Great mod, thank you

@JESUS Neither mod is needed.

Do I need the shaped gloves and shaped shoes/boots mods, or this mod already fixes this problem ? Thanks

@Dogma Two-handed weapons are intended to be used with two hands and are balanced around not having a shield (as in they have significantly better attack stats than one-handed weapons to compensate for not having a shield). The accuracy penalty for using 2h + shield is bad enough that they'll be outperformed by both 2h without shield and by 1h + shield in terms of 1v1 duels with an equally skilled opponent. The required size to avoid that accuracy penalty is deliberately high enough to be unachievable by anything that isn't comparable to an ogre in size.

Hey, i really like this Mod!
I just wanted to ask how exactly do 2h weapons work now? is it still viable to pick them with a shield, do you need a certain heigh to avoid the accuracy debuff? is it better to pick them as a single weapon?

@Digganob I haven't intentionally hidden it, that mod in particular just takes forever to get through Steam's automated content check whenever I update it. No idea why.

@Cheese wheel from Skyrim Bolts will be reliably deflected by superior material plate armors, but they can do significant blunt damage through superior material mail shirts so damage will pile up on the upper arms and neck (as well as the unprotected facial features). As a result, copper bolts can kill someone in full iron armor via a neck shot damaging the spinal nervous tissue, leading to suffocation. Additionally, large volumes of copper bolts are capable of damaging and breaking iron armors so they can also secure kills that way. If you're not using Tougher Bodies, they can also decimate people through pulling/twisting/bending damage, just like every other attack in the game.

Hey it seems you've hidden the Ava's Armory VWO patch, is it going to be available any time soon?

Will copper bolts still hurt enemies wearing armor made of a superior material, or has their size change made them too light for that?

And furthermore, a giant creature would have zero incentive to wield a human-sized weapon as a weapon to begin with. Imagine you're a human and get attacked by the ant civilization. Which is a more efficient way to kill the ants: taking one of their two-handed swords between two fingers like a toothpick and swinging it at them, or simply crushing the ants under your boot? Obviously the latter, and you'd much rather have a weapon sized to help you in the event that you need to fight another human since another human would actually be a threat to you.

@mihai 110 As stated in the description, "large weapons require multigrasp" and this isn't a suggestion. A larger creature wields a larger two-handed weapon, as represented by the significant momentum bonus they get for being larger. There is no universal size for a weapon type because smiths are not a hivemind. Additionally, it's not possible to balance a weapon for both one and two-handed use: either it'll be balanced for two-handed and OP one-handed, or balanced one-handed and useless two-handed.

Apologies if this was brought up and I could not find it. Checked the raws and, isn't 5 million rather excessive to one-hand the two hand weapons? This makes it impossible for even very large creatures to one-hand them. Not even Elephant men reach that size (and they get to like 36 times the size of a human). At that value even the likes of Ettins and Giants seem to need to be on the bigger side to do it (for them I checked the wiki size Mid:2 million, Max:8 million, for ettins).

The armor sheet has been added to the spreadsheet. It includes relevant layering information, material costs, and formulae for size multiplier, armor size, and weight (in kg).

@lmlsna Wonderful, thank you!

@One01011 Sure, I'll work on adding that.

Would it be possible for you to make an additional page on the google doc for the armor changes? As it stands, I'm not exactly sure what I want to be producing for armor in order to layer things the way that I want without digging through the raws myself.

@Cheese wheel from Skyrim And overall no weapon is realistically going to be useless against inferior material armor. It'll just be more of an obstacle to some relative to others. 1h sword slashes are the worst at it, but those weapons all have stabs, and even if they didn't you could exploit the weaker armor pieces like the gauntlets. And even against armors that you can't penetrate at all, there's always the option to exploit indirect damage, exploit the mail shirt's lack of blunt resistance, or remove an armor piece with wrestling.

@Cheese wheel from Skyrim It depends on the context and weapon. They're a lot less homogeneous and individual edged weapons/attacks have their own strengths and weaknesses. Many are actually better at penetrating armor than in vanilla despite having less momentum because of contact area changes.

