Bay 12 Games Forum

Based on my (fairly extensive) arena testing, the damage done by firing bolts/arrows should be essentially the same against humanoids as in 34.11, assuming they penetrate armor.  Even the "nerfed" arrows pack more than enough momentum to penetrate all body tissue.  Also, metal bolts/arrows will penetrate armor less than steel 100% of the time.  I have never seen an enemy with steel or better armor in adventure mode, so this should be pretty much irrelevant (except possibly in vaults).

Toady's notes claim that he "Adjusted firing rate for projectiles again to make them more like the older versions" (persumably 34.11).  I have not tested this, but I assume he knows what he is doing.  Being able to fire one shot against a creature at maximum range and having them be on you before you can fire again sounds about right.

All this is to say, ranged weapons are exactly as bad as they were in 34.11, which makes them not that useful for an adventurer (unless you sneak).  They were briefly much more powerful (up to 40.11) when their firing rate was much faster.  Trust me, whenever enemies actually start attacking you again (has they happened yet?), you do NOT want them firing much faster than they did in 34.11.  Anyone who played 34.11 should recall that the #1 complaint about adventure mode was there being no defense against attacks by archers, and a single hit being either instantly fatal or incapacitating you due to pain.

It would be REALLY great if it was possible to fire once and then not reload, and that type of thing is something Toady said he might do with the combat speed rewrite, but which seems to have been lost.  Also, I'm not sure I agree the firing rate is that far off from reality.  According to Wikipedia, firing rate for English longbowmen was about 6 rounds per minute (10 sec per shot).  One tile in DF is about 2 meters, and 3 meters/sec (6.75 mph) is a fairly modest running speed for a human.  At this speed, an enemy would be able to cover 15 tiles in the 10 secs it takes to shoot 1 arrow, which is pretty consistent with the game.  Maybe an archer could fire a bit faster than this, but a crossbow would almost definitely be slower.  Currently they are identical, so a compromise needed to be made.

I'm sure Toady plans to eventually improve archery, but for now its really not that bad, and making it better would take a lot of effort.  I have to assume he didn't add in the ability to fire without reloading because something about the coding made it too difficult, because I know its something he wanted for this version.  In the long term, for archery to be more realistic, we would need this, along with the ability to aim shots at specific body parts (or at least areas), and the ability to shoot farther (which is currently probably restricted because it would make the game run slower).  I'd really like to see a system where you could aim at a specific body part, with your chance of hitting based on its size, your skill, and the same kind of opportunity modifiers used for melee.  Then if you miss you would still have a chance to hit nearby body parts based on their proximity and size.  In other words, shooting at center of mass gives you the highest chance to hit your target, but if you are legendary you can go for headshots.

Furthermore, it would be relatively easy to add in modeling each body part as a sphere, and calculating the angle of incidence between the arrow and the (armored) surface of the body part.  Then the momentum used for armor penetration (DF already calculates armor penetration based in momentum of the blow) could be only the component perpendicular to the armor.  Meaning that direct hits would penetrate armor much better, but a glancing hit could be deflected even by poor armor. 

Anyhow, that's already more derailment than I intended.  If people are interested in my crazy ideas for improving projectiles, I can give a lot more details about them (maybe somewhere else).

TL:DR - the current archery system is not great, but making it better would take a lot of work, and just making bows shoot faster would be bad.  Very bad.  For you.

Did you have to take a few tries to get the evil areas aligned with Russia and Texas (257x129), or did your RNG just have a good sense of humor?

I agree that this would be a great idea.  Not only for this reason of making it less tedious to look around, but also it is quite useful to know which direction your enemy is facing even if you are not trying to sneak, so that you can try to hit them from behind, etc.  Maybe you could post something along these lines to the suggestions?  If you don't want to, I can give it a go. 

In the short term, maybe Toady could enable the stealth vision arcs for enemies even when you are not sneaking, or maybe have a config flag to do this if some people don't like the screen clutter?  I also agree that the ideal would be to have a different, smaller marker when not sneaking that identifies an enemy and the direction they are facing (perhaps just 2-3 red/purple tiles making a line?)

One potential problem - does anyone know if sneaking through a densely populated area causes the game to run slower?  It can already get pretty bad (for me at least) moving through a market, etc.  Having the game need to draw the stealth markers even when not sneaking could potentially slow it down even more, but I'm not sure.

Quote from: Robsoie on November 25, 2014, 08:28:14 pm

Too bad , so i guess they're just useless.
I wonder how are elves not utterly annihilated in every worlds and can sometime win battles, as they only use such weaponry.

Doesn't the battle thing only take skills into account and not the weapon and arnor material? Not sure how it works.

Given how they're immortal but have normal breeding rates, they can build up population, so they probably use zerg rush as a common tactic. That and elves are supposed to be supreme archers.

Yes, the abstract battles that occur during world gen definitely don't take into account the crappiness of elves armor and weapons.

... And elvish archers kick ass. YOUR ass, most of the time.

Only if you don't have armor.  Arrows were reduced in velocity compared to 34.11, so that now any metal armor will block wooden arrows.  Metal arrows are only blocked by steel or better armor, so your adventurer should be very careful around archers using those.

I'm not sure if elvish archers that are part of other civs (and hence have metal weapons) get the elven skill bonuses.  I think not, but not sure.

If you retire with companions who are also dwarves, will they become part of the fortress as well?  If so, you could recruit your military as followers, take them out for some "intensive training", and then very quickly train up a whole army of super-dwarves.

Not sure how worthwhile this is given that there are many other exploits which allow you to quickly train your military, but this still sounds kind of fun.  It would be cool if you could lead your military to take out the neighboring goblin settlement or whatever and then return them to the fort when you are done.

I am pretty sure that disabling automatic swimming makes you just walk on the bottom of water.  This will obviously cause you to drown pretty fast, so it's not recommended.  I could be mistaken though - it's been a while since I tried it.

So I found what I believe to be a slade spire. Being the smart person I am I didn't check to see if it was made of slade though.
Huge tower, circular, widest building I've ever seen. Filled to the brim of trolls which were friendly towards me and mauling on the goblins dwelling inside. Exploring it's fucking labyrinth of troll-gore-rooms I found nothing but troll-gore and a single Goblin Lady who attacked me.

Anyways, killed her, went as high as I could, explored every room, no way down.

This is consistent with what I have seen.  Some of the slade spires (and this is definitely what you found) have no way down.  Not sure if this is a bug or its meant to be this way.

You want to look for a tile that has a "fortress entrance".  It will be marked as Ω on the zoomed out map, and in the intermediate zoom map is looks like a bunch of lines and circles.  The entrance itself will be a huge building with a trade depot inside and (at least usually) a large spiral staircase going down. 

You don't have to go poking around for a down arrow like a cave.  Fortress entrances are huge things that are impossible to miss.  Try visiting different dwarven sites (make by the Ω) until you find one.

Also, if the fortress entrance is on an underground road (a road marked on the map which doesn't appear on the surface) then you can take the spiral staircase down until you find a road (5-6 tile wide smoothed walkway, just like on the surface).  You can then use the road to fast-travel underground to other sites, like that mountain hall you were trying to get into.  You may have to manually travel on the road until you are out of the fortress site - I can't remember.

In other words, if you really want to visit a particular (undergound) mountain hall, look for a fortress entrance site that is connected to it by an underground road.