Yeah, it`s incredible hard to kill things now. Once, in adventure mode, my sword managed to get stuck in the throat of my enemy- After twisting it 3 times around in his throat i managed to free my sword.
We fought for another ~80 turns.
(Dwarf Fortress Z!)
Dwarf! Dwarf! Rock the Dwarf!
Dwarf Fortress Z!
Dwarf! Dwarf! Rock the Dwarf!
Come get me!
(Dwarf Fortress Z!)
Dwarf! Dwarf! Rock the Dwarf!
Dwarf Fortress Z!
Dwarf! Dwarf! Rock the Dwarf!
Come get me!
Dwarf! Dwarf! Rock the Dwarf!
Dwarf Fortress Z!
Dwarf! Dwarf! Rock the Dwarf!
Come, a-come get me!
Dwarf Fortress Z!
Dwarf Fortress Z!
Previously, on Dwarf Fortress Z...
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 (http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20080234609) (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
Yeah, currently all materials have blunt combat attributes (impact yield and impact fracture) equal to some placeholder value 1080000 which appears to be chosen from stainless steel, according to a raws note by Toady. I think the shear values (presumably for edged combat) might have similar placeholders. We really can't make any comment about the formulas and processes Toady is using to do the wound calculations until we can better understand what's being caused by the placeholders.
Massively reducing impact fracture but not impact yield for armour, for example, creates a system where almost every hit from a weapon causes serious deep bruising, but never penetrates enough to break bones. So there's modelling of some more complicated stuff than what we're seeing in fights right now (better material weapon goes through all the time, equal or lower material weapon bounces off all the time) going on. I just think it's obscured.
We need to see if we can scare up a materials scientist from among the community, or an engineering student willing to do some library-diving to make some sense of these numbers and what they *should* be.
My ears are burning....
I have an ~900 page fundamentals of material science and engineering book, a bachelors in mechanical engineering, and am unemployed(difficult job market is difficult, but it is getting better)....
What do you want to know? The uses of yield vs fracture? Frankly, until weapon and armor damage are in the game the concepts of material yield and fracture are largely moot. How the concept of fatigue is implemented(if at all) will be a critical part of the weapon/armor damage. Besides we would really need to look either at the code or at least get an oral explanation of the under-pinnings and inner-workings from Toady. How I might expect penetration to work and how Toady may have coded it could be vastly different.
item_armor.txt = (layer size/ material size )*material density/1010 ?? maybe a little higher
item_helm.txt = (layer size * material density)/60000 {Exception: Helm = material density / 1010 ??}
item_gloves.txt = density/100000 ??
item_pants.txt = (layer size * material density)/5500
item_shoes.txt = (layer size * material density)/75000 {Exception: High Boot = material density / 100000 ??}
item_shield.txt = density/100000 ??
If you want useful numbers for different materials, I can tell you that the bulk modules to COMPRESSIVE_ELASTICITY conversion isn't linear(seems to be something close to y = constant/x but I haven't bothered too do anything other than a quick plot of the data). I can also confirm that some of the numbers(chiefly the compressive yield and fracture numbers) are bogus at best, and in fact hasn't changed sense Toady originally put the raws together ~16 months ago (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/spoilers/raws-12-18-08/inorganic_metal.txt).
I'm still trying to find out why blunt weapons can "tear" through fat but not muscle. I cannot figure this out for the life of me.
Just thickness, maybe?
Probably, fat has the same relative thickness as skin apparently and skin is pretty regularly smashed open by warhammers(like on fingers and toes). Although, how [THICKENS_ON_ENERGY_STORAGE] and [THICKENS_ON_STRENGTH] interact with the combat system, if at all, remains to be seen. I think I did hear/read Toady answer a question kind of to that effect, though....
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Frankly, when I first went looking in the armor raws originally I was expecting explicit thickness statements and was surprised to see the old [LAYER_SIZE:#] and [LAYER_PERMIT:#] tags instead. I am still expecting the layer size to have some relevance to deflection and protection but have held off testing. As I don't have access to a working copy of MATLAB anymore I have been writing a program to parse the gamelog for me and turn it into a more excel friendly format but have been having difficulty making my mind up on just how to go about doing that(I have maybe 40% of it done). I am looking for a job you know. :P