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[arkhometha]

Well I found this cool game called xcom, and it pretty much ruined all productivity this week. I should have something for real this time, soon.

Good for you. I did not enjoy xcom, since it took away all freedom the original and the other two provided and basically gave me XCOM on rails or XCOM: COD edition.

[dennislp3]

Yeah I called that...I didn't even buy it or try it...just waited for the reviews and shook my head as everyone said the same thing. So glad I didn't waste my money.

[Vherid]

Well I found this cool game called xcom, and it pretty much ruined all productivity this week. I should have something for real this time, soon.

Good for you. I did not enjoy xcom, since it took away all freedom the original and the other two provided and basically gave me XCOM on rails or XCOM: COD edition.

That's a shame, I'm loving it.

Yeah I called that...I didn't even buy it or try it...just waited for the reviews and shook my head as everyone said the same thing. So glad I didn't waste my money.

Odd, as everyone I know who has it, is absolutely in love with it.

[arkhometha]

Well I found this cool game called xcom, and it pretty much ruined all productivity this week. I should have something for real this time, soon.

Good for you. I did not enjoy xcom, since it took away all freedom the original and the other two provided and basically gave me XCOM on rails or XCOM: COD edition.

That's a shame, I'm loving it.

Yeah I called that...I didn't even buy it or try it...just waited for the reviews and shook my head as everyone said the same thing. So glad I didn't waste my money.

Odd, as everyone I know who has it, is absolutely in love with it.

I guess the game pretty much divided people. Some people love it, some people don't. Sure it's an ok strategy game, but still it is worse than much things. I enjoyed Silent Storm more than this game. I guess what put me off was the non free aim thing, the nearly constant cutscenes, and the game forcing your hand tactics - you can't wear a kevlar vest, put a scope on your weapon and carry a grenade. You have one slot for misc object and you can use only one of those, meaning you also can't bring a small medkit and a grenade. Or a kevlar vest, or a scope. I mean, they can reverse engineer alien technology but can't mount a scope on a weapon? You can go up a bus but can go prone in it's top? You can't fire walk fire, or fire walk without abilities? Damn, you have to get a ability to fire a rocket launcher, and you have only one shot. You can't get a good position, fire and attract enemies to you - they start in a sleep mode in a variety of missions, waiting for you to uncover them! But alas, let me stop my rant. This forum is for discussion of Dwarf Fortress! Good luck to you and enjoy your game!


And we got other games that can be good. A shame we will never see a XCOM game in a 3D engine with tanks, air battles, a collapsing building and fire spread mechanic and loadouts, nukes (like XCOMRL) or a remake of APocalypse. What I wouldn't pay to wreck chaos in air battles in a modern like XCOM Apocalypse game.

[Grimlocke]

Ok, heres what I got. Not certain on some of these, so some input would be welcome.

Reworked armor:
 - Renamed the armors more accurately, and added a number of parts: Chainmail mittens and chauses, laminar, lamellar and scale armor (functionaly identical ones for seperate entities) Removed low boots.
 - As an expiriment, I also removed the weird lower body armors. The upper body armor now covers the lower body and optionaly the upper legs (vanilla armors did this also) whereas the foot armors now cover the entire leg. Mostly done to make the armor cover what the name implies it should cover, no greaves covering the lower body, chestplates also covering the lower body, and high boots covering the lower leg.
 - Armor now only layer with sensible combinations. You can combine chainmail with a coat of plates, but not chainmail with more chainmail and more chainmail and a breastplate. Worldgen characters dont quite pick up on this. They seem to have a set combination per entity, which is rarely of consistent armorlevel (like plate armor with leather gloves). This is no different from the vanila armors though. I may have to remove layerable helmets, the AI does not use more than one.
 - Fortress mode dwarves dont prioritize armor over their own clothing for some reason, can be solved by setting them to replaced clothing with armor. My test fortress died due to me forgeting to assign them pants (due to removed lower body armors), stupid dwarves take things quite literaly.

