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Vanilla Weapon Overhaul (v4.0)

Tweaks vanilla equipment with the goal of improving balance and variety in a way that is systemic and intuitive. Aims to strike a good balance between realism and vanilla-esque spectacle. Shifts attack stats in a way that presents more trade-offs and decision-making complexity in selecting an attack or weapon.

Description of melee attacks and weapons can be found in the pinned discussion (ran into the description size limit), and all the specific numbers involved in each attack and how they relate to the momentum formula can be viewed via the public spreadsheet linked there.

Weapon Changes:
1. Added many new attacks, all weapons now have exactly 4. Some utilize overlooked weaponizable parts of the weapons while others reflect making attacks with alternate levels of precision or commitment.
2. I’ve made it a priority to ensure all new and existing attacks provide a useful function to their respective weapon, and that each weapon has a useful function in the grand scheme of available weapons.
3. Flat slaps are removed from all weapons, as they had no useful purpose (they’re identical to slashes apart from being unable to penetrate layers)
4. Each attack name has been given its own consistent rules, such that if you understand the name you can understand the function of the attack without looking up the exact attack profile. There’s no subterfuge, inconsistent design, or random unexpected numbers you couldn’t possibly anticipate without going into the files.
5. A complete overhaul of contact areas and penetration depths that makes them a much more relevant factor, able to meaningfully differentiate the behavior of two different slashing or piercing attacks.
6. Slashing and piercing attacks generally have less momentum (stabs especially), while blunt attacks have vastly more to the point where they can kill things in less than 5 business days.
7. Large weapons require multigrasp but are now powerful enough to justify sacrificing the use of a shield.
8. Scimitars and short swords are no longer statistically identical
9. The ambiguous “long swords” are now definitively longswords
10. Utilized attack prep / recovery times to simulate weapon reach - longer weapons are more likely to attack first, while the shortest weapons get a slight increase in overall attack speed to compensate.
11. Weapon and ammo weight has been brought down into more realistic ranges.
12. Standardized weapon equip requirements such that smaller creatures aren't excluded from certain weapon types. It is no longer implied that weapon smiths are a hivemind dedicated to making every battle axe, pike, and mace in the entire world the same size for sole purpose of enforcing rollercoaster height checks on short people for the privilege of single-grasping a dagger.

Armor Changes:
1. The main goals here are to increase the amount of potential uniform strategies, decrease the amount of items that are strictly inferior to others, and invite more resource-scarcity driven decision-making. This is mainly accomplished through buffing underperforming armor/clothing and making dominant armor/clothing types harder to layer and/or more expensive to produce.
2. Breastplates and greaves have stricter layer permits (breastplates from 50 to 30, greaves from 30 to 15) such that there is more reason to consider their otherwise inferior alternatives like leather armor, leggings, or extra clothing.
3. All loose cover-layer clothing had their layer permits reduced to 60. Cloaks and hoods also had their layer sizes increased to 20, making them thicker but less stackable.
4. Mail Shirt layer size from 15 to 20. Mainly to increase the layering and weight commitment, but this also makes them more protective.
5. The layer permit of caps has been increased from 15 to 30 and their coverage has been increased from 50 to 80 to help them compete with helms.
6. The block chance of bucklers has been increased from 10 to 17 and their weight has been decreased as much as possible (for iron bucklers this is a 2 kg reduction).
7. Hand and foot clothing/armors have been made thicker across the board to bring them more in line with other clothing/armors (they were and still are much easier to penetrate due to the lower size of the underlying body parts, which affects the armor size calculation)
8. As with the “gauntlet equip fix” mod, 1 pair of gloves, gauntlets, and mittens can be worn together.
9. The material costs of most metal armors have been increased by 1 bar, and melt item returns have been standardized at 90% for items that are not produced in pairs.
10. Gloves and chausses can be made from mail, similar to leggings
11. Foot armor layering has been opened up considerably: layer permits of socks, shoes, and chausses are now 50, low boots: 30, high boots: 20. Low/high boots, shoes, and sandals are now shaped to avoid shoes+boots and the layer size of chausses is increased from 10 to 20. Sandals had their coverage lowered from 100 to 75, layer size increased to 35, and layer permit increased to 60.
12. The tunic, shirt, and vest have been increased in thickness to bring them closer to being on par with the dress. Similarly, the toga and coat have been increased in thickness to bring them closer to the robe. Toga layer size has also been decreased from 30 to 20 for layering parity with the robe. The leather armor has also been increased in thickness so as to be more armor-like next to leather clothing.

Ranged weapon and ammo changes:
Bow - Faster reload than crossbows, but shot time is slightly higher and achieving its full shot force requires considerable strength and skill.
Bow size from 300 to 200, arrow size from 150 to 10, contact area from 5 to 3, penetration depth from 1000 to 500, shot force from 1000 to 1500, max velocity from 200 to 1500, strength requirement for maximum shot force from 1,500 to 2,000, reload time from 20:7 to 20:10, shot time from 1 to 4.

Crossbow - Slow reload but is highly accurate and has instant shot time.
Bolt size from 150 to 10, contact area from 5 to 3, penetration depth from 1000 to 500, shot force from 1000 to 1500, max velocity from 200 to 1500, max:min reload time from 30:7 to 40:20

Blowgun - Capable of inflicting a large amount of superficial injuries quickly with its high fire rate, but requires exceptional endurance and skill to be properly lethal.
Blowgun size from 150 to 100, blowdart size from 20 to 5, blowdart contact area from 1 to 3, shooting force from 100 to 1000, endurance requirement for maximum shot force from 1,500 to 2,500, reload time from 10:5 to 16:8, shot time from 5 to 3.

This mod does not change which weapons are craftable by the dwarf civilization. My version of a mod making all vanilla weapons craftable by dwarves can be found in the MVO collection.