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[Grimlocke]

While in the progress of balacing out my ranged weapons to my heavily modded armor I came to notice that the SHOOT_FORCE tag goes completely ignored.

Whatever I entered there, 0, 1, 100 or 1000, projectiles seemed to reach their max velocity regardless (which initialy led to every cheap metal arrow punching through any armor without trouble).

Confirmed this with giving my bow 1 shoot force (in case 0 would bug it somehow), 2500 max velocity, then taking poor quality arrows with a larger contact area and having arena test subjects shoot eachother while wearing high quality armor. Every single shot went through.

Lowering max velocity to 180 and setting shoot force to 0 for good measure eventualy made metal arrows and bolts balanced (though I changed both my armor and projectiles, it may not work well for the vanilla game). Unfortunately this rendered wooden and bone arrows near useless due to them not flying any faster than the metal ones. Realistic I suppose but realisticaly nobody would be stupid enough to go to war shooting toothpicks either...


Anyhow, just thought Id put this here since the wiki does not actualy mention this. Could save someone a lot of time.

[scamtank]

It's a bunch of broken math at the force calculation level, yeah. All projectiles whose weight figures down to less than 1 (wood, bone, adamantine from crossbow bolts) get rounded down to zero and default to maximum permitted velocity. And that's before the fact that the shooting forces are way overblown as is.

Urist da Vinci, Pirate Bob and a gaggle of other lunatics beat this problem into its component parts about six months ago. Read this, it's very enlightening.

[Urist Da Vinci]

...
Anyhow, just thought Id put this here since the wiki does not actualy mention this. Could save someone a lot of time.

The wiki becomes increasingly incorrect over time, unless a major release comes out.

We put some of the results of the ranged weapon research here: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Material_science#Effects_on_Combat

The calculation for projectile momentum, which does use both SHOOT_FORCE and SHOOT_MAXVEL, is mentioned on that page. The calculation uses some odd rounding.

[Grimlocke]

Aha, that explains a lot. I did reduce the mass of arrows and bolts substantialy. Thank you!