Bay 12 Games Forum

Thank you! Hope you enjoy it when you get a chance to give it a proper go, pretty exited about adventure mode coming back and working on this again

Hey, I've been gone for quite some time, sorry about that, finished up uni, started work, and then more recently figured out I've secretly been a woman this whole time, but figured I should test to see if this still works once adventure mode is back, assuming it's not been made obsolete by the vanilla game. If all is good then I'll sort out the dffd page and put it up on the Steam workshop some time after adventure mode is on the stable branch, and I'll try to sort out some graphics for the new tools after that if I can figure it out. Hope all 12 of you that downloaded this are well

The accuracy rate is a lot worse than 50%.  Then we have to account for cover, element of surprise, bad weather or nightime reducing accuracy further and the limited supply of ammunition. 

But yes, you are describing the situation that the introduction of crossbows and longbows in the middle ages created, it became possible to destroy foes at a range as they approached you over an open field.  Prior to this you could reliably march heavy infantry across said field while taking only light casualties because the arrows were not powerful enough to penetrate the armour they were wearing and had to rely on luck hits. 

We also have to account for troop formation density, and the fact that in your mind longbows are basically railguns so a hit to the armour still counts.

And no, this was not the situation created by crossbows and longbows in the middle ages, infantry still existed and made up the bulk of most armies, even during battles on open fields.

Infantry were recruited and trained in a wide variety of manners in different regions of Europe all through the Middle Ages, and probably always formed the most numerous part of a medieval field army

I figured I should source my arguments, since if you try to do the same you might realise how wrong you are.

Because knights are on horseback and the armour penetration is not perfect.  The knights can reach the archers fairly fast and cut them down in melee.  The main issue here is not knights but heavy infantry like greek hoplites, phalangites and roman legionaries, *they* suddenly became completely useless because they would be shot to pieces by archers or crossbowmen. 

Good part about sourcing your arguments is that you can find out when you're wrong; the pope did outlaw crossbows (or rather the use of them against christians) because of ease of use and armour penetration, you were right about that. However if you look up the dates, that law was made in 1139, and the first proper plate armour since the fall of western Rome was made in 1420 (presumably this is why DF plate armour seems very hoplite-y). The armour penetration was likely in reference to maille armour, which, when unriveted was totally penetratable by more or less anything stabby, and when riveted was still suceptible to quite a few ranged weapons.

When the mail was not riveted, a thrust from most sharp weapons could penetrate it. However, when mail was riveted, only a strong well-placed thrust from certain spears, or thin or dedicated mail-piercing swords like the estoc could penetrate, and a pollaxe or halberd blow could break through the armour. Strong projectile weapons such as stronger self bows, recurve bows, and crossbows could also penetrate riveted mail.

As for your actual argument in this post, it entirely relies on your railgun long/crossbows being real, since I completely agree that horses charging at you will reach you fast. I'll just leave this here.

The longbows have to be good enough to offset the disadvantages they have. 

Longbows are slow in relation to smaller bows because it takes longer to draw back the bowstring and the archers tire faster.  That means that your longbows have to be good enough at rate of fire, ease of use and armour penetration to justify the drawbacks to using them.

If your longbows do not have enough power to get through the armour your opponent is wearing and you need to rely on lucky shots; your aim is to loose so many shots that one of them is bound to hit an unarmoured point.  The same principle applies even more with crossbows. 

If you're strong enough to use a longbow properly they take the same amount of time as any other bow, the motion is the same, the distance you pull the string back is the same, it just takes more power. They did tire out faster than people using lower poundage bows, obviously, and would have paced themselves so they didn't exhaust themselves before they exhausted their arrow supply, but it was a negligable difference, especially when compared to the massive range advantage they had compared to the lower poundage bows.

With a firing rate of three – five volleys per minute they were however no match for the English and Welsh longbow men who could fire ten – twelve arrows in the same amount of time

That was English & Welsh longbowmen vs Genoese crossbowmen at the Battle of Crécy. 5-6 seconds to pluck an arrow out of the ground, load it, draw, and loose as a volley with all the other archers, is not slow by any means. I can't find a figure for other bows, but they'd have to be pretty damn fast to have their speed be a big advantage over the longbow

As for the armour piercing comment, I refer back to the link in the previous section.

Wikipedia is wrong here.  They had longbows in the paleolithic and then forgot how to make them, there is no since in the equation. 

If they had longbows in the bronze age, nobody would ever used any other weapon back then at all (I'll get to why that is later).  They did not have longbows in the iron age either and the Roman Empire would not have existed had they had them.

I provided a source. If you think my source is wrong, provide me with a more reliable and up-to-date one, rather than simply making the baseless claim that my source is wrong.

No because the prototype crossbows were not good enough to penetrate armour yet.  The Greeks never adopted them en-masse because they did not have the rate of fire to replace bows nor the armour penetration to make their slower rate of fire worthwhile. 

Or maybe it's because Greek armies had lots of training, enough for the crossbow's advantage of being easy to use to be irrelevant, because plate armour actually works.

Here's a video of faulty replica plate armour still working against functioning replicas of crossbows from the century after the armour was used. Makes some dents and small holes, but never actually hits the "body" underneath until the plate is removed. Also note that the crossbows have those metallic limbs that you claimed wouldn't work.

Yes war *is* very much rock-paper-scissors.  The reason they lost is that the muddy terrain prevented them from moving at their full speed, so in effect they were rendered in a similar position to heavy infantry, especially once their horses are slain.  So Agincourt really demonstrates the uselessness of heavy infantry once longbows are in use, heavy cavalry remains useful at that point because their speed counteracts the effectiveness of the archers somewhat.  It is only when gunpowder is invented that heavy cavalry also becomes useless since guns armour penetration is even greater than longbows/crossbows.

In rock-paper-scissors, there is no situation in which scissors turn into rock, so already you've gone against your own analogy, but there's also some other questions it raises, like what happens when your cavalry has bows? If infantry is rock and cavalry is scissors, why were cavalry charges into infantry formations so common? Where does siege equipment fit in? Since numbers afford an advantage in warfare, how many pairs of scissors does it take to cut a rock?

If the Romans enemies had longbows, their preference for fighting large battles in the plains would have been their end.  The whole reason the Romans prevailed with the tactics they did was because none of their enemies had longbows or crossbows. 

As I said, mountains and molehills but you clearly did not get what I was saying, ships are fortified enough to count as fortifications but a line of stakes in the ground is not.  The testudo was used whenever the Romans came under missile fire in open ground, which tended to be fortresses because that was the only open ground context in which archers were generally effective against heavy infantry.  The effectiveness of this formation is entirely based upon the lack of armour penetration of the contemporary missile weapons causing them to be completely dependant upon lucky shots, which the testudo formation denies them.   

noun

• the act of fortifying or strengthening.
• something that fortifies or protects.
• the art or science of constructing defensive military works.
• Often fortifications. military works constructed for the purpose of strengthening a position; a fort

Stakes driven into the ground to protect against cavalry charges, under these definitions, are indeed fortifications as they are constructed for the purpose of strengthening a position. Small fortifications when compared to most others, but fortifications none the less. Boats on the other hand are not built for defence. Some boats do have fortifications on them, but Rome used polyremes, rather than defensive fortifications, they had offensive rams that were used to puncture the other ship's hull and sink it.

the trireme was essentially a ship built for ramming

Also why are you bringing up the testudo again? I agreed with you, it's used for sieges, because shields are quite good at stopping arrows, but the troop is left very open to flanking due to poor visibility, and has little to no oppourtunity for retaliation to melee attack without breaking formation.

That X lies therefore what I say is true is the Conspiracy Theorist's Fallacy.  You have just doubled down on it there; that we know the Romans lies and cover stuff up, does not mean that what they are covering up is the evidence you are correct.

I wasn't the one making claims though. You said that there was a thing that definitely never happened, I asked how you knew that, explaining that absence from Roman records isn't a reliable way to draw that conclusion, then you called me a conspiracy theorist. The burden of evidence lies firmly upon you.

The Romans did use archers and yes they were auxilia.  Crete was also where the best archers came from, but ask yourself the question?  Why is it the Roman Empire and not the Cretan Empire? 

Because war is not rock-paper-scissors, good archers don't always beat heavy infantry.

They wore a mixture of linen and metal, they had a metal helmet, a metal breastplate and a linen skirt under the breastplate to protect their legs.  Oh and they also wore metal greaves on their legs under their skirt, the linen vs bronze distinction you are using does not exist in Ancient Greek infantry, they always wore a mixture of cloth and metal. 

They did not use bronze upper body armour at this time, but that of leather or linen

Bronze!!!  This is the Iron Age silly, the bronze age ended centuries before this point so all the armour, shields, weapons and arrows are now made of steel.  Here is why that matters, heavy infantry rule the Iron Age but not the Bronze Age because of basic physics; the metals involved have got stronger but the men wielding the metals have not. 

the Greeks' wooden shields (sometimes covered with a very thin layer of bronze) and bronze helmets deflected the arrows...

...In 1939, archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos, excavating at Thermopylae, found large numbers of Persian bronze arrowheads on Kolonos Hill

When we take two substances of the same strength and hit one substance (the armour) with a second substance (the weapon) all the damage done to the first substance is the extra force added to the equation by the person or missile thrower.  While hitting bronze armour with a bronze weapon does not involve more force than with steel weapons+armour in absolute terms, in relative terms the difference in the extra power on the side of the weapons vs the armour is greater with bronze than with steel so the armour takes more damage.

So what you're saying is; the harder the material, the less it deforms from external pressure. Congrats, you have successfully described hardness.

That is why I said that if Bronze Age people had longbows, nobody would ever have used any other weapon.  Bronze arrows against bronze armour is much more effective than steel arrows against steel armour.  It is for that reason that heavy infantry becomes dominant in the Iron Age.  In the Bronze Age masses of archers are used as front line troops and chariots are used to counter them, chariots are of a dubious effectiveness compared to cavalry in an actual charge but their dominance is because they provide cover against missile fire; even if you kill the horses with arrows the chariot itself provides cover for advancing infantry.

Your argument still relies on the idea that the longbow provides enough force to pierce plate, which I already provided evidence against. Sure it'd probably do more damage to bronze plate, cause steel is harder than bronze, but the steel was literally just scratched by a close range shot. At best, from the same range, I'd wager bronze plate might get slightly dented. Feel free to test it out, or find someone doing so online.

The Persian armies unlike the Greeks were mostly archers, the Spartans at Thermopylae were not fighting heavy infantry like themselves; they were fighting hastily converted archers while is why they did so well.  The Persians archers were useless, so they were forced to use them in melee but the Persians did not realise the uselessness of archers because their tradition of warfare did not take into account that the physics of warfare had changed by the transition from bronze to steel.  They thought (like you) that archers were still effective at the front line and like you they were wrong. 

They had a lot of archers, yes, but that wasn't all they had, and they certainly didn't hastily arm their archers with melee weapons and send them in. Some lessons in Persian army composition:

Xenophon (Cyropaedia 6.4.1; 7.1.2) describes the guard of Cyrus the Great as having bronze breastplates and helmets, while their horses wore bronze chamfrons and poitrels together with shoulder pieces which also protected the rider’s thighs. Herodotus, instead, describes their armament as follows: wicker shields covered in leather, short spears, quivers, swords or large daggers, slings, bow and arrow. Underneath their robes they wore scale armour coats

The sparabara, meaning "shield bearers" in Old Persian, were the front line infantry of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.[1] They were usually the first to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. Although not much is known about them today, it is believed that they were the backbone of the Persian army who formed a shield wall and used their two-metre-long spears to protect more vulnerable troops such as archers from the enemy

Not as well equipped for melee as the Greeks, sure, but certainly not hastily converted archers.

Also they were both still using bronze, I've already given you a source for that. Their bronze helmets and bronze-plated shields still protected them from the arrows, so bronze isn't as flimsy as you think, nor were people so quick to abandon it when a cool new metal was discovered.

It does not matter if some kinds of iron are more elastic than others, as all kinds of iron are insufficiently elastic to make a decent bow out of.

Most kinds of wood are too inelastic to make a bow of sufficient power to deal with a heavily armored opponent. 

If you're talking about an opponent in plate armour then there is no wood, nor any bow design, that allows you to actually pierce the armour. Until the advent of gunpowder, most ranged weapons weren't intended to pierce armour, rather they were supposed to hit people in the places where there were gaps.

If you do not have yew, you cannot make longbows; if you have yew you can make longbows; it does not require an advanced scientific mind.

No, yew makes the best longbows but you can make a longbow out of a great many different woods, I think my longbow is ash. The longbow is to do with the design, not the material.

What is certain is that longbow technology was forgotten at some point during the ancient world and then was reintroduced at some point in the middle ages.

Again, no. The longbow is literally just what the name suggests: a long bow, typically around the same height as the user. You don't need any extra technology, if you can make a bow you can make a longbow, you just need a bit more wood. It was actually during the bronze age that bowyers began to prefer yew as a longbow material, you know, ancient Greece time. It's also believed that the Germanic tribes in the black forest that gave Rome such a hard time were using longbows or something very similar, perhaps the flatbows that Atarlost mentioned?

If the Greeks and Romans sucked at archery, that was because they did not have longbows or crossbows

Did you even read my last post?

The reinvention of the longbow changed the rules altogether, so we start to see things like the Battle of Agincourt where despite being outnumbered English archers managed to dispatch an army of French heavy cavalry. 

The field of battle was arguably the most significant factor in deciding the outcome. The recently ploughed land hemmed in by dense woodland favoured the English, both because of its narrowness, and because of the thick mud through which the French knights had to walk...

... As the battle was fought on a recently ploughed field, and there had recently been heavy rain leaving it very muddy, it proved very tiring to walk through in full plate armour. The French monk of St. Denis describes the French troops as "marching through the middle of the mud where they sank up to their knees. So they were already overcome with fatigue even before they advanced against the enemy". The deep, soft mud particularly favoured the English force because, once knocked to the ground, the heavily armoured French knights had a hard time getting back up to fight in the mêlée. Barker states that some knights, encumbered by their armour, actually drowned in their helmets.

