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Topics - Shinziril

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DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / v34.05 Weapons vs Armor testing

« on: March 19, 2012, 09:38:56 pm »

I did some research on weapons versus armor. The main conclusions:

TL;DR version: For unmodified Fortress Mode, if you want weapons that will work against any enemy, stick with (steel/adamantine) (battle axes/short swords/spears) and non-adamantine war hammers. Bronze or iron armor is sufficient to protect your dwarves from enemy slashing weapons, but steel or adamantine provide better protection against certain other weapons. Nothing can fully protect your soldiers from morningstars, scourges, large daggers, whips, or war hammers.

Testing was done with completely unskilled human subjects in Arena Mode. Note that in cases where weapons could not penetrate armor, they generally ended gaining weapon skill fairly rapidly, and it generally didn't seem to affect the (lack of) penetration.

There are three major categories of weapon attack- broad edged attacks, narrow edged attacks, and blunt attacks. For convenience, I will refer to these as "slashing", "piercing", and "blunt" attacks.

Slashing weapons are almost entirely incapable of penetrating armor of their "level" or below. Any injuries sustained are generally minor bruises (or, more likely, various damage from lucky bites and punches). The levels go Silver<Copper<(Bronze=Iron)<Steel<Adamantine. Thus, a silver battle axe cannot penetrate any armor, and neither can a copper battle axe. Both bronze and iron battle axes will penetrate copper armor, but they bounce off bronze and iron armor. Steel battle axes can penetrare copper, bronze, and iron but bounce off steel and adamantine, and adamantine battle axes can penetrate any armor but adamantine.

Piercing weapons can penetrate armor made of better material, but the penetration ability varies with their contact area. Of course, if the piercing weapon is made of stronger material than the armor, they are guaranteed to penetrate anyway.

Blunt weapons can again penetrate armor. Their penetration ability seems to vary with impact velocity, contact area, and possibly size.

Conclusions about individual weapon types:

-Edged weapons:

All edged attacks with a CONTACT_AREA of 50 or greater seem to be slashing attacks, incapable of penetrating armor of their level or higher. Note that this includes the "stab" attacks of all swords. Steel or adamantine slashing weapons still work just fine in Fortress Mode, as no vanilla enemy of the dwarves has access to steel armor in significant quantities. If dwarves ever start exporting steel armor in quantity during worldgen, stick with adamantine for guaranteed-to-work weaponry.

Spears and pikes seem to be the weapons with the largest CONTACT_AREA (20) that perform as piercing weapons. However, their penetration ability is not necessarily that great. Adamantine spears can pierce all armor but adamantine armor- in other words, exactly the same as adamantine battle axes. Steel spears cannot pierce steel or higher armor. Armor made of iron and bronze is the point where we see a noticeable difference between spears and battle axes, with silver/copper/bronze/iron spears penetrating iron armor about 5% of the time and bronze armor about 20% of the time (one of the few times we see a noticeable performance difference between bronze and iron). Silver and copper spears can penetrate copper armor, again about 20% of the time. Note that "penetration" in this case could mean, say, fracturing bones through the armor without cutting through it- battle axes can't even do that. Spears also seemed to cause major injuries more of the time (compared to battle axes of the same material) if their material was stronger than the armor material, but be warned that this could be more "tearing the muscle!" hits and fewer "the severed part sails off in an arc!" hits.

The next step is weapons with a CONTACT_AREA of 10, in this case morningstars and scourges (both of which also have an IMPACT_VELOCITY of 2000, twice normal, which doesn't seem to hurt). Any non-adamantine morningstar or scourge can penetrate any armor (yes, that includes adamantine). Steel and adamantine armor both reduce the incidence of major injuries slightly, but even adamantine armor lets major hits through about 20% of the time.

Large daggers can also penetrate any armor regardless of material, but their penetration is lessened by the presence of a slashing attack in addition to their (CONTACT_AREA 5) piercing attack. Watch out for those goblin thieves, they have a nasty habit of headshotting your soldiers right when you weren't expecting it.

-Blunt weapons:

Weapon material is almost entirely irrelevant for blunt weapons as long as they're not adamantine. Copper and silver work well since they're much less useful for edged weapons and armor, especially in Fortress Mode where you can't make silver morningstars.

Whips are the best, as is now common knowledge. Whips seem to flat-out ignore armor, with even adamantine armor providing no significant protection. They only cause serious injuries about 33% of the time, but that's not particularly reassuring when a single serious injury can be crippling (and often has fatal follow-up).

