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[Teh Barple]

just wanna say that this mod is amazing and i love it, keep up the good work!

[Grimlocke]

Aaand updated to Revision 3b! No big changes but plenty of small ones, including the fix for the annoying invincible head bug.

One remaining gripe is the annoying 'dented hair' combat reports, which I can't get rid of without making woollen padded armor useless.

And this is not a huge problem, more of an... awkward thing: Does anyone knows better names for 'gauntlet and plate bracers' and 'boot and plate greave'?

And glad you like it Barple 

[Urist Tilaturist]

Why are boots and plate greaves 1 item? Historically greaves and sabatons were separate pieces of armour and I am not aware of a term for both.

[Grimlocke]

Gameplay reasons. I can't make any item covering a leg that doesn't cover a foot.

The default 'greaves' did not work as they covered the lower body and inevitably overlapped with the upper body armor which always also covers the lower body. That and leg armor is not like trousers.

Every armor item beside some helmets are also a collection of separate armor pieces. The 'plate armor' for isntance is composed of a breastplate, backplate, tassets, spaulders, rerebraces, gorget and probably a few things I forgot.

The reason the body armor covers the upper arms, in case anyone wonders, is that I have to give the body armor at least 1 upper body stepping for it to cover the neck and throat.

[Urist Tilaturist]

After some more testing...

A fight between an untrained, unarmed dwarf and goblin was a horrendous affair lasting 92 pages of combat report. The dwarf initially gained the upper hand, knocking out some of the goblin's teeth and crushing several of his joints before settling for punching him in the head for literally days on end, collapsing and regaining consciousness before resuming work. After a few days of this beating, the goblin suddenly became responsive again and bit the dwarf in the foot. The dwarf suddenly soiled himself and ran shrieking "Help, save me" while vomiting profusely. A second bout of fighting then ensued, with the dwarf initially pummelling the goblin's head again before the goblin finally bit the dwarf's head and shook him around until he bled to death.

There were still issues with this fight, but they were mainly an inability for participants to walk away from a lethal fight and poor AI resulting in obsessive head punching. Tissue raws seem fairly good.

A match between grand master unarmed fighters (all skills grand master) was short but vicious. The dwarf quickly defeated the goblin by biting off his finger, exploding his foot into gore with a kick and finally exploding his head into gore with a punch, only taking 5 report pages to do so. While grand master fighters have more striking power, it seems a little unfeasible that one could explode a head into gore with a punch. If there were some way of damaging the brain without crushing the skull, that might be more suitable, but at the moment much of the combat system is out of our reach.

I was about to test armoured fights when I saw that I had not installed your mod properly. My conclusions from unarmoured fights may be invalid.

[Grimlocke]

The unskilled, unarmored, unarmed combat being that way is kind of inevitable (heh) at this point, as I can't for instance regulate how much momentum bonus skills give. If I give the unskilled fighters more impact, the grand master ones get a proportional increase. I also don't know of any way to encourage the AI to strangle enemies, or for the game to more often inflict brain damage (I did some experimenting with the size of the skull and brain for that but there is no obvious difference).

Thankfully it will also be fairly uncommon in actual play as even the adventurer mode civilians carry daggers, knives and cudgels. For fortress mode it will at worst make for a realistically one-sided fight when a goblin finds one of your dwarves with no weapons.

I should also note that grand master punchers seem to be exceedingly rare ingame. I would still like them to behave realistically but its not a great priority when altering it also affects other parts of the game.

Anyhow I look forward to hearing more results! Keep in mind that for armor to reach full potential you will also need to add the various padded armor pieces (the aketon, padded coif, gloves and padded boots fit under armor). Not having these will make the fighter fairly vulnerable to blunt damage.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Thank you for the advice. Unarmed, unskilled clashes like the first fight will fortunately be rare, since any real goblin invaders will have at least minimal training and equipment. Have you checked to see if fortress invaders equip themselves properly?

[Urist Tilaturist]

In a longsword duel between a completely unskilled but fully armoured (steel and padding) dwarf and goblin, the fight started with many ineffective blows being exchanged before the goblin finally knocked down the dwarf and stabbed him again and again in the head until he died. Unfortunately, stabbing through gaps in the armour does not seem to be possible here. The fight was reasonable for unskilled participants, though the head being "cloven asunder" through the helm seems a little unlikely, especially after both participants have been fighting for some time and would be tired.

More testing to come later.

[Grimlocke]

Weak point attacks are not really possible to mod in I'm afraid.

As of now an adapt swordsman has a small chance to stab through armor of a standing opponent when using a heavy attack, which in not particularly realistic until you pretend he hit under a joint or something. That's as close as I can get it though.

'Cloven asunder' is kind of an unfortunate term the combat log uses for every bodypart that gets pulped by edged weapons. Which means that even in the vanilla game if you stab someone upper body enough times it gets 'cloven asunder'. Which is weird but also a good way to keep fights from getting stuck because of attacks that don't penetrate far enough to damage brains.

As for fortress equipment: I haven't checked, but if its anything like adventurer mode equipment its... not great. Basically the game throws together a random body armor and helmet for every entity and still does the silly thing where it puts shields on soldiers using non-pike-skill two-handed weapons. From what I have heard invaders behave largely the same, although to be honest it has been a while since I last ran a fortress long enough to get invaded in the first place. There's always some bug or quirk I run into that annoys me enough to eventually gen a new world.

There is supposedly a set of uniforms the game generates for each entity that could theoretically be modified to make sense, but that's all scripting voodoo territory.

