v0.34 Talk:Bolt

Inconsistency?

"Tests show that where even masterwork wooden bolts bounce harmlessly off copper armor, iron bolts pierce without any issue."

"Tests show that even wooden bolts are effective against armored targets with the new release. Copper bolts have been known to pierce adamantine consistently."

These two statements flatly contradict each other, is either true? OrangePikmin 21:31, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

The problem is the assumption that adamantine is the best armor against bolts. I have done arena testing which clearly shows it is not. Steel and copper armor will both deflect 98% of pine bolts, while adamantine only deflects 58%. This is quite strange, and I am not sure why this is happening. My best guess is that, since adamantine is completely rigid and very light, it essentially converts the edged attack of a bolt into a blunt attack with the same force and contact area.

Summary of Arena Testing:

• Dwarves armored with breastplate, helm, greaves, 2 gauntlets, and 2 low boots of indicated material.
• Armed with adamantine crossbow, and 100 bolts of indicated material.
• Great archer/marksdwarf, grand master armor user.
• Usually 20 dwaves from each side positioned on either side of the 3 tile wide trenches in the standard arena.
• Used a perl script to count the indicated words within gamelog.txt

bolt material	armor material	hits ("flying")	deflections ("deflect")	through armor ("through")	headshots ("head")	fatal headshots ("killed")
pine	steel	2011	1814	29	93	0
copper	steel	856	0	772	38	26
iron	steel	302	0	267	22	13
steel	steel	319	0	295	21	13
pine	adamantine	996	533	386	51	10
copper	adamantine	708	0	649	36	26
bronze	adamantine	569	0	522	31	23
iron	adamantine	609	0	551	32	20
steel	adamantine	663	0	594	36	17
pine	copper	1390	1241	25	61	0
copper	copper	579	0	522	26	11
bronze	copper	552	0	510	25	18
iron	copper	496	0	438	23	14
steel	copper	512	0	459	22	11
pine	pine	739	0	684	43	31

I am continuing testing, and will try to add a more complete table of results to the bolt wiki page when I am finished.--Pirate Bob 12:37, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

I now have a fairly large sample of results, and it doesn't look like any armor does anything to stop metal bolts. I kind of feel like going forward is a waste of time, since none of the armor actually, you know, does anything... --Pirate Bob 03:11, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

While it would be interesting, I unfortunately cannot test bone bolts in the arena, as they are not available. I did test wood on wood (useless), and when I get the chance I will test pine and copper vs. leather armor (I strongly suspect leather is also useless). I might also try testing other types (i.e. featherwood and whatever wood is densest) to get some idea of how bolt effectiveness varies with density, but doing more metal bolt tests when nothing stops them is not worth the several hours it would take.

I think instead I will redesign my test: On one side I will place a fixed number of unarmed, but armored, dwarves, and on the other side of the moat dwarves with the appropriate bolts for ammo. I will then record the average number of hits to kill the dwarf targets. It would be nice to also record the number of hits until each dwarf first falls unconscious, since this is usually what really matters in combat, but this will require a much fancier script to analyze. I am saving all of my logs, so I can always go back and re-analyze them for unconscious dwarves.

I will of course also get the same data already in my table from these tests. However, collecting data that says no armor deflects metal bolts is not interesting. I want to be able to grade the relative (in)effectiveness of each armor, and also compare survival with armor to without armor. If metal armors really do nothing to help survival compared to no armor, I would say that qualifies as a moderately serious bug, and I would proceed with trying to figure out how to modify bolt and/or crossbow raws to get more sensible behavior. --Pirate Bob 12:19, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Side note: it's "adamantine", not "adamantium" - this is Dwarf Fortress, not Marvel Comics. --Quietust 12:50, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

This is great research, Bob. Please continue testing. Ideally test every combination of arrow material and every armor. try to include wooden, leather and bone armor. And Bone arrows, too, please. If I find the time, I may try to verify your results. I did not know that you have a gamelog.txt of the fights in the arena. I can write a Python script analyzing the figthts, then. --Nagidal 13:16, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

I found that I need to slightly improve my script so that it only counts "deflect" and "through" in lines that also contain "flying *** bolt". I thought that by putting the dorfs on opposite sides of a moat so there can't be melee combat I would prevent all non-bolt hits, but I forgot to account for them dodging into the moat and falling to their deaths. Also, in case it's not obvious to anyone, the number of deflections plus the number of armor penetrations does not add up to the number of hits because some parts of the dwarves (upper arms, neck) are not armored. I could add chainmail to fix this, but I was more interested in the effectiveness of bolts against plate armor. I also was considering some of the tests with leather clothing underneath to see if this has any effect. Especially for adamantine armor. Theoretically it should help cushion the impact (real knights would always wear padding under metal armor), but I don't know if DF models that. --Pirate Bob 00:14, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

I have updated my perl script to only count statistics for lines containing "flying", and I am working on filling out the table. I wrote some macros to help with arena setup. --Pirate Bob 01:45, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Decorated bolts

There used to be an exploit wherein encrusting bolts with gems gave them enormous value boost because decoration value is counted for every bolt in stack. As I get it, Toady fixed it by setting value multiplier for bolt decorations to 1/3 instead of 10. Should be this mentioned somewhere? Also, if you manage to get a stack of more than 30 bolts, this is still an issue - e.g., for bolts[60] decorations value is doubled. --04:17, 21 May 2012 (UTC)