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[Warlord255]

Organ damage should be engaging to give medical dwarves more to do. Overall weapon balance is another thing entirely...

[Morrigi]

Hmm... while realism is great and all, I'd rather not have every dwarf laid out every time they go into combat and get anything more than a light scratch.

Last time I checked, getting a spear through the liver or being smacked in the chest with a war hammer constitutes a bit more than a light scratch

[Rowanas]

Hmm... while realism is great and all, I'd rather not have every dwarf laid out every time they go into combat and get anything more than a light scratch.

Last time I checked, getting a spear through the liver or being smacked in the chest with a war hammer constitutes a bit more than a light scratch

Yeah, that's fair enough, but a real warrior could easily be rendered inoperable for a long time by a light stabbing. Hey, even a long cut could put them down for life.

[Narmio]

The thing that I think the current system is missing is not more lethality from wounds, but more combat impairment.  When you get stabbed in the guts with a spear several times, the bleeding is not too severe and the organ damage is usually not immediately deadly.  That's pretty accurate - it takes quite a while to die from a gut wound.  But the problem is that in combat there really isn't any serious penalty to effectiveness from such a wound.  Even for a hardened soldier who managed to remain conscious, the pain would seriously weaken effective strength, slow you down and probably cause your legs to collapse.  If the dwarf in question wasn't extremely skilled, extremely lucky or rescued immediately, you would expect things to go very badly.

That's what I think is needed to prevent the current very drawn out fights with ridiculous injury on both sides.  Better modelling of damage for things like internal bleeding, trauma and piercing vs slashing are all important, but more impairment and shock from wounds will make combat much better.

[HAMMERMILL]

Well, I think there are plenty of examples where the pain/ psychological effects of an injury didn't stop the fight. This incident is a pretty famous example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout

I think the willpower trait could play a role in that, but I think body parts should need to be physically disabled to make a real difference. Pain and bleeding and whatnot causes a fighter to slow down and fight less effectively already, which is a start. Something like a broken bone in a limb would cause said limb to stop working. Right now it seems the only way a golbin will drop his sword is if his arm is severed off completely.

[Rowanas]

That is... that is pretty hardcore.

Examples of such die-hard people are pretty rare, though. Take the berserkers, for example, who were said to ignore fire and steel and walked out of fights unscathed despite having quite obviously been hit during combat. Berserkers were generally only a small part of the Norse traditional of warfare.

I'm of the opinion that the trance state dwarves currently have should be changed into a general berserkergang state that may or may not be initiated when they see an enemy, depending on the size and power of the enemy (go and see that topic about fight/flee responses). Tantruming dwarves should always be berserk

[HAMMERMILL]

I'm thinking the "martial trance" is like some sort of inner calm and focus, which does seem kinda contraindicated considering how unstable dwarfs are in general. Berserking can just be "enraged" which groundhogs and stuff do. Both should probably decrease the fight-stopping effects of pain though. Tantruming dwarves, I dunno, since he's just lost his mind for a minute and wants to throw shit around. Insane dwarves like from a failed mood would be unstoppable.

But really, just about any determined person can block out pain, or simply be too intent on killing the other guy or escaping the situation to just fall to the ground and stop fighting. Some injuries, even if they are horrific or fatal are not even that painful, really.

Some injuries are intolerably painful though. Any injury against a kidney in game should be one of those.

Still, I'm not really sure improved pain models or even the ability to instantly deliver a mortal wound on an unconcious, prone enemy would fix the damage modeling. I think the old system worked better.

[Morrigi]

Use the combat balance mod, it helps. Also, upping the number of pain receptors on tissues makes things much more realistic.

[Toybasher]

UPdated it a bit.

[Toybasher]

BUmping this, updating it a bit more.

ANyways with the new updates I noticed broken bones cause WAAAY too much pain but lets get back on topic.

[Marshall Burns]

It's been my experience that any non-trivial damage to the liver is eventually fatal (which is realistic). Once you stab a guy in the liver and tear it apart, you can pretty much just leave him alone and go on to fight the next guy (unless he was a bowman or something, then you want to make sure he's dead), and before long you'll get the message that so-and-so has bled to death.

One problem with organ injuries at present though: you stab a guy through the heart, and then you have to wait for him to bleed out. It doesn't take long, but that isn't really how it goes. You get stabbed/shot through the heart, you die within seconds and don't really bleed that much (since your heart can't pump properly).

Also, getting limbs cut off: not deadly enough. In real life, you'll bleed to death without imminent cauterization.

[Footkerchief]

You get stabbed/shot through the heart, you die within seconds

That's the stereotypical depiction, but I've never seen any evidence that it's true.  At the very least, brain death won't set in for several minutes.

[tsen]

I imagine the stereotypical description is *visually* truer than expected simply due to the shock value of being spiked in the middle of one's chest. While it wouldn't cause instant death from tissue damage, severe enough shock does sometimes cause the appearance of instant death due to unconsciousness.

Edit:  which also means entities need to have a variable AI determining at what point they'll stop attacking. A dwarf who knocks a goblin unconscious and sees that the goblin has sustained mortal wound(s) should move on to the next fight, but an animal might continue to savage a creature and/or feed on a foe who is clearly out of the fight or already dead.

[Rowanas]

I imagine the stereotypical description is *visually* truer than expected simply due to the shock value of being spiked in the middle of one's chest. While it wouldn't cause instant death from tissue damage, severe enough shock does sometimes cause the appearance of instant death due to unconsciousness.

I'm not entirely certain that DF death is, in fact, death. While brain death can occasionally take absurdly long to set in, generally you're a vegetable after a very short period of time. We don't see it, but it's likely that those goblins your dwarves punctured earlier are actually in a vegetative and coma-stricken state until one of your hauling dwarves decides to thoroughly shank the git.

[ZebioLizard2]

It's been my experience that any non-trivial damage to the liver is eventually fatal (which is realistic). Once you stab a guy in the liver and tear it apart, you can pretty much just leave him alone and go on to fight the next guy (unless he was a bowman or something, then you want to make sure he's dead), and before long you'll get the message that so-and-so has bled to death.

Being stabbed in the liver not only is fatal, it HURTS LIKE THE DICKENS. I mean there's a good bit of feeling there when your hurt there. Screaming bloody pain.

You get stabbed/shot through the heart, you die within seconds

That's the stereotypical depiction, but I've never seen any evidence that it's true.  At the very least, brain death won't set in for several minutes.

You don't die within seconds, however it is very fatal of course.