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[Shima]

Wouldn't that also make the skull/ribcage vital for every living thing as well, though?

[Deon]

I don't know if skeletons can be given blood, buuuut perhaps we can give them white blood and call it bone dust?  I don't know if we can or not, but if we could give them actual dust for blood, that would be even better.  Could also solve the Colossus issue for the time being.

Skeletons are generated from normal creatures, removing any blood, so sadly it's not possible.

[Phoebus]

Wouldn't that also make the skull/ribcage vital for every living thing as well, though?

I've yet to hear about a living being surviving the loss of their skull/ribcage/spine.

[Shima]

Well, that's the thing.  As far as I've seen right now, it's not removal that kills, it's just tapping it.  Even bruising the brain seems to cause death at a 100% rate, from my own testing.



Speaking of, I've been testing for my own mod in development, I figure I should share some of the findings.

Using this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[ITEM_AMMO:ITEM_AMMO_545]
[NAME:5.45x39mm round:5.45x39mm rounds]
[CLASS:545]
[SIZE:50]
[ATTACK:EDGE:40:35000:jab:jabs:NO_SUB:6000]

as my control ammo, I've gotten to a point where the bullet rarely hits vitals or bones (Still working on that...).  Often, it'll only pierce the skin.  BUT, when it DOES hit a bone, or organ, or anything, it completely destroys it.  As well, it only takes one to three hits to cause guaranteed bleed out.  I've been holding mock battles with this, and so far, there's a constant 1:1 death ratio.  There are zero survivors, because they all take a shot and the bleeding's too intense.

Against armor, it very, very, very, VERY rarely pierces, usually having to wait until it finds an unarmored place, but the results are the same.  The battle testing was performed using lines of Amphibian men in cave spider silk robes, using iron ammo and mangrove guns (Gun stats currently identical to crossbow during testing).

I need to perform tests using the buckshot and slug shotgun shells, to see if either of those have a large difference from 5.45 right now.


UPDATE:
One of the first slugs in a robed buck v. slug battle tore apart the brain.  Promising.  The battle results in a total lose for the buckshot, and 7 lost for slug (About 1/3 of the unit).  Within about 20 seconds (At 200FPS), about another 6 or 7 bled out.  These tests are being done with complete zero-skill peasant amphibian men.

Let's see how this goes with a full suit of iron armor, otherwise same conditions.

Buckshot v. buckshot.  Nearly everyone (Who survived long enough) spent every shell.  I note that some toes, fingers, and feet are severed and fly around.  Otherwise the rounds deflect off the armor rather than go through.  The remaining healthy ones are testing out melee for me while the 3 still alive on the ground are still firing slowly.  Considering that the crossbow is basically a small hammer, it should be doing more than constantly being deflected, but whatever.  Wiping this group out and starting buck v. slug.

I notice something really odd, Amphibian men are either super fast, or fairly heat resistant, as magma doesn't harm them much.  I also note that their bodies remain under the magma, until there's a sudden explosive burst of "boiling blood".

Anyway, enough of that, buck v. slug.  Same kinda results, except with less slug survivors.  Going through everything, neither go "through" the armor.  I'm thinking of testing these as blunt, but the problem is it might not enter them at all at that point.  I also noticed, one of the amphibian men died one round after a toe being torn off.  Starting to think I should use humans for these tests to make sure if death happens this fast.

[Phoebus]

Would adding the [SKELETON] tag to the brain template make skeletal creatures keep their brain?

[Shima]

Would adding the [SKELETON] tag to the brain template make skeletal creatures keep their brain?

That's actually a very interesting suggestion.  Might be only one way to find out, I suppose.  I'd give it a run if I weren't busy with ammo testing.

[G-Flex]

One problem with those bullets: Creatures will be able to stab with them, and when they do, they will stab through an obscene amount of flesh due to the penetration depth they have.

Of course, this is the problem with ammunition respecting penetration depth even when fired, as I've noted elsewhere; the game simply doesn't have a notion of a fired piece of ammo going deeper than its own size.

[KaelGotDwarves]

Actually, the main brokenness associated with ammo right now is that bow/markdwarves in melee will sometimes stab with ammo stacks of bolts/arrows and the damage will stack according to how many arrows/bolts were in the stack. I filed that bug report on the tracker.

Further balancing of ranged weapons has to be "fired projectiles" side rather than the arrow penetration itself.