How does this change the effectiveness of steel edged/piercing weapons? Can they still penetrate armor made from weaker materials or are they useless against armored enemies?

Oh cool, I didn't know that higher ranged skill decreased block chance. That's some handy data right there, thanks. Looks like it might be optimal to order your dwarves to only shoot at goblins without shields, at least while their skill is still low.

I did testing regarding the block chance of shields vs bolts, with an average of 1,055 bolts worth of data (not including misses) per test. For proficient marksdwarf/archer vs prof shield user, I arrived at 63% block chance. Prof vs GM was 83%, GM vs prof was 34%, and GM vs GM was 73%. These percentages may be lower than the actual raw percentages due to the effects of exhaustion and injury, but such things will realistically happen in combat and I did use armor and GM armor user to reduce their impact.

@eDen Jack970 This mod only edits vanilla equipment and doesn't add any new items.

Hi ! Ty for the great mod ! I'm curious about something, does it add a lot of weapons ?
I got a lot of new items and I don't know which mod they come from. It's a lot of swords like "wavy sword".

I see. I do hope this is simplified once Tarn gets around to combat mechanics.

@Digganob I should be able to clear up coverage affecting penetration by repeating the same sort of test, only with a stronger attack setup. The reason that part wasn't clear before is because although the scimitars damaged the breastplate, the best those scimitars seemed to be doing in terms of penetration through the breastplate before it was broken was bruising (at least at that skill level). I'll need to confirm an attack can do edged penetration through the breastplate pre-coverage change and then see if I can make that stop happening with coverage increases.

@Digganob As for the rest, it's a murky area. I think coverage does affect penetration since the conditions for the occurrence of both damage and penetration are very difficult to separate. Edged penetration will always cause damage and leave a wear marker. You can see damage without penetration (which could perhaps represent partial penetration or maybe it is full penetration but without enough force left to damage the underlying layer) but it’s rare that you see that and not have penetration also be a possibility. Therefore, I’m unsure whether armor damage itself decreases the armor’s resistance to penetration or if it only looks that way because they so often appear under the same conditions. During testing in the past I’ve seen what looked to be nice gradients from initial deflection, to bruising, and then outright edged penetration prior to the armor fully breaking, but ultimately it could’ve been chance or other factors.

@Digganob I didn't determine it exactly at the time since I discovered it by trying out 100,000 and got back below it by removing a zero, but today I've narrowed down that the cap is somewhere between 32,751 and 32,799. As for material size, it only affects cost on armor.

Fascinating. I must have increased the coverage so high in my tests it looped around. What is that cap specifically? Does it only increase durability, or does it also increase resistance to penetration? Does damaging armor make it easier to penetrate, or can you only penetrate once the armor is completely broken?

Also, does material size only matter for weight and resource requirements? Or does it affect anything else?

@Digganob Yeah, it’s doing that and 1v1 combat tests. I also have an “arena mod” that I use to reduce potential randomness caused by creature stat variation. The way I determined that coverage does help was by taking an attack that I knew would frequently damage and eventually get through an armor (which can be checked very quickly over a large volume of tests by looking for wear markers) and increasing the coverage to the point where it was never damaged and never received a wear marker. I did this with iron scimitar slash at adequate skill vs copper breastplate. It’s worth noting that I couldn’t increase coverage infinitely because there’s a cap where it resets back to 100.

It is armor layer and shaped, so it'll never be worn with breastplates. I thought it made sense considering it's a lot less flexible than chain. I wish we could designate our own flexibility values.

Thanks for the suggestions.

By the way, how do you do your testing? I tried testing armor penetration by repeating the same attacks with the same modifiers before, and found consistent results that way. Do you use a combination of that and combat tests? I remember trying making the coverage of armor ridiculously high, but found no difference in penetration. Did you find that it did, in some other way? My methodology was probably super flawed, but I couldn't seem to find any way to improve armor strength except for increasing layer size and limbSTEP stats.