Reworked metalurgy, mostly covers iron and steel:
 - Removed armor and pickaxe material tag from copper, added weapon and ammo tag to brass. Considering removing weapon grade tags from those two and silver entirely though. Also considering removing bronze reaction from humans and goblins to reflect 14th usage of metals.
 - Renamed 'iron' to 'wrought iron', and 'steel' to 'crucible steel'. Added folded steel, laminated steel and meteoric iron along with iron meteor stone. Also added siderite and goethite, both are iron ores.
 - Added 4 workshops: Bloomery, blast furnace, crucible furnace and 'minor forge'. That last one is an annoying necessity as I cant add reactions to the forge building. Made magma versions, though that entire concept doesnt work too well with a realism mod...
 - Iron ores are processed in batches, the bloomery yields a bloom (glob of iron of inconsistent composition) which needs to be hammered into bars at the forge. Does not require flux, but yields less than the blast furnace (which also instantly yields bars). Added a crucible tool which can be made from clay at the kiln, and used at the crucible furnace to produce crucible steel. Reactions involving iron now only take charcoal, mineral coal contains too many impurities and would only yield useless iron.
 - Added white gold (gold/nickel), blue gold (gold/iron), and red gold (gold/copper). Just to add few missing colors to the metal collection.


Aaaaand while that is all nice and well for me, anyone who doesnt know some basic of medieval metalurgy and weaponry wont make much sense of this mod. I (or maybe someone who isnt a shitty writer) can write up a manual, perhaps some of the naming could be done better, or perhaps I should cull some features. Please discuss!

For now, temporary raw files: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=7037

[sayke]

grimlocke - all this makes sense - i'm especially impressed with the integration of body improvements, archery, melting points, etc... this is the go-to mod for that stuff. but it seems to me that there are lots of ways to improve the realism/balance of the metalworking industrial toolchain, no? i know deon does it one way, meph does it another, and you do it a third way, and i think there several other variants out there that i haven't looked at. what did you think about the other approaches?

[Grimlocke]

To be honest, I havnt actualy looked at the other metalurgy mods in any detail. Mostly because the point here was to base the mods on reality, and not just other fiction. I got most my information from wikipedia and various smaller, history oriented sites.

I made the mod with idea of pure realism in mind, there is no game-ish tech tree stuff. Not intentionaly anyway. The various industries require what they would realistically require and dont necessarily build up on eachother. A bloomery is not much more than a stone or brick pipe with charcoal at the bottom, ore at the top, and some bellows.

The blast furnace is kind of lacking due to the limitations of the game, in this mod, and without doubt the other mods. Its a furnace that generaly took up an entire multi-story building, the main difference to the bloomery being that can be constantly loaded with ore and fuel instead of being a batch process. The more promitive bloomeries for example needed to be toppled, emptied, heaved back up again, filled and re-heated.
All of which I cant mod into the game, as I cant affect reaction times, number of crew required, and making the bloomery self-destruct after each use seemed a bit over the top (not to mention difficult to do without melting the operator as well).

The crucible furnace was easier to do, based it on early cemention process steel making. In its most basic form, its packing layers of wrought iron and charcoal in crucibles (stone or clay containers) and cooking them in a furnace for a week or so (again, cant change reaction times. Grr.) Its earliest known european appearance is well into the 16th century, but much earlier examples exited in india, and similar processes were used for the making of damascus steel. Annoyingly I have not been able to find out if the crucibles could be used more than once, set them to do so for now.
Also cant remember why I made a seperate crucible item instead of just using stone pots. Maybe this was one of the things the firesafe tag didnt work so well for.

Material properties are also tricky. There is no such thing a single set of material properties of 'steel'. Steels and irons comes in an endless number of compositions, which can all be heat-treated in various ways, and which often are not consistent throughout the piece, as in the case of laminated or folded steel or simply poorly produced metal. What I did for now is balanced out the material values to make the metals ingame behaviour realistic.


EDIT: I should note that I have yet to start on the non-ferric metals (beside the added gold-alloys). Bronze and brass will likely use the crucible furnace instead, and likely more annoyance is comes up due to being unable to affect certain hard-coded buildings. For future versions of the mod I will have a look at the other metalurgy mods for possible shameless rip-offs inspirations 

[arkhometha]

Awesome work Grimlocke, it's a shame I don't understand much from medieval weaponry and metalworking to give feedback, but if you ever need help with flint knapping or anything prehistoric, I can help you.
About forging, I only understand about the amalgamation process, the use of mercury to extract silver and gold. Since we don't have liquid mercury nor a good way to make a syndrome to apply it... well, the idea needs to be dropped.

