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[Mel_Vixen]

Behold wikipedia has a  Chainwhip   and it is "Blunt".

[Alastar]

Whatever the nature of the whips in game, they shouldn't be treated as rigid objects. What happens at the moment is that we get the impact of something the weight of the whole weapon moving with the speed of the business end. Roughly 1kg of somewhat pointy metal moving at roughly the speed of sound... that's about right. For a 40mm autocannon shell.
It seems the wound calculations simply give up for this kind of impact power, but the armour-penetrating nature shouldn't come as a surprise.

[Misterstone]

So from what i've noticed in Adventure mode, weapons, attacks, wounds and other issues need tweaking.  Here are some things I have noticed:

1)  Maces, mauls and fails seem to be pretty useless.  I just had an adventurer die because he was beating the crap out of a mini-night creature and he eventually got tired from swinging his iron mace at it 100x (he fractured the things skull like four times), passed out, and was mauled by the crippled beast.  War-hammers are better because they have a smaller striking area (??), and tend to go through the skull and shatter it.  Morning stars are very deadly because they do edged damage.  Whips are OK, not great, because they have 5x velocity which makes up for their light weight, and a small striking area.  Scourges seem to be pretty deadly, because they do edged damage.  Maybe the answer for maces and mauls and such is to make them heavier, or give them a larger velocity bonus?

2)  Charge attacks seem to be successful way too often.  If a skilled adventurer attacks a wild horse, they will almost always be knocked over in my experience.  THen when you stand up, you are immediately knocked over again, etc. etc.  It seems like charge attacks are too successful, a character that dodges 90% of attacks will be knocked down by a charge rather easily it seems.

3)  Damage to internal organs does not seem to affect wounded people very much, unless there is a single wound that immediately destroys the organ.  You can have your pancreas, heart and lungs bruised over and over again, but if a single shot does not destroy it, you are not especially effected by it in my experience.  Lungs are a bit better- a damaged lung causes you to get winded, which is pretty deadly in combat.  Gut strikes sometimes cause vomiting and retching, which is also deadly since it is like a stun and makes you vulnerable; however you can have guts bruised over and over again without serious effects, and the opponent it seems will only vomit if a single strike hits them hard enough.  Again all of this means that blunt weapons are less likely to disable or kill an opponent, since edged weapons are better at destroying organs outright, and cumulative damage does not seem to matter much right now.

Wrestling is a bit crazy now, but that's to be expected since it is still a work in progress.

I'm sure some of this is rather old news, correct?  Is Toady planning on tweaking wounds/cumulative damage, etc. more, or does he seem to be happy with it for now?

[PsyberianHusky]

Combat is still a lil weird, but I like the direction it has gone in, I don't think its done because I recallToady mentioning wanting to put in "Schools of fighting" I would like to see how that affects the game

[Dante]

I'm sure some of this is rather old news, correct?  Is Toady planning on tweaking wounds/cumulative damage, etc. more, or does he seem to be happy with it for now?

He's said he'll revisit combat after the caravan arc.

[LoSboccacc]

I wonder if the metal values from wikipedia could help there.

tensile strength and shear and bulk modulus are compiled for most of the metals in df (but not for alloys, sadly)

[Shinziril]

Did a little testing with "adamantine" robes (actually leather modded to have the same values as adamantine).  It appears that robes protect everything except for the head, hands, and feet.  Adamantine robes protected perfectly against all broad slashing weapons, although to be truly perfect an adamantine helm, gauntlets and boots were required. 

Unskilled peasants with iron war hammers and adamantine robes/helms/gauntlets/boots beat peasants with iron war hammers and no armor 80-20, so it appears that this does provide some protection against blunt weapons.  True adamantine armor seemed to provide similar protection. 

One source of caution: it is possible that the "structural elasticity" tag possessed by true adamantine cloth robes would affect their properties as armor. 

[Misterstone]

I think the robes are pretty sweet protection for a lot of things, however I found that if you shoot someone in adamantium clothing with a crossbow (used by a skilled marksdwarf) it will still crush bones and cause death fairly easily.  I think crossbow bolts have very high velocity, so flexible layers stop the piercing but not the force of impact.  Maybe its a little different now?

[KaelGotDwarves]

Regarding the lethality of whips and the uselessness of blunt weapons in general...

There are two factors with this, one being that small contact area for edge AND blunt weapons turns then weapon into a bullet that pierces every thing, and that blunt weapons do not currently cause internal bleeding because of how bodies work. They rely on breaking bones to cause pain and crushing a person's skull into their brain to get kills.

Changing the contact area for both is advised. Keep in mind that we did this with the community combat overhaul mod when .31 was originally released, and Toady adopted a few ideas from that (Blunt weapons used to be worse), but some of the current numbers are still placeholders- as made obvious by bullet-whips.

It's non-obvious but- smaller contact area for blunt weapons = better for shattering bones and causing blunt force trauma, whereas most blunt weapons have a large contact area. The fix is lowering that value for gameplay reasons even though it doesn't make sense to have a large maul have a small contact area, or making the velocity multiplier value much higher.

Besides whips, perhaps you noticed that the blunt weapon with 10 contact area is also particularly deadly at crushing skulls. Skulls are also weak in DF, I boosted their relsize to 50 in the body raw, since attacks that bruise the muscles everywhere else without touching other bones causes the skull to shatter into the brain, but that's a different balance issue.

[Shinziril]

Did some testing with humans versus giants.  All giants were unarmed and unskilled, humans were Grand Master Dodger with level 0/5/9/14 in the relevant weapon skill (testing was battle axes versus spears).  Grandmaster Dodger was used to prevent the humans from dying too easily (they're pretty crunchy with nowhere to run against giants, and dodging helps prevent them from getting grabbed and wrestled, which is another failure mode). 

Spears showed a noticeable advantage at all levels of weapon skill.  However, even the 0 weapon skill humans with battle axes had about a 50% kill rate, which shows that anyone with enough Dodge levels and a decent weapon can get a lucky hit in eventually.  Those without said dodge levels tend to die too quickly for this to occur. 

This would seem to support my theory that stabbing weapons like spears are more effective for large unarmored targets.  Also, Dodge skill is massively useful. 

[azazel]

War-hammers are better because they have a smaller striking area (??)

Yes?

[Shinziril]

First post rewritten and reorganized.  I made sure to preserve the informational content of everything that was from that post originally, although it may have been rephrased slightly. 

[o_O[WTFace]]

Q1: Any idea how much impact armor user has on combat?  Do you think it has any effects other then reducing effective armor weight? 

Q2: do you think fighting in 2x1 cells has any effect on results, vs say individual fights with plenty of open space to move around in? 

[thvaz]

Great work shinziril.

Your tests show that though not perfect, the combat system of DF is quite sensible and realistic, despite so many complains based on pontual observations.