Soo yeah sadly most of the quirks there come down to 'it was inevitable'.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Could you use dfhack to spawn a load of invaders and check their armament? I presume there is no way to fix those problems.

[Urist Tilaturist]

A fight between 2 legendary longsword wielders in full plate had a few problems. Besides heads being cloven asunder, the goblin smashed the dwarf on the upper left arm with the flat of his longsword and exploded it into gore. Not only is that a stupid attack which should not have done more than bruise muscle through armour, it could have snapped the longsword in 2 if struck with that level of super-goblin force. Removing attacks with the flat of the sword would be a good idea, since their implementation seems utterly broken now.

I then set a fully armoured legendary axedwarf on the victorious goblin, who proceeded to smash straight through his armour in with superdwarven strength until something utterly stupid happened. This dwarf, who had hit the goblin so hard his axe had gone straight through steel plate and got briefly stuck, bashed the goblin on the eyelid...denting the eyelash and bruising the skin. This, for once, is comically underpowered; an attack of that sort should have blinded the goblin at least, if not killed him. The dwarf then recovered his form by cleaving the goblin across the waist so deeply his axe became stuck again, and finishing him off.

The same axedwarf then hacked down a legendary goblin axedwarf with no issues at all, cleaving his head asunder with several strong chops.

Finally, the axedwarf faced a hammer goblin. He did another stupid slap with the flat of his axe (why?) before having his skull caved in. Weirdly, a scratch on the eyelid was blocked by an aketon; what kind of aketon covers the eyelids without blinding the wearer?

I deployed a hammerdwarf to fight the hammer goblin. He did well, smashing out many of the goblin's teeth, though such small body part attacks should cause wider destruction. A scratch on the nose was blocked by the aketon (I have no idea what a goblin or dwarven aketon looks like anymore), but the dwarf eventually prevailed, caving in the goblin's skull with the war hammer.

The main suggestion from these tests is to remove if possible slaps with the flat. They should be very ineffective, especially against armour, and the AI really has to stop using them entirely in its current sorry state.

[Grimlocke]

Aaah, flat strikes. I flat out forgot about those!

 

Ok terrible puns aside, it seems I haven't adjusted the flat attacks velocity since the first version at all. I could adjust them to more reasonable values fairly easily, though I suppose its worth considering removing them entirely as the AI can't tell the difference between a lethal secondary attack (like a pommel bash) and a non-lethal secondary attack.

The face parts right now are left as the vanilla ones, which is to say pretty broken. For some reason they are not at all covered by the helmet, hits on them do not translate to damage to the actual head at all, the AI is way to fond of using any 'high roll' attacks they get on them and any clothing that extends two steps from the upper body does cover them. This is the culprit behind all the weirdness with bruised eyelids and noses getting scratched being blocked only by body clothing. Its not even the weirdest I have seen, my character once decided to bite and rip out someone's tongue, unimpeded by his helmet, face and general logic.

I have no luck in fixing this so far, at all. Making them embedded does nothing beside making them impossible to sever, making them internal causes the hits on the head to smash every single facial feature at once, and somewhere along the line it went and caused that weird invincible head bug. Removing them entirely is also problematic is a whole lot of creature entries reference them for descriptions like long noses and such. Teeth are even more annoying as they are used by attacks so I can't replace those with a dummy bodypart either.

A few historic notes: An aketon is a padded jacket, often with long sleeves. The names are somewhat ambiguous and often interchangeable, but here its the thinner version worn under armor or worn by civilians, often more for fashion than protection. For this mod it also covers the legs as making separate padded breeches once more causes the annoying double armor coverage on the lower body. Its not supposed to cover any part of the head, that's an annoying side effect of making a piece of body clothing/armor that covers the whole arms.
Slapping someone in armor with the flat of a longsword really hard would not break it, they are fairly flexible. Of course this does make a slap like that breaking bones through armor all the more silly.

Anyhow I will either remove the flat attacks or severely weaken them for the next version. For the face bits I'm really not sure what to do though...

[Max™]

I don't use the full mod since I was having bad luck with some other stuff and rebuilt from scratch, though it did inspire me to make my war hammers into lucerne hammers with a spike on the back.

Anyway, for the face bits, could you change the rel-size to make them much much harder to target unless done deliberately on a prone target or as a freak lucky shot?

[Urist Tilaturist]

The longsword snapping was based on the massive amount of force needed to explode armoured parts into gore. Any sensible level of force would not break the sword, as you said.

Why does covering the arms cause the head to be covered?

[Grimlocke]

@Max Worth a shot I suppose, though these parts are already very small and generally get targeted by the AI when they get a 'lucky hit' roll that massively increases the odds of scoring a hit, which seem to happen regardless of the bodyparts size.

I also feel compelled to note that a Lucerne hammer is a polearm 


@Urist Tilaturist Upperbody clothing has two tokens used for stating how much of the body it covers: UBSTEP and LBSTEP. The first one decides how many bodyparts from the upper body it cover, the last one how many from the lower body. For the padded armors I used UBSTEP:MAX which covers everything safe for hands, heads and feet to account for any animal races/custom races. The thing is, the game does not actually stop applying the armor after it runs into a head, hand or foot. It just goes Upper body -> Neck -> Head, oh this is a head, not covering this! -> Nose, not a head or a hand! Covering this.

The whole problem would be solved if the face-bits would just be covered by the helmet instead, but the armor/clothing section of the game in particular is really old and clunky in a lot of places, it hardly changed at all since version .28, which was like 6 years ago at least. I do hope it and the entity equipment system get revised with the army arc update.