, in DF terms). Obviously, this isn't the case.

So, where's the disconnect? Consider: Tallow is rendered, relatively pure fat. The fatty tissue inside you is more complex. In fact, some of that fatty tissue inside you has a melting point well below room temperature, but because there's other stuff in the tissue surrounding it, it doesn't just slosh around or leak out. Another way to explain it: Your muscles are something like 70-75% water, yet you wouldn't call those a liquid. Realistically, fatty tissue should "melt" at a much higher temperature (for our purposes, let's say 140°F/60.0°C), and should have a HEATDAM_POINT lower (again, for the sake of discussion, let's say around 111°F/44°C, see next paragraph), to represent tissue damage from the heat (your internal body temperature just isn't supposed to be that high).

Actually, for human adipose (fatty) tissue, I found this (search the page for "is 44 degrees") stating that "it is well known that the tissue damage temperature is 44 degrees Celsius".

It should be possible to discover melting (and possibly even tissue damage) points for various tissues, given the fact that there are methods devised to target and liquefy/destroy arbitrary tissues inside the human body surgically/with lasers, but I haven't been able to find a table or anything. I've been able to find patents, but they don't list that stuff in detail. Hopefully something can be found without resorting to corporate espionage.

For what it's worth, fat has a COLDDAM_POINT of -68°F/-56°C. If it's representing fatty tissue, this should probably be a bit closer to, I don't know, the freezing point of water or something like that. Certainly, fatty tissue can get frostbitten and I doubt it takes a temperature that low to do it. This is of secondary concern, however.

Also for what it's worth, tallow doesn't have a liquid density defined. Seriously. It's 5/9 the density of fat when solid, which doesn't seem realistic anyway: Solid fat is defined as 0.9g/cm³, and tallow is defined as 0.5g/cm³ (god bless you Toady for using SI units), yet from my quick googling, tallow is actually about the 0.9 figure. Seriously though, in addition to that, tallow has [liQUID_DENSITY:NONE] despite melting easily. I have no idea how the game handles this when/if it comes up. Again, not the biggest issue, just a small oversight.

Bone's values don't seem too out-of-whack in a practical sense, although I'd personally take the HEATDAM_POINT down a notch (it's 282°F/139°C), since bone is a tad more complex than it looks. To be fair, I don't know what's realistic here. It doesn't have a melting point defined, but that easily could be realistic enough, and by that point it should be long burned away.

Blood boiling is a bit weird, since in reality it should just congeal before it boils. Another minor quirk with boiling is that it all happens at once; there's no sense of a pool of something boiling off over time, it all just goes off at once like an explosion (this is something we can easily live with). Personally, I'd move the HEATDAM_POINT down below the boiling point a bit, to at least sort of acknowledge the fact that heat messes it up before it gets to that point.

The HEATDAM_POINT for muscle is the same as that for bone, so maybe that should be lower too, since tissue damage does occur long before then.

Of course, this all depends on what HEATDAM_POINT means. In the human body, I'm sure tissues start being "damaged" in the sense of losing function before the material starts to physically get ruined. It's hard to tell what to use here, since there's no real sense of having the stuff get damaged in different ways or to different degrees at different temperatures.

I think one issue here is that, while bodily tissues are an example of something where material properties are extremely important, they're also an example of something where simple engineering-type values like these don't work very realistically. For instance, fat has more of a gradual, plastic shift from solid to liquid (and sort of goopy in between) rather than a typical "melting" process, tissues are fairly complicated in general, and also note what I said about boiling blood. Fudging it with the current system seems pretty much fine, though, so I don't think it's a serious "issue" or one that really breaks anything. It's just an interesting thing to note.


While I'm on the subject of body tissues, it seems like something is weird about chitin, or at least the body parts/creatures that use it. Untrained dwarven punches sometime shatter through chitin, other times glancing away a lot, and other times breaking straight through to the brain. I don't understand the inconsistency. Maybe they just can't break through consistently, but when they do it's traumatic because there's not much to protect underneath. I was thinking that maybe it's due to its low elasticity, but even modifying that didn't help. I'm honestly not sure, but it might be something to do with the body parts and not the material itself, perhaps.


There are some other miscellaneous issues with the raws, like brain matter also having slightly less than half its actual density, and so forth, but I won't bother going through and trying to list everything that seems off.