[Arrkhal]

One thing on crossbows and bows is that, realistically, a bow or xbow probably will hit the velocity cap with nearly every type of ammo.  As the raw says, the bolt can't move faster than the string, and the string is limited by how fast the limbs move.  And the limbs tend to weigh a lot more than the arrow/bolt.

A modern archery setup will be about a 60 pound draw weight bow shooting a 300 grain arrow (7000 grains = 1 pound).  English longbows were more like 100-180 pound draw weights, shooting arrows weighing about 900 to 1500 grains.

Heavier crossbows would usually shoot bolts weighing 2000 grains or more.  Han Chinese crossbows used solid metal bolts (bronze cast around an iron core) that weighed 1-2 pounds!

And with a 2000 grain bolt, a 3,000 pound draw weight crossbow shoots only a couple percent faster than a 1,000 pound draw weight one, but shoots a 1 pound one way faster.

Near as I can tell in the raws, 200 size units = 1 pound, which results in fairly realistic weights (though the large swords are too heavy).  And does result in roughly correct weights for arrows and bolts.

[Kagus]

Interesting research on the ranged weaponry front, I've been thinking about putting together a mod with firearms in it for a while, and I've been wondering how to get the bullets to act like they're worth something.


On a more thread-related note, has anyone done testing with the mud man?  Although they have a much lower material resistance than the iron man or bronze colossus, they still have the "made out of stuff" problem of just not dying.

Blunt weapons are utterly incapable of killing them, and spears are of course not helping.  The only way to kill one of these guys is a lopping-off death strike to the head or body.

...and I do mean the only way.  These guys are actually immune to lava.  I'm going to run some tests with dragonfire to see if that can melt the suckers...

[Zalminen]

Skimmed through the thread out of curiousity.
One comment on bodkin arrows:

I'm no expert but I remember reading of a case where a bodkin arrow hit a knight and
- pierced the metal protecting the thigh
- went through the leg
- went through the armor on the other side of the leg
- penetrated into the horse, nailing the knight in place

I don't really remember any other details so I can't comment on how thick the armor was etc.

[Another]

Mud men are annoying but there are things even worse then them. I've originally posted this on a different forum. Spoilered due to HFS.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I had multiple Shade Banshee from the underworld that consisted of Right wing-Body-Left wing. Both wings chopped away with no problem, body hacked to red status, then - no progress. Hundreds of pages of "The militia commander hacks The Shade Banshee in the body with his (silver battle axe), breaking away the rest of the tissue!" in combat log with no effect. They have absolutely no organs and I think that they can't bleed to death. You can't even detach upper and lower body because the only thing they have besides wings is the "Body". Their description mentioned that they are composed of "ash" - probably means immunity to magma.

I couldn't find raw files for them or any other underworld demons to get more info on them and just hope that they will be fixed at the same time as bronze colossus. I warn you against digging too deep until combat issues are fixed.

P.S. To make life even worse in fortress mode - they are also apparently [ TRAPAVOID] and [BUILDING_DESTROYER].

[Moontayle]

Anything with a single body component is damn near impossible to kill. I ran into the same problem with zombie Flying Heads. The wings came off fine but my squad of Legendary Axedwarves took about six months to finally get it to a dead status. I'm still unsure of how they accomplished it since it happened while I was afk and I forgot to look at the game log before I deleted it (damn thing was 12MB big).

[Arrkhal]

I'm no expert but I remember reading of a case where a bodkin arrow hit a knight and
- pierced the metal protecting the thigh
- went through the leg
- went through the armor on the other side of the leg
- penetrated into the horse, nailing the knight in place

I don't really remember any other details so I can't comment on how thick the armor was etc.

I remember that one.  It hit chainmail only, no plates, and was fired at a distance of 20 to 40 feet or so.

Anyway, I'm getting close to done with a material file mod, though I don't know where to upload it.  There were a lot of tenfold errors.  Some of the numbers seemed to be in PSI, some seemed to be 10x PSI (and some seemed to be just made up).  That even happened within the same materials.  Every single metal in the entire game was 10x the PSI of stainless steel in defending against bludgeoning weapons!  And most body tissues were in the 10x PSI scale, making bone stronger than most of the metals...

I'm gonna test my 1x PSI mod in a bit.  I'm betting blunt weapons will be much more useful.  But hopefully the extremely low values for skin won't make crazy things happen, like skin tearing when you move or something.

[userpay]

I'm hoping it won't need a regen, I seem to have a problem with my war dogs being able to kill a god damn kobold. Maybe I should see if a group can take down a snatcher, caught a few...