Some new ideas on early game torso armor

[Eric]

I may have just been playing too much of The Escapists, but an idea came across to me.

What if there were new ways to reinforce your clothing outside of what currently exsists?

(These would probably be more for early game armor than anything else)

Cushioned Shirt:

Requires 1 t-shirt, longsleeve shirt, or flag t-shirt, 50 duct tape, and a pillow. Would provide the least amount of extra protection, but no torso encumbrance penalties.

Plated Shirt:

Requires some kind of shirt, 100 duct tape, and a sheet metal. Would provide the most extra protection in exchange for the most encumbrance

Padded Shirt:

Requires some kind of shirt, 50 duct tape, and any book weighing at least 2 pounds. Provides medium protection in exchange for medium encumbrance.

Also, while playing Kenshi a new idea for torso armor came to me

Heart Protector:

Requires 1 lump of steel (or 3 chunks of steel or however much scrap metal that is), 2 long strings, and 150 duct tape.

Strapped to the character’s torso, only 40% coverage but has 14 Cut protection and 14 Bash protection.

[Wally-kun]

Not sure about armor but i just thought of a pillow silencer. Doesn’t work too well and fucks your aim up and the power of the bullet royally but it muffles the blast a little bit. Works if you’re desperate. Rags/string and a pillow.

I suppose you could rope some pillows to yourself if you wanted. Some string and some pillows. Wouldn’t do fuck all against cutting but might actually provide some tangible blunt damage. They DO tell you to punch a pillow when you’re angry for a reason.

Duct tape armor, too. You do NOT apply it to yourself, you first tie some rags around your arms and such and tape THOSE up. Better than going naked. I guess.

This is all stuff you’d grab on the fly when you know there’s a hoard outside and highly doutb you can get anywhere without getting into a fight. Clothes give zero protection and an early infection bite can seriously screw you. Anything and everything that can get between you and a zed will work. Desperate measures.

[Yossarian23]

A ++ tshirt is already a cushioned shirt. 40% is way too much coverage for the heart protector. Maybe 7%.

[Random_dragon]

Sand-filled life jacket.

[Valpo]

Clothes give zero protection and an early infection bite can seriously screw you. Anything and everything that can get between you and a zed will work. Desperate measures.

Clothes give tons of protection. To the point that regular zomby atacks are stoped completely most of the time by a properly clothed survivor that wears nothing that one would actually consider armor.

Did they change that lately and i didn t notice?

[Arek_PL]

actualy clotches give good armor, they are just fragille and do not protect well agaist tankbots hulks and zombified predators and they do not stop damage completly

[Coolthulhu]

The biggest problem with clothing is coverage.

You can’t have a plate breastplate that covers your chest and an armored collar to complete it, you’ll just have 2 items that let through most of the attacks.

For this reason, heavy armor except power armor and survivor armor is mostly useless. Anything below 80% coverage is very risky and not worth encumbering torso or legs for.

[Random_dragon]

Or you could load up on assloads of low-coverage, high-protection items and hope luck is in your favor.

With enough kevlar loincloths, anything is possible.

[Valpo]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:7, topic:9516”]The biggest problem with clothing is coverage.

You can’t have a plate breastplate that covers your chest and an armored collar to complete it, you’ll just have 2 items that let through most of the attacks.

For this reason, heavy armor except power armor and survivor armor is mostly useless. Anything below 80% coverage is very risky and not worth encumbering torso or legs for.[/quote]

When i think medieval armor i could have a breatsplate and a chanimailshirt beneath. Where the breastplate covers like 90%+ of the torso the chainmail gives complete coverage. so all attacks would meet the chainmail and most both chanimale and breastplate.

Seems okay to me but your still right that some clothing items should complement eachