Bay 12 Games Forum

Whut, where did the megatons come from? That kind of yield is not for busting bunkers, that's for busting a whole province.

The worst that would happen earthquake-wise is that it might shake around all the burning, melting rubble and screaming survivors-for not-much-longer. And that of course only if the area is in earthquake territory in the first place.


On the subject of supersoldiers: I could see the biggest gain there being in enhancing cognitive abilities, especially for pilots, tankers, etc. War machines are requiring ever more interaction with on-board computers and tactical input from command, and at some point the meaty element could become a serious bottleneck.

Especially if some sort of effective mind-machine interface could be developed then it might only take one person to operate a tank and they might do it a lot more effectively as well as there is no longer any delays from communication between crew members. Saving room could also help of course.

Politically super soldiers could cause all sorts of issues, but those would probably come along with every other dilemma presented by the opportunity of genetic manipulation. The trick I think would be to not breed specific supersoldiers, but 'enhance' each and every citizen with a general package (for the good of mankind of course) and specialize them for soldiering roles only after they themselves decide to sign up for the army. This ensures wide availability, the loyalty and dedication of a professional soldier and retains an edge the military has over the rest of the populace.

Its not so much the speed, as it is the acceleration that can wreak havok on fast-moving things.

Taking an hour to accelerate to near-C would be quite different from doing loop-dee-loops and 180-degree turns at C.

You could somewhat believably get away with the former, but the later I can only see ending as the engine or directional thrusters going off on their own and leaving the spaceship as a very fast-moving interstellar comet.

For similar reasons, I also want to keep the faceplate, although less of a focus and removable so that it isn't a problem on desert missions or light diving or wingsuiting etc. It'd be more or less so that you have more of a chance of an open-casket funeral than to stop a .50 cal bullet. It'd primarily be there to stop shrapnel from frags and burns from HE getting on the face and to prevent that flying sheet metal from decapitating you. Also if it cracks from something in battle you can remove it for the visability.

Wont a faceplate sticking out from the armor get in the way of your helmet?

Or if there is no helmet to speak of... Well then ouch, that open casket funeral better have some barf bags 

I would recommend trying it out on a VM first, since if something gets botched you can easily restore it with snapshots (remember to make those), its also easier to try out a couple other distros and/or desktop environments (gnome, cinnamon, plasma, etc) to see which one suits your fancy.

Ah, right. I made the iron-rich slag just a rock of iron, to save on having to make a new material for each in every metal in the future.

Did not consider stockpiling. Looks like I'll have to make a metal ore material for them after all...

The issue with the adjective-names is not so much the length, but just that I think 'steel long arming sword' sounds a lot more awkward than 'long steel arming sword'.

I'll do some science of the goblins, and see if there is a satisfactory minimum weirdness solution to it. Would be good to have something to use all this new stuff on 

Uh... bot post or not a bot post?

Either way its a bit inappropriate.

Yes, I used willpower in my adrenaline simulation interaction and it works pretty well (creatures no longer pass out from a broken toe in the middle of combat), though you have to add quite a lot for significant effects.

That's not to say that I think weed would make for a very effective combat drug 

The 'questionable garage test' really does not do either the bows, crossbows or the armor any justice. A thin, flat sheet of mild steel strapped to a hay bale is not an analog for a knight, its an analog for a hay bale wearing a thin sheet of mild steel. They are the historian's equivalent of the 'Perfectly spherical horse in a vacuum'.

So, as my part in correcting common misconceptions and myths:

Plate armor was pretty much impervious to both crossbows and bows when shot at frontally. Actual historic accounts (ie Agincourt) make this pretty obvious, as do the more legitimate practical tests.

Mail still had a pretty impressive resistance to arrows and bolts, as can be figured from accounts of crusaders being turned into walking pincushions by their Saracen enemies. And contrary to popular belief, the Turks had fairly weighty bows of their own, of similar construction of other nomadic, central Asian tribes such as the Huns, Cumans and Mongols.

Nobody would have bothered with armor if it was as useless as modern media makes it look.

The same goes for the endless crossbows vs bows thing. They were both used extensively. If either of them was crap, they would not have bothered them.

Bows generally hit harder at long range as the arrows have a lower front profile/mass ratio, but long range shooting against armored targets was not really done in the first place as it was a waste of ammunition. If possible, archers went for the poor sods with poor armor, if not they waited for the enemy to get closer and shot at them with flat trajectories, not the piss-arch you often see in movies. That still didn't kill them, but still hurts and demoralizes them.

One thing about crossbows I haven't seen anyone bring up: They are quite a bit more convenient to use behind cover. A crossbowman can reload behind a crenelation, wall or pavise and then only needs to stick out his head and a bit of his shoulder to shoot. This is a very big advantage in long-term shootouts like sieges, which also happened to be significantly more common in the middle ages than field battles. Rate of fire becomes a lot less important when your battle can last more than a year, and your supply of ammunition is finite.

...

To get back to something more relevant to the actual game, raw modding hasn't gotten me all that far. All the things like damage fall-off, accuracy, rate of fire, skill scaling and AI behavior are completely inaccessible with the raws. Getting the game to differentiate between hunting and war bows/crossbows has also not gone well for me.

I'm hoping DFhack and future version of DF can get a bit further with this.