Sounds like Agincourt was won through exceptional tactics and no small measure of luck to me.

Nothing like ever happened or could have happened in the ancient world.  Archers were used for skirmishing or to man fortifications but they were never fielded in such a bold manner, the only circumstances where archers could have prevailed against heavy cavalry is with a heavy numerical advantage.

How do you know that nothing like that happened back then? Do you expect any literate ancient society to admit to such a humiliating defeat? The majority of the Roman records on their conquests are essentially just propaganda which is why, for example, the death toll on auxillia was not recorded.

Also, the archers were fielded in a bold manner? Look at the map of the battle in the article you linked. They were literally hiding in the bushes, and it says in the article that they were also protected from cavalry with pointed wooden stakes that had been driven into the ground. Sounds like fortifications to me.

I suspect that this is actually the reason why the Greeks were able to prevail over the Persians, their armies made heavy use of bows because prior to the invention of heavy armour bows (not longbows) had been an effective weapon.  In effect one Greek was worth more than one Persian because it took now more than one archer to take down an infantryman, so despite being outnumbered the Greeks were able to win in a kind of Anti-Agincourt. 

Persians technically won the battle at Thermopylae, they just took such heavy casualties that they had to abandon their campaign, it's called a Pyrrhic victory. Fun fact about that, the last of the remaining Greeks at Thermopylae were surrounded on a hill and bombarded with arrows until there were none left alive.

The general consensus is also that good training and tactical use of terrain (again) were both just as important as the quality equipment that the Greeks had. If either of those things weren't in Greek favour, they likely would've been significantly easier to deal with.

You do have the option of adventure mode crafting mods too, you always craft clothes/armour of your own size. I made one myself, but I'm pretty sure there are others out there if you don't like how I did it, or if you wanna try out a few different mods to see which one you prefer. Installation is fairly simple, just drop the files in your raw/objects folder and gen a new world.

The question there is how hard a magic system can get before it stops being magic and becomes the laws of physics?

If magic is hard enough and plentiful enough, why would anyone still call it magic?

It isn't uncommon among hard magic systems for it to be treated like any other science, or for it to be called something other than magic.

Or at least I think so, I've been told my interpretation isn't entirely accurate, and to be fair it's not my field of expertise, just something I briefly looked into, best to double-check with Atarlost.

Still doesn't sound impossible to generate, however, it does sound excessively difficult to bug test and, more importantly, control a game that procedurally generates a magic system that hard. Would be better for a pure simulation since there's less to test and nothing to control.

Might be worth asking Toady how hard or soft he intends on making magic, if it will vary from world to world, or if players will have any control over how hard or soft their world's magic is, like they will for fantastical-ness.

There were 2 irl reasons that most European medieval armies picked crossbows over bows; it takes less skill and strength to be passable with a crossbow, so troops took less time to train up and could more easily be replaced, and, as I have previously mentioned, readying a shot and loosing an arrow/bolt are part of the same action for a bow, but are separate for the crossbow, so crossbow users could take cover in order to reload, thus only exposing themselves to enemy projectiles for the brief moments it takes to aim and loose their bolts.

First part can quite easily be represented by accuracy for bows being much more heavily affected by skill level than it would be for crossbows. Second part would need some combat AI changes before it could really have any effect on fortress mode, but that's something that's likely on it's way at some point anyway. If this were how it was implemented, crossbow users would be the slow, steady, and ultimately replaceable option that works best when they have somewhere to take cover and some melee soldier allies to prevent their melee weapon wielding opponents from reaching them too quickly, while bow users would be more versatile but also riskier, being faster on a shots-per-minute basis, and thus more able to hold their own without support from melee troops, but would not be capable of preemptively readying a shot, and thus would require a little idle time before loosing an arrow to draw back the bowstring. Bow users would also be less replaceable due to the greater training requirements.

This implementation has the added bonus of making your average dwarf fortress much more suited to having squads of marksdwarves as opposed to bowdwarves thanks to a) it being a fortress and therefore having plenty of places to take cover, b) most dwarf fortresses having copious amounts of melee squads, and c) access to an abundance of spare hands that could be easily trained into somewhat competent marksdwarves if necessary. Meanwhile, invading forces and adventurers would be much more capable of exploiting the speed and versatility of the bow, largely because they are not guaranteed to have any of the conditions that benefit crossbow users, but also because they don't have to worry so much about training times either because an invasive force doesn't need to be replenished as quickly as a defensive force, or because they are an independent party that doesn't plan on being replaceable. Goblins and elves also likely don't really care much about how long it takes to train bow users compared to crossbow users because they're immortal, so they literally have all the time in the world.