How come a big female athlete cannot use a short bow?
Side note: I have just been informed in IRC that doing “Workout” does not actually train stats but only drains calories… which explains why I had to eat 5500 calories per day…
How do I get my strength up to normal human levels, let alone athlete levels?
have on stats through skills or kills
your character is your character when you make it, just because they ‘are’ something doesnt mean that they’ll be something.
what if they were a dodgeball player YEARS ago, and have been out of it (generally y’dont do a sport like that professionally for more than 10 years, and it seems like you’re… 28? 29? they’d get into it at 16-18.)
or, because dodgeball doesnt nessisarily need strength, you were better at the ‘dodge’ part than the ‘throw’ part.
Stats through skills / kills sounds wrong and unrealistic. Reading books should increase intelligence. Working out and doing manual labour should increase strength. Fighting should increase dexterity. Going through bushes and in general being in an open area should increase perception.
I don’t know, isn’t 6 strength below average? I’d expect a 95kg 190cm normal weight female to still be able to use a short bow despite not actively participating in sports any more.
8 strength is human average, so yes, 6 is below that.
Height & weight are more for flavor and RP. The only effect they have on gameplay is that taller people need more calories than shorter people.
If you think your character should be able to use a short bow, you will have to start them with the appropriate amount of strength required to pull the bowstring (in this case 8). Otherwise you will have wait until you are able to use one of the several lategame ways to increase your stats.
Did someone say mutation?
For now, there are no ways to increase your stats by training (it’s planned, however).
You have to set your stats on character generation in a way you like it.
There are ways to increase them afterwards; cheating/debugging and mods are the “external” ways, bionics and mutagen the in-game way (although limited).
That’s close to what stats through skills does - while you can pick up skills from books and increase your stats that way, fighting and dodging increases skills as well, which in turn increase your stats. You can also edit the mod to change what skill increases what stat and by what amount.
Also, I’m not sure why you argue that these mods are unrealistic and then suggest to increase intelligence by reading books… because that’s unrealistic. Intelligence is not the same as knowledge and usually can’t be picked up by reading books.
I’m not sure how weight/height will help using a bow. You need muscles at the right place to pull a bow back.
If you don’t have them, you’re missing the necessary strength (or, from the game perspective, the other way around; you don’t have the strength, so you’re missing the necessary muscle mass).
I don’t see this as a bug, it was the player’s choice.
I guess you either didn’t check the random character it generated or you chose to be put into the game straight away, otherwise your complaint would be weird… The generator favored Dexterity over Strength, which in my eyes is fine for a Dodgeball player.
Yes, I just started a game with a random character. As a new player I couldn’t have possibly known that I’d have to be a mutant cyborg gorilla to use a common medieval weapon.
You have to not be a wimp. I think you’re rather under-estimating medieval fighters, they didn’t have it easy (although they also didn’t have skeletal juggernauts. So, half a dozen of one, six of the other.)
You don’t have to be. You just need above normal human strength.
That’s also the reason why it wasn’t that common in the medieval times as you seem to think, and it took years of practice.
The latter is also the reason why it was expensive to replace/train a bowman - and rarely done during a war. Hence they got very well protected.
I imagine anyone to be able to draw any bow. What differs is how much they can draw it and how far the arrow flies and how damaging it is.
What use is a bow if you can only draw it back to let the arrow fly 2 meters with no penetration force?
According to a german website, normal human draw weight with no experience in archery is between 15 and 30 pounds (man 20-30, woman 15-25).
While I did not find much information on the usual draw weight of a medieval short bow, (Wikipedia just guesses it’s around 100 pounds), I’ve found another website that says 40 pounds would be enough to kill an animal, IF you nail the shot (hit vital organs).
I mean, we could make the bow useable at lower strength - but then this post’s title would just be “Bow’s bugged, it does no damage?!”.
you also have to factor in that most ‘bows’ that modern age people use have significantly reduced draw weights (in that they’re using them for practice, not for actual hunting) or compound bows (which require less strength for more power) and any ‘real’ bow would in fact require a CONSIDERABLE amount of strength to pull back.
think about like… if you’ve ever been to a renaissance faire, they always have an archery area with 4-5 diffrent sections of bows you can fire at a nearby block of hay or scarecrow or whatnot… well, the STRONGEST bow in that lineup probably isnt even close to the actual draw strength of a bow. i remember we had an antique longbow in our house when i was growing up, and i tried to string it with paracord… i couldnt.
Underdrawing a bow makes it essentially worthless, so we don’t represent it. If you take a typical-ish hunting bow at about 70lb peak draw and only draw until it reaches (let’s make the numbers simple, half weight) 35lbs, you aren’t imparting half the force, you’re imparting something like a quarter of the force, since bow power is very roughly “peak draw weight * draw distance / 2”. If you draw a 70lb bow to 35lbs, you’re cutting both the peak force and the draw distance in half, so to plug in some real numbers (28" is a very standard draw length):
70 * 28 / 2 = 980
35 * 14 / 2 = 245
If instead you have a bow designed to be drawn to 35lbs, it is about half the power of a 70lb bow.
In other words, a 40lb draw weight bow delivers roughly twice the force as a 70lb bow underdrawn to 40lbs.
If anything, this simplification greatly underestimates the impact of underdrawing a bow, due to various design issues, the vast majority of the work is done in the last couple of inches of bow travel.
That 70lb peak draw weight bow is considered “enough to reliably take down a deer with a square and well aimed hit”, so drastically reducing it gets you essentially a toy.
OTOH, as @Valase points out, a 40lb peak draw bow is considered barely enough to take down a deer with an essentially perfect hit, from close range, on target in the vitals, from a good angle, and avoiding any bones.
We have some amount of interest in specifically allowing for the player to work their way up to higher effective draw strengths, it’s a top contender for special purpose strength training, but we’re not there yet.
I see.
I’ve enabled the stats-through-skills mod and already have strength 7. Judging from the mod json, this should work without making me OP.
oooh~ mabye we could link a proficiency to every weapon type, which makes you more efficient with that weapon the longer you use it?
Sounds okay, however it would just be a focus drain instead of something hard to reach.
Hehehe, I just had the idea of trying to throw shoes and … throwing combat boots at zombie deals 4 damage, the same as a wooden broadhead arrow shot from a survival bow (if you are lucky, but mostly 3 damage).
I’m now using slingshots + marbles/bearings(8-11 damage). Using rocks+staff sling (20 damage) resulted in bruised corpses and l thus lower butchery gain. The former usually leaves unbruised corpses and doesen’t take an eternity to kill (compared to arrows).
Still can’t be bothered to spend 10h/20h to craft shortbow/longbow, which are supposedly 6/9 damage each.
Hmm, 2 rocks from staff sling (~20 damage each) + 1 marble from slingshot also results in an unbruised corpse.