@Digganob Is the scalemail armor layer and shaped? I'd maybe raise the layer size to 20 to match the mail shirt, leather armor, and breastplate. I'd probably give it 40 layer permit to be in between the breastplate and leather armor/mail shirt in that regard, then you could give it 125 coverage so that it has more thickness than the mail shirt. This would make it quite heavy. For cost I think mat size 6 would be fair, seeing as how it would be a sidegrade to the mail shirt. If you wanted it to be less of a budget option you could go for mat size 9 and give it more layer permit to stack more clothing underneath (buffs it in a way that doesn't make it even heavier), then reduce its layer size 10 to improve its layering relationship with cloaks while raising coverage to offset the loss of thickness and have it be the premium clothing stacker armor.

Very cool. It's also handy to know how important it is to send in shielded squads when dealing with archers.

@Digganob Sure, I could do a focused test on that and see if I can get some approximate block chance percentages at different skill levels. I could lower skill rates to 0 to eliminate the possibility of the blocker gaining skill level during the test to avoid that skewing the results. And yeah, the bolt thrower might just have to be a "don't abuse if you want challenge" sort of tool, sorta like the almighty cage trap which is also immune to nerfs unless I want to slap trapavoid on every creature. At least there's the new "free friendlies from cages" behavior with siegers, I wonder how that plays out.

By the way, would you examine the balance of the scalemail coat in my A&CO mod? I initially gave it the same stats as your breastplate, with the exceptions of an UB and LBSTEP of 1 each, a layer size of 15, and chain elasticity, with the theory that it should be a little stronger than breastplate due to the extra mass from the limb protection, but without the protection from blunt weapons. However, I found that they weigh significantly less than mail shirts (around 20 vs 30). So I expect that they are significantly weaker than both breastplates and mail shirts, making them redundant.

Do you have any suggestions for balancing scale mail against mail shirts and breastplates?

@lmlsna Have you done/would you do tests for the efficacy of shields against ranged weapons? That's of special interest in considering ranged balance. If they're any more effective than they are at blocking any other attack, then they make more than just a small difference.

The fortunate thing about the bolt thrower is we don't have to use it if we don't have to. Pretty cool idea, though. I hope we get to edit it soon, among other combat mechanics.

Thanks for making this mod.

Over 30 trials, my average hits to kill for crossbows firing iron bolts into unarmored dwarves was 6.6. There was a wide variation and the overall range was 1-18, and the difference was largely just targeting RNG. Kills were typically headshots tearing the brain (and this could be achieved with a single shot), but also included blood loss due to torn hearts or bleeding in general. Tests were done with GM marksdwarf/archer and the target also being GM marksdwarf/archer only without the crossbow. Often they'd waste a bolt or two in the time between the lethal bolt being fired and the bolt killing the target, but otherwise missed shots were virtually nonexistent. I did more than 30 trials but some were invalidated by the marksdwarf choosing to attack the unarmed dwarf with their crossbow or bolts' melee attack and of course I'm trying to gauge the shots in isolation.

@Romping the gay The main struggles ranged weapons seem to have are that they require a good amount of skill to achieve decent accuracy and they have a hard time outright killing very large targets (but they can still render them completely crippled and then have them bleed out).

@Romping the gay There's a lot I can already say for certain about how ranged weapons work in the mod though. They generally don't have any difficulty reaching the organs of humanoid targets. Their effectiveness against armor is solid by this mod's standards, bolts can easily penetrate as long as they're made from a better material than the armor. They aren't useless even when they can't penetrate an armor because they're able to cripple a target's arms through their mail shirt, rendering them unable to hold their weapon or shield. And as far as shields go, even a grand master isn't immune to ranged fire and marksdwarfs can win 1v1s against melee+shield pretty easily if they have the speed to maintain distance, their bolts can penetrate their armor, and they have adequate ammunition. I feel like you're asking me to make changes based on assumptions you've made based on unreliable external sources rather than based on direct observations on how the weapons actually function.

As for the bolt thrower, it seems to be hardcoded like the other siege engines and as such I can't change it directly.