Warhammers are second best. Warhammers again deal serious injuries about 33% of the time through armor, dropping to 22% against steel armor and ~15% against adamantine armor.

Weirdly, other blunt weapons are significantly worse. Maces penetrate armor up to bronze and iron about 20% of the time, and can barely penetrate steel or adamantine armor at all. Mauls and flails seem incapable of penetrating any armor at all.

DF Gameplay Questions / Civilian Uniforms

« on: June 17, 2011, 12:52:55 pm »

Say that I have four sets of armor, and I wish for four specific civilian dwarves to wear this armor in case they need to be activated as military in a hurry, but to otherwise retain their civilian jobs. How would I go about doing this?

The obvious answer is to draft the dwarves into a permanently-inactive squad with the metal armor uniform assigned. However, I am uncertain if this would properly cause them to wear the armor while going about their civilian tasks (one risk is that if their military skills are too high, they'll end up doing nothing but individual training, instead of their important civilian jobs, or they might properly remain civilians but not wear their uniforms). Does anyone know exactly how this works?

DF General Discussion / 31.18 Combat Research

« on: November 18, 2010, 01:04:43 am »

I've been doing some tests in Arena Mode on weapons in the most recent version. The test methodology I use is a slightly modded arena with 100 2x1 walled cells, with a macro that allows me to copy a given warrior into each cell.

Here are some of the more general conclusions I have come to:

Spoiler: Skills (click to show/hide)

Fighter and Weapon skills give both increased offense and defense (parrying happens quite a bit if you are more skilled than your opponent). High Fighter skill is much better than being completely untrained, but is trumped by high Weapon skill (particularly given that Fighter trains at the same time as Weapon skills, and faster to boot).

High Dodging skill is a massive advantage in combat. If your Dodging skill is above your opponent's weapon skill, you are almost guarenteed to win the fight. Even if it is only the same or below your opponent's weapon skill level it still gives a noticeable edge. A recommended training regimen for adventurers is to find a monkey or similar creature, grab it to prevent it from running away, and then let it flail wildly at you while you practice dodging. Remember, if you can dodge a monkey, you can dodge a sword. Extremely high weapon skill levels seem to decrease the benefit of even equally high Dodging skill levels, but these are almost never encountered in practice.

Wrestling is near useless when used by the AI. Its most common maneuver is to grab random body parts or articles of clothing and then release them. Code that makes people with open hands favor using those to wrestle would likely help here, as then joint locks and gouging would be more common. As it is, the AI will gouge or execute joint locks if it manages to randomly use hands to grab a relevant body part, but is otherwise not very effective. It will also attempt to strangle if it grabs the throat (again at random).

In the hands of a player, however, wrestling is vastly powerful. It was shown above that an unarmed enemy dies horribly versus an armed opponent, and with a free hand, a player can wrestle an enemy's weapon away from them. Currently, the AI cannot pick weapons off the ground, so this renders the disarmed enemy near harmless. Even if this is ever corrected, a high enough wrestling skill would still likely allow you to play "keep-away" with the enemy's weapons.

A player can also go for strangulation, which is highly effective. A good chokehold takes down any enemy that breathes within a few combat rounds, rendering them entirely helpless and easily killable. If one has a high enough Ambusher level, it is possible to sneak up to someone without them spotting you, knock them unconscious, and swiftly dispatch them, all while remaining hidden. Of course, this method does not work on anything significantly larger than you are, or that does not need to breathe, which includes pretty much all night creatures and megabeasts.

Unarmed combat can work, but it is significantly less effective than an actual weapon. Most reports of success in Adventure Mode involve combinations of this with wrestling to render enemies unarmed or unconscious. Also, if your skill in unarmed combat becomes high enough, you will start to use it more and more even while wielding an actual weapon (due to either opportunity strikes or your unarmed combat skill being higher than your armed combat skill).

Spoiler: Weapons and Armor (click to show/hide)

The tiers of materials for both weapons and armor is Adamantine > Steel > (Iron = Bronze) > Copper > Silver. Blunt weapons mostly ignore this tier, and are effective almost no matter what they are made out of so long as its density is significant. While increasing density makes blunt weapons slightly better, any weapons-grade metal other than adamatine is acceptable for them due to the narrow range of available densities.