About the changes, well I wouldn't recommend taking out the weapon tag from silver and brass, nor taking bronze from humans and goblins. They already barely have any armour. I don't know about the taking out copper pickaxes: I know they didn't exist but they could be done... same for silver. Although silver weapons probably weren't done, silver would become more useless and hammers more so.

I do have some questions about iron meteor stone. How rare are it is and do they appear underground or only in the surface? Why add a new iron type for it and what are it's characteristics? (Would be cool if you could do craters, but I don't suppose that's possible. What are the characteristics and changes of folded steel and laminated steel?

Also, completely non related question: As you added the magma variant for these forges, would be possible to add a similar shop that needs water? To brew or cook.
Please disconsider any stupid questions, my only experience with DF modding was with the heat work.

[Grimlocke]

Prehistoric stuff might actualy be nice for kobolds and elves. Elves especialy, wooden armor and weapons are very close to useless. Actualy give them bodkin arrows (cocktail skewer shaped arrow) to give them at least some armor piercing ability.
As for gold refining, will have to look into the realstic complexity. Right now we do have cinnabar, but setting up a seperate building, material and syndrome for it may be a bit hard to justify. Possibly platinum reactions could also use it though (forgot to mention, I temporarily took out the platinum and aluminium metals).

For the weapon tags, taking the lowest grade metal from an entity actualy just causes it to use a higher grade one. I also gave the humans and goblins some extra armor pieces, though they dont allways get the combinations right... As for copper picks, it wouldnt be realistic. Copper is very soft, and pickaxes rely on high hardness and small area of impact of the material. Soft materials would essentialy cusion the blow, not to mention bend every few blows and require repairs.
What particularly annoyed me about the copper and silver weapons though is adventurer mode. Looking around the town and such, theres entire shops that stock only silver and copper weapons, removing that sort of weird is kind of the point of the mod. Hammers can be adjusted accordingly should they become too weak.

Iron meteors are fairly rare, I sadly cant make any nice craters for them so right now they just appear in small cluster (like gems) in any stone layer. The metal is high nickel content steel, which I placed in between folded/laminated steel and crucible steel. The material value is well above that of crucible steel as it was regarded a highly prestegious metal (hopefully also to scale down the stupidly common appearance in adventurer mode). Main reason I added the new iron and steel types was to add some variety, particularly needed should I take out the copper/silver weapons.

Not sure about workshops requiring water, but I do know that the system for gathering water in buckets is somewhat broken.

[arkhometha]

Well, rock bifacials for arrows, spear and axes can do quite a damage for anything wearing less than leather. IRL they are very fragile but I don't suppose you can do mod them to shatter on impact with armor. Obsidian maybe able to pierce leather as that thing is way sharper than a razor. In that field, obsidian swords are a little silly, the mexicas (Aztecs) used macuahuitls, clubs with obsidian razors in it but obsidian is a really fragile material so even if you had all the work to do a sword with an obsidian blade, it would likely shatter in three or four blows. Generally, any stone can be used to make a stone weapon but some were preferred, the ones with glass-like properties, namely flint. Quartz could be used but is HARD to find a proper quartz crystal to do it. Basalt could be used but is not very common because of the rock properties.  Stone tools and weapons can be craft without any special equipment besides a hammer stone, but wood, antler and bone was used to give a more "pretty" form to the weapons. I do see sense in kobolds with stone weapons and they should be better than wooden stuff but I don't know Toady's vision to the game, so I dunno if elves should have. It's your call.

Wouldn't taking away copper picks make you have less embark points in fortress mode?

[Grimlocke]

Hmm ok. I think adding flint and obsidian for elves should be ok in the light of a realism mod and all. It never did make much sense to me that they only use wood.
It does pose a bit of a problem of how to actualy get them to use the stuff.

It is a bit of a pity that the stone edged weapons cant be made to shatter when used on armor, though blunt weapons should behave as they should.

As for kobolds, I think they were intended to use the weapons they stole, though I dont think that mechanic is in the game yet.

Number of embark points can be changed in worldgen if needed, I may also adjust the materials values of some metals.

[Scrimpton]

does this significantly alter the balance of the game?

