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
pine	adamantine	996	533	386	51	10
pine	copper	1390	1241	25	61	0

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)

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.

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)