Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on September 12, 2012, 06:38:07 am

Historical note: Bows, cross and otherwise, were extremely deadly back before guns let you kill the bowman first.

True, but do you really think it's realistic that steel, or even candy, plate armor does literally nothing against crossbow bolts? 

The internetz and modern testing are somewhat mixed on how effective medieval armor was against arrows, but from what I have read it seems that plate armor would probably deflect arrows sometimes, but not direct hits at close range, and the protection from chainmail depends on the type of mail (riveted vs. non-riveted, thickness of weave) and the type of arrow used (broadhead vs. bodkin), but was generally worse than plate armor.

In the current version of Dwarf Fortess:
1) Plate armor does nothing at all.  It NEVER deflects bolts, and it does nothing to improve survival or reduce damage in any way (except against addy, wood, and bone bolts, which probably should be useless against armor...).
2) Chain armor seems to convert a large fraction (or maybe all? needs more testing...) of hits to blunt damage.  This does have a significant impact on survival.
3) Range has no impact on effectiveness.  Lines of marksdwarves 20 tiles away kill dwarves with the same number of hits as when they are 2 tiles away.  They of course hit less often, but that's not what we are talking about here.  More testing is required to confirm that range has no effect, as in my tests the range was not well constrained (the targets could move and the shooters could shoot at large angles).

I DO think that there is a serious problem with the way ranged weapons work right now, which needs to be addressed.  I am currently trying to see if modifying the raws can produce a more balanced result.  I am hoping to find a solution where armor does something without making dwarves invulnerable, while unarmored opponents are killed just as quickly, but I'm not sure if this is possible without changing the underlying game mechanics.  So far I have just been adjusting the force of crossbows.  Setting Force=42 (chosen totally at random  ) approximately doubles the amount of hits required to kill steel armored dwarves, and a bit more than triples it for candy, while doing nothing for lesser/no armor.  Decreasing the force further to 26 renders candy/steel armored dwarves nearly invincible, and provides some protection for iron armored dwarves.  I will add the full tables to this post later, but I have to go to work now.

Bottom line - I wasn't able to get exactly what I wanted.  I'd like all armors provide some degree of protection, with the degree depending on the armor and bolt materials.  I definitely agree that no armor, other than maybe candy, should provide complete protection.  I will try adjusting bolt mass, contact area, and maybe others (suggestions?) to see what happens.

Also, to be clear, I'm not saying what I want is necessarily the "correct" way that armor should work.  I'd like to figure out if it is possible to tune the raws to get a situation where all armors do something (but don't convey invulnerability), because I suspect that from there it will be relatively easy to tune the effectiveness up and down with small tweaks of the raws.  This will allow wiser individuals than I to create balanced and realistic projectiles, which in my humble opinion are currently neither

[Edit]
One other very important, !!SCIENCE!!, reason for finding raws where bolts are less than 100% effective - this will then allow us to much more easily determine what factors impact effectiveness.  For example, does armor user/marksdwarf level matter?  It's impossible to say if armor never does anything, but if it's say 50% effective, then it's easy to see small changes.