@Romping the gay As for the ranged topic, I'm not inclined to have faith in random experiments from the internet. I've seen them be all sorts of problematic before: low sample size, bad methods of data collection, and outdated game versions (2 years ago is super recent compared to a lot I've seen, and the combat mechanics of DF have changed significantly from how they initially were). I've seen someone do a grand total of 2 chaotic fights as their "experiment" and start drawing conclusions from that. As such, I'll for sure want to do my own shots to kill testing. I'd better work on getting my outdated MVC and FFF patches working first though.

@Romping the gay They use the same equation, it's just that adamantine's density is so low that it does matter. Like I said, it's diminishing returns: the higher the density number, the less additional density gives you. Adamantine is only 200 density and the difference in momentum between 200 and 7,850 density is actually quite significant. Much larger than the difference between 7,850 and 1,000,000 density.

@lmlsna I agree that edge attacks dont benefit from weight much cuz momentum = velocity * mass, and lighter items can be swung faster so it balances out. However, blunt attacks have to be operating on some modified equation cuz adamantine blunt weapons are terrible but silver and platinum is better. Maybe there is a speed cap or something for blunt weapons

Also, bolt thrower nerf > crossbow nerf at this point. This is problem is peanuts compared to our new dwarven machine gun vaporizing 13 goblins

In practice, crossbows are super finicky due to sensitivity to armor material and “ineffectiveness” against unarmored. (Someone did a very good experiment on bolts 2 years ago which is where I am getting this) In vanilla, dwarves with the highest possible marksdwarf and archer skills, it takes around 16 bolts to kill/incapacitate 1 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ completely naked goblin (its higher for below iron materials). This number hardly changes until the material of the bolt = material of the armor on which the bolts required triples to sextuples. Now with the changes, it would take around 3x as long to shoot the same number of bolts much less incorporating higher tier armor, shields, dodging, and non goblin enemies. Frankly, they were already slow when enemies couldn’t break down walls giving them infinite time to farm. Now that enemies can break down walls + they shoot at 1/3 the speed, I just don’t see how to use them to any degree.

What digganob is saying makes sense to me. Their job should be to apply attrition while your fort is sieged. They are necessary to make you walls actually have value beyond simple delaying. Naturally, if they killed as fast as melee they would be like a bolt thrower (overpowered). The cited 20% losses for a reinforced, solid fortress I think is a solid place to put them at against the average invasion. Balance is dependent on how long the enemy takes to break into your base which isn’t established well yet, but I am fairly certain crossbow were already a bit slow to deal meaningful damage and now are muhc too slow.

I haven't seen any of this work out in-game myself yet, but I think it's fine if ranged weapons are only marginally effective. IRL they're only useful to counter specific types of enemies or in specific circumstances, because of how effective shields are against them. If shields aren't actually that great against them in-game (I don't know how effective they are), then it makes sense that they shouldn't be too effective, or they'll just halve the numbers of an enemy force before they get into melee range.

If currently they only go so far as to cut a 100 strong army down to 80 before breaching the fort, then that's more than enough, I say. If it is much more than that in vanilla, they could probably use a nerf.

I think this really depends on data, though. How effective are they really on the grand scale? How effective are shields at blocking bolts? How many kills can you get with a ten-dwarf squad before your gates are broken down? All important for balance.

@Romping the gay I'd agree that they're worse than melee dwarves in terms of those things. The issue is that if they were as good as a melee dwarf in those things, I feel they'd completely overshadow melee. How should ranged weapons ideally be balanced in your opinion?

@ImIsna Quite surprised you feel so. I have always felt that marksdwarf are ♥♥♥♥ compared to a melee dwarf in terms of per dwarf efficiency, effectiveness, and micromanaging. They take over a dozen shots to kill anything particularly armored and take far longer than any competent melee dwarf. Especially now fortifications arent invulnerable so the time costs does matter as sieges will bypass your defences. Versatility be damned, they wont kill a troll if we waited a season lmao. Also, not your fault, but these new bolt throwers shoot like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MG42, so I cant see anyone ever using these modified crossbows. Unironically, bolt throwers probably have 80x the firepower of a crossbow in vanilla and maybe 250x in this mod and they can be manned by any dorf