Okay, back to fire and tissue damage. There are a few issues here.

• Tissues on fire seem to stay on fire in perpetuity. Drop a zombie in the lava in Arena Mode and it'll never day. You'll get an eternal torch. The same happens with Blizzard Men, for instance. Why? Because, like the other problems related to the lack of cumulative injury to body parts (rearing its head again, I see), fire does not seem to damage body parts to the point of actual destruction. They damage it to the point of a yellow "burn" wound and that's it, it seems. Obviously, something on fire doesn't reach a stable state like that: It either gets extinguished or burns the stuff away. This ties in to my other notes about cumulative injury, but to sum it up: Stuff that's on fire should burn away completely after a while, or at least enough to fall apart.
• Creatures don't die from heat very easily. I'm not talking about burn wounds, or melting, or anything like that; I mean simple heat. I've definitely seem "died from the heat" messages before, but extremely rare, and I have personally witnessed a normal wildlife creature's brain getting "burnt" well before it died. Obviously, by the time your brain reaches that temperature, you're already dead. I'm not sure if the HOMEOTHERM stuff isn't functioning correctly or what, but creatures requiring functional organ systems (not zombies or iron men or whatever) need to die more readily when their core temperature (perhaps brain temperature?) goes up drastically, and organ damage needs to probably happen more easily in some cases. This goes hand-in-hand with temperature transfer needing to be faster, and what I said about tissues probably needing a lower HEATDAM_POINT or something.
• Not enough tissue trauma in general, as an effect of the other stuff I mentioned.

Non-solid creatures

Now, as for creatures made of fire... stuff is definitely weird. (I used fire men for these tests)

For one thing, their attacks "pass right through". While it makes sense for a fire man's arm not to really physically exert force on something, one of two things should be the case:

• Fire men don't attempt to use such attacks, instead opting for fire breath all the time.
• The attack should transfer temperature (as if it did hit) significantly enough to at least burn naked flesh.

On the defensive end, things are even stranger. Creatures can easily punch/kick parts of the fire man off, because it's made out of a superlight, ethereal material which is somehow able to be sort of... fanned off. The game treats these like normal severs, too, dropping "fire man flames" on the ground, which makes no sense to me since the tissue is in the gaseous state: Why does it land on the ground ostensibly in solid form? For what it's worth, there's a similar issue with the magma that magma men drop on the ground from combat, in that it doesn't seem to interact with water at all.

The problem here is that there's simply no way I can think of to properly deal with creatures made out of gas like this. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a sword to "cut through" and sever parts of it, and if you feel like handwaving it to say that it does, then there's still the issue that it's way, way too easy. However, if you truly treat them like a gas, they wind up being nigh-invincible, short of extremely complicated water traps, or some sort of hypothetical "throw water on this thing" bucket brigade maneuver.

Except! They don't even interact with water. They don't boil the water, and the water doesn't cool them off. Personally, I see something wrong with this picture. Oddly enough, magma men do boil off water (although they don't get hurt by it, sadly). Is this a problem with the state of matter? I have no idea.


There are similar, yet  less weird, problems with creatures made out of liquid or powder. Powder creatures, such as those made of snow, are fragile enough that I've personally witnessed combat logs of a cow calf severing the lower body of a snow-composed forgotten beast with a kick. The issue here is that the creature is essentially loose powder (as opposed to being packed solid) kept in shape by forces unknown, meaning it's really easy to break through, similarly to the gas. Also similarly, I'm not entirely convinced that kicking through it, or swinging a sword through it, should actually sever off the part; I mean, the connectivity is entirely magical anyway, so it's not like anything's really getting broken or cut. Again, though, I have no idea how this could be handled better, especially in the current system. It sort of makes sense to whack away bits of the material time after time, but severs don't make a lot of sense to me.


In other words, it seems like non-solid creatures are probably going to be pretty messed up for a while, but there are still some things that look, to me, like they could at least be made a bit more workable. I don't know if I'd suggest simply culling all non-solid titans or what, though, at this point. It would be kind of sad to not have any titans/forgotten beasts/demons made out of snow or fire or whatever, but on the other hand, there's not really any point if they can't be fixed up (or at least weirdly cludged) to the point that they provide a challenge.




oh my god this post is too long what have I done

[Pandarsenic]

Epic thesis is epic.