Specifically adventure mode?

It seems like it only affects dwarves and not all creatures with flesh, or am i wrong here?

[Putnam]

It affects every creature.

[Grimlocke]

Grimlocke gestures!
Forum thread shudders and beginds to move!
...

Again. Sillyness aside, I present completely reworked armor and weapon raws!
Main changes to armor is completely replaced layer sizes and coverage, in order to make each piece of armor have equal strength. As it turns out the mass of the armor drasticaly changes how much protection it provides. I also made some changes to the layering, removed the aventail and gorget and added funtional padded armor. In addition I also added surcoats and tabards, something every medieval themed game needs!

As for the weapons I have modified and rebalanced the way they handly contact area and velocity. Axes are now no longer utterly useless against armor, swords can still penetrate low-grade armor and polearms are more consistently useful (rather than varying from 'crap' to 'hammer of god'). Blunt weapons now properly detroy armored enemies, whilst swords still stand a chance when using stabbing attacks.
Also added a number of weapons: Pollaxe (not to be confused with poleaxe), Crecent axe (low contact area, compromise between swords and maces), Heavy crecent axe (includes a spike attack), Misericorde (stiletto used by knight to finish off disabled enemies), Quarterstaff (changed from training weapon to ranged weapon, used by elved to good effect) and various ancient weapons that will only come up for artifacts.
I also incorporated a modified version of the archery rebalance mod, along with a variety of ammunition. I havnt quite finished balancing that part out against the armor modifications so I may still change stuff there.

Also if anyone knows a better word migration perdiod germanic swords (like Viking swords) than 'transitional sword' or a localised name which makes no sense in DF, id much appreciate one. My ancient Germanic isnt very good.

Anyone is free to use and modify this, long as they dont claim it as their own work.

http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=7185

I moved the crucible tool, part of the metalworking mod, to item_weapon so that item_tool can stay unmodified. If you have an older version be sure to delete the one from item_tool.

[Zucchini]

I should mention that, likewise, I've been watching you guys' work here with interest.  I'll definitely be checking out these weapons when I get around to that end of it.

As for names, I know technical period/culture-specific names like "arming sword" don't really appeal to me.

One naming method that seems to be kind of interesting that I've noticed being used more is simply using dwarven words, but that's really hit-and-miss and probably won't work in an appealing way for weapons/armors.  For example, I thought of a dwarven short sword for restricted-space fighting called a tunnel sword; the dwarven language word for tunnel is ¢d (od), which is...  od sword...  oddastot (tunnelsword)... bleah. Tunnel-soldier sword?  Odezar Sword...  better bit still meh.

On the other hand, my friend and I were trying to come up with a different word for "charcoal iron" (the technically- and historically-correct term). Eventually, I decided on a whim to look up the dwarven word for "charcoal" and came up with "Athser Iron" which is accurate enough not to offend the purist, but alien enough to bring back the magic of the riddle of steel.  And it doesn't sound half bad.

So, depending on the word itself, it can come off well or awfully.  (Of course, I might just be deluded and "athser iron" sounds like ass, but that's another matter. :p)

Otherwise, for more narrowly-themed or period-design-specific weapons, my own thought is to just subtly tie them to a certain culture, rather than having the AD&D list of weird names (guisarme-voulge, Bohemian earspoon, etc.).  My own preferred envisioning places the non-dwarven world more distantly in the past, perhaps even bronze-age, but with chosen anachronisms (dwarven influence we'll say, but nothing even close to the kitchen-sinkiness of genre fantasy) -- so, inspired by King of Dragon Pass, I might have "Orlanthi sword," patterned in the raws on, say, a Viking sword or a spatha or what have you.  A gladius might be retermed Arcoscephalian or Argive short sword.  A certain polearm might be an Elven bladed pike or whatever (Goblinian ear spoon!).  And so on.  (I haven't worked it all out, as that's still at drawing board stage, but just general design ideas.)

Hope that rambling was at least marginally helpful... 



EDIT: ALSO, I was going to post here to say HUGE thanks and props to Arkhometha for that material properties research but didn't want to get necro-slammed.  Now I can.  Awesome work, Arkhometha.  I've done a bit more research of my own, and will make it available (built on top of your work) on the same terms (free use for any purpose without need for permission or credit).