Weapon attacks are divided into three categories: blunt attacks, "slashing" attacks, and "stabbing" attacks. Blunt attacks are obviously any weapons with the BLUNT descriptor. "Slashing" attacks are edged attacks with a contact area of 50 or greater; it should be noted that this includes the "stab" attack of all swords. "Stabbing" attacks are edged attacks with a contact area of less than 50 (and preferably a high penetration depth). In vanilla DF, the largest contact area below 50 is 20 (pikes and spears).

Blunt attacks seem to ignore armor of the level of iron or below, are somewhat blocked by steel armor, and quite often (but not invariably) blocked by adamantine armor. This seems to be mostly independent of the weapon material. Blunt weapons are somewhat worse than edged weapons against unarmored opponents due to the lack of bleeding. Always aim for the head to get crushed skulls and torn brains, as these are the only instant kills easily available with blunt weapons.

Slashing attacks are almost completely incapable of penetrating armor of the level of the weapon or above. Picks with their higher velocity multiplier seem to be the sole exception to this, and even then the damage mostly consists of bruises and the occasional broken bone, indicating that their normally edged nature is being converted to blunt damage by the armor. Quite realistic, really. However, if the slashing weapon's material is of a higher level than that of the armor, it will cut through the armor like butter.

Stabbing attacks can penetrate armor, with the degree of penetration going up as the contact area goes down. The level of armor that can be penetrated depends on both the material of the armor, the material of the weapon, and the contact area of the attack, but a good rule of thumb is that a stabbing attack can penetrate armor of at least one level above the material of the weapon. It may require a decent degree of weapon skill to do this, however, and extremities like the hands and feet seem most vulnerable. Note that morningstars are actually stabbing weapons with a contact area of 10, and large daggers have the uniquely small contact area of 5 on their stab attack. Large daggers can thus make effective anti-armor weapons. It should also be noted that the small contact area that allows stabbing attacks to penetrate armor makes them less likely to sever body parts, but since brain death kills everything with a brain, I find that this is not a problem.

A modded-in estoc (think a severely overgrown, weaponized icepick), created by removing the slash and flat slap attacks of a two-handed sword and reducing the contact area of the remaining stab attack to 5 instead of 50, went through armor of higher tiers (a silver estoc could penetrate copper, iron, or bronze armor, but not steel; an iron or bronze estoc could penetrate steel, but not adamantine; a steel estoc could not easily penetrate adamantine, but in the hands of a master swordsman and fighter it was quite possible).

Penetration depth does not have a huge effect on human-sized targets, but for large targets such as giants, dragons, or other various megabeasts it becomes essential if you wish to reach any interesting internal organs. The fact that increasing size also renders severs and decapitations significantly more difficult means that stabbing weapons such as spears have a noticeable advantage when fighting large targets such as megabeasts. Again, aim for the head to get brain shots. The only exception to this rule is bronze colossi and other large, sturdy randomized beasts without brains or other internal organs to target. For these, you will simply have to settle for cutting off their heads through many, many hits with a slashing weapon, lumberjack style. Make sure your axe is stronger than their body tissue!

Robes protect every part of the body except for the head, hands, and feet. Modded pseudo-adamantine "leather" robes protected perfectly against slashing weapons in arena mode (with the addition of adamantine helm, gauntlets, and boots to cover the remaining body parts), but testing is needed to see if true adamantine robes retain this property.

Spoiler: Miscellaneous (click to show/hide)

DF Modding / Modding Question

« on: March 24, 2010, 09:59:35 pm »

So I was working on a special instance of Dwarf Fortress for experimentation with various overcomplicated mechanical constructions. For this purpose, blatant raw modification was used to turn my dwarfs into industrious, nigh-indestructible [SPEED:0] robots requiring no food, drink, air, sleep, or happiness (turns out the [NOTHOUGHT] tag permanently sets them to "Quite content" at 100 happiness, even though happy/unhappy thoughts will still show up on their profile).

Now this was working pretty well. However, I wanted to take it a little bit further by modding them so that they truly resembled miniature steel versions of a bronze colossus. But when I removed their internal organs, they promptly collapsed to the ground and ceased doing anything useful, complaining of massive injuries. They're not dying, so I know that the various tags I've given them mean they don't really need said organs, so what gives? Is this because they "know" they used to have internal organs and now don't? If so, will regenning the world fix this? Or is this just hardcoded for playable civilizations (like not being able to path/build through magma or water, another annoying remnant I can't get rid of)?