Bows, Crossbows and Their Balance

[Tamior]

Full disclosure, this is what I normally play:

(+ a wrecked cars mod for extra FUN)

[crazykiddeath]

This for me:

I’m not a big fan of turning down item spawns, It doesn’t make sense to me in an area that has been very rapidly depopulated (in a letal sense) that it would have no stuff, that’s just my preference though. I’ll probably turn up enemy spawn soon/ for the next play through though.

[darktoes]

This is rapidly moving away from the topic of the thread, so if you want to keep talking about it I’d suggest making a new one.

As it stands, i don’t see an issue with the compound greatbow as it is in my current PR, so unless Kevin tells me to change it, I’m not going to.

[crazykiddeath]

Sorry, I take full responsibility. I have a terrible habit of going on tangents.

[Tamior]

As it stands, i don’t see an issue with the compound greatbow as it is in my current PR, so unless Kevin tells me to change it, I’m not going to.

So what’s the base damage on compound bow (high) and compound greatbow in this new PR, and what are the strength requirements for them?

[darktoes]

You can check the PR or the change spreadsheet I’ve linked at least once in this thread. Or reread the message where i listed those stats already.

[Tamior]

If you are talking about this:

Archery Redux

I don’t see strength requirements explicitly listed, unless it’s just (poundage/10).
Assuming that’s the case, we have 24 damage for str 8 and 31 damage for str 14.
So 7 damage for 6 points of str.
Compound bow settings scale at 2 damage per 1 str ratio.
That’s still higher that the melee scaling ratio. I still don’t think bows should outpace melee in how quickly they scale with strength.

[darktoes]

Then go make a pr to fix melee scaling. It’s based on real world values, so melee must be broken.

[Tamior]

I’m sorry, but the is no “real world” 1 point of damage. All in-game damage is relative to whatever the baseline is.

[darktoes]

It’s relative to the square root of the kinetic energy of the projectile multiplied by the terminal ballistics value. I’m sure i explained this before.

Melee damage has no real world correlation yet, why don’t you look into it?

[Tamior]

It’s relative to the square root of the kinetic energy of the projectile multiplied by the terminal ballistics value. I’m sure i explained this before.

And? There is still no clear equivalent of “1 point of damage”, so the absolute value of damage scaling for, say, compound bow, can be 1 point for 1 str, or 2 points, or 4 points, etc.

[darktoes]

You’re either not understanding or not listening to what I say. Luckily, that doesn’t matter, and I’ve got no reason to keep trying.

If you read it carefully, including the explanation section, that spreadsheet will explain everything.

[Tamior]

The only thing your formulas give you (even if we assume they are perfect) is projectile damage in “units of energy” (or something like that). Not in “units of damage”.
It’s up to you how you scale those “energy units” into actual damage.
You insist on using a conversion factor here that results in bows having about 150-200% the scaling from strength melee weapons have.

[darktoes]

Um… No?

The system is simple, the damage (in ingame damage units) for any projectile is the square root of the kinetic energy of the projectile. 9x19mm rounds have a kinetic energy of 481J, so they have a damage of 22ish. However, arrows aren’t bullets, as you’re probably aware, so they have this thing called a terminal ballistics modifier. Basically this represents the fact that instead of just applying all the energy in the projectile to the target directly, a lot of the energy is being spread over a bladed tip, cutting through flesh and causing more actual damage than a pointed projectile with the same energy. The TB modifier for broadheads is x2.4 from memory. However, I make the assumption that bows aren’t going to fire any rocks, so they start modified by x2, so the broadhead arrow only needs a 1.2x modifier, as they currently do.

In practice, this means that an 80lb compound bow, which has a ‘muzzle’ energy of around 140J, has a base damage value of 12. Multiply that by the base TB multiplier of x2, and we get 24, WHICH IS WHAT’S LISTED AS THE DAMAGE VALUE FOR THE 80LB COMPOUND BOW. IT’S ALMOST AS IF I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING.
For the 200lb bow, there’s a paper somewhere where a team basically showed that you can relatively accurately model compound bows (and probably most other bows actually) as a spring using Hooke’s law, which means that K.E is directly proportional to the poundage of the bow.

What that all means is that my numbers are correct, unless there’s a flaw somewhere in our well entrenched K.E -> damage system which has been in use far longer than I’ve been around. Which means that melee scaling is broken, which it pretty obviously is, considering being twice as strong means you do barely any extra damage unless you’re trying to slap someone with a wet sock. You can go fix that if you want to, but I have better things to do.

If you want to know more about terminal ballistics you can see if Poragon is willing to speak to you.

Also, I can find pretty good reason to justify the compound bows having about twice their current damage, so my numbers are actually pretty conservative.

[dissociativity]

TLDR; Bows actually do less damage than they justifiably could irl, if lategame enemies were more of a real threat it likely would feel less unbalanced, the core of the issue is basically that there is no real late game difficulty content that warrants more powerful weapons than the compound greatbow other than getting unlucky in labs or getting fucked up by chicken walkers or tanks

If we were to have even more horrifyingly strong zombies, triffids, some horrifically mutated moose and bear varieties, gigantic sabre toothed boar, powerful fungal hulk-like beings and runners, there likely would be more of a challenge that bows with arrows that aren’t explosive or something and thus a pain to craft would have trouble dealing with.

[Tamior]

We are back to square one: you don’t see “consistently with melee weapons” as a good enough reason to adjust your current calculations for strength adjustment (we both know that your current calculations are not rigid enough to be completely immutable — you yourself constantly adjust them). I do see that as a good reason.
That’s the only disagreement we have.

[darktoes]

My calculations are correct. I agree there’s an issue, but the solution is to fix melee strength scaling because it’s obviously broken.

When have I ever adjusted my calculations?

[Tamior]

I don’t think it’s productive to keep on arguing here.
If you really want to tell me that with all the different changes to the archery system you’ve submitted over the years you’ve never adjusted a single coefficient in any of calculations (including TB, Poundage to K.E. for different bows, etc) — so be it.

[Tamior]

By the way, what’s the rationale for noticeably lower poundage to K.E for crossbows (compared to bows) made with similar techniques and components?

[darktoes]

Of course i changed things like that, but i never changed the actual equations, once i started using them. Before that i just eyeballed things.

Crossbows are less efficient because they have a much shorter draw length.