Crossbow damage

[Wehr Wulf]

Hey, Im curios about crossbows damage...

My designated archer's skills are :
crossbows 66
precision shooting 77
perception 65

I had him using a masterwork old world bow with 44-63 damage,
After being attacked by gate guards I decided to just see if my guys could handle it. Well, his shots were only doing 1-8 damage per shot...
I ran into the ranger shop mid fight haha, I grabbed a "high" quality spring bat and some heavy bolts because the description says its designed to punch through heavy armor... still doing single digit damage.


Now that I think about it, even on unarmored opponents the damage isnt that high with my masterwork oldworld bow.. I chalked it up to just low stats but im surprised by how high his stats are and how low the damage is. I dont even know if stats effect damage...

But are crossbows just worthless against heavy armor then?
And kinda weak overall?

[happy]

damage is affected by the target's toughness, and armor.
crossbows are far from weak, but the main asset late game is not damage, it's interruption.

take a squad of 15 guys with stats in the 60s, go fight catlon: you might win but will have limbs chopped off and possibly even casualties, take 14 similar guys and one with a shoddy tooth pick: no one is really hurt, as the crossbow with its near garanteed hit will just give opportunities for your fighters to hit catlon while he is not trying to block.

crossbows are broken in kenshi, they don't fit well in the mechanics, and though damage can be low, having just one changes drastically the outcome of the tougher fights, to the point where one can call them cheese or even OP.

[Faerador]

Stagger- lock is the larger benefit of a crossbow when you're facing more heavily armored foes, who will just resist a good portion of the damage.

[SmallGespenst]

harpoon resistance is subtractive rather than multiplicative, so rather than 35 resistance reducing an attacks damage by 35% it's just a flat 35 less damage, on a 60 damage shot that means that rather than doing 40ish damage it's cut to 25. that's not factoring in toughness, which applies a modifier to incoming damage before damage resistance calculations, so for high toughness targets your damage will suffer even harder.

[SmallGespenst]

also: crossbow damage doesn't care about stats, it's all on the weapon type and quality, that said, if your stats suck you won't be able to hit anything and that's more of a problem then having mediocre damage output.
and the reason that the spring bat mentions punching through armour is because it's one of the strongest bows available, high damage really helps overcoming that subtractive damage resistance.

[Spack Jarrow]

Crossbows are very very poor against heavy armour , the only way for them to remain somewhat relative is to crank up the wound-difficulty and rely more on the Bleeding effect.

It may appear that they're weak , but for most weapons enemies keep standing up and coming back to fight. Especially in Huge battles for the cities and such. The battle drags on and on and on , people keep regenerating.
Damage done by crossbows doesn't have that problem, once downed with a bolt , the target rarely stands up.