meph - those charts are awesome! they really help shed some light on one of the more complicated parts of the mod... but in looking at them, i wonder if there aren't perhaps a few too many weapon/armor materials! as far as i can tell, one of the core aspects of this mod's design philosophy has been elegance through simplicity - hence the simplified but more useful wood/leather/meats/drinks/etc. in that light i can't help wondering whether some things are a bit unnecessary!
for example, what's the point of sladmantine, if it's worse then slade for blunt weapons and worse then adamantine for edged? is it the strongest material for armor? if so that makes sense, but isn't clear from the charts =D
but aren't there just too many kinds of iron and steel? as it stands now we can have items made from "iron", "pure iron", "pig iron", "rusty iron", "meteoric iron", and "feather iron"... either "iron" or "pure iron" seems perhaps a bit unnecessary - doesn't "pure iron" ore just produce two iron bars? if so, should it even be reasonable to construct "pure iron" or "pig iron" weapons/armor/etc? and the "feather iron" seems like a bit of a contradiction to me, and should perhaps be renamed... "hardened mithril", maybe? it should be clear that there's an incentive to get better armor by teching up, and being able to use materials like steel, titanium, wolfram, mithril, and adamantine, not to mention the advanced leathers and woods... which are actually light and good for armor.
speaking of steel, how many kinds of that do we have now? "steel", "battle/damast steel", "fireproof steel", "heavy steel", "lightweight steel", and "stainless steel", not to mention "steeloak" and "steeloak metal"... i say if you want lightweight armor etc, you should have to seek out mithril or adamantine, or build up advanced leatherworking capabilities, no? and if you want heavy blunt weapons, you should use one of the heavy metals or woods, right? in that context, doesn't it make sense to keep the materials simple and remove redundancies from the industrial toolchain, or at least give people the option to do so?
i'm also not sure why "steeloak metal" needs to be there - perhaps for more technical reasons...? if so you might want to rename it to something clearer. same with "slade", "weak slade", "slade mineral", and "slademantine". is it feasible to make the "weak slade" and "slade mineral" ones redundant? also, i urge you to revisit "fireproof steel" - there should be some disadvantage to it, because right now there's no reason not to just make all your otherwise-steel armor out of the "fireproof" variety. maybe some other armor material progression, like meterioric iron, titanium, wolfram, hellwood, and slademantine, should be fireproof instead...?
another way to think about this would be that because different military materials should have different roles, one kind of economy shouldn't be able to fill all the niche roles very easily. for example, in order of usefulness, here's a rough layout (leaving out many misc materials) of what a simpler progression could look like:
- blunt weapons: ironwood, iron, cobalt, steelwood, steel, meteoric, wolfram, precious metals, iridium, hellwood, slade
- edged weapons: copper, bronze, ironwood, iron, cobalt, meteoric, steelwood, steel, hellwood, slade, adamantine
- ranged weapons:
probably similar to blunt, but there should perhaps be reasons to seek out other materials for these at the high end...?
- light armor: leathers, titanium, mithril, hardened mithril, adamantine
- normal/heavy armor: similar to edged, with slademantine the best...?
- fireproof/extra-heavy armor: meterioric, titanium, wolfram, hellwood, slademantine
of course, this doesn't include the patternwelds, which have their niches, and it should maintain an appropriate progression of woods, leathers, shells, etc, so non-metal economies should be feasible but perhaps not quite as effective as metal economies.
you might want to make an armor chart, and perhaps a ranged-weapon chart, in addition to your previous charts, to help clarify those things so everyone can see what the advantages and disadvantages of all the different materials are...
i guess what i'm proposing is, at least, a simplification of the apparently-redundant or otherwise weird military metal variants. that would involve renaming a few things (like "feather iron" -> "hardened mithril", using a steel bar instead of iron), and removing as forge-able materials things like "pure iron", "pig iron", "battle steel", "heavy steel", "lightweight steel", "fireproof steel", and maybe "stainless steel", "weak slade", and "slade mineral", although i'm not sure what those ones are for. this would hopefully simplify raws and menus, reduce the types of items, clarify things for the users, incentivise more diverse economies, and maybe even help FPS a bit!
sorry for the length of this post - these are just ideas =) again, absolutely all the best -
Poll
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Topic: ☼MASTERWORK-DF☼ V.3 - New release and old post. This will be locked later. (Read 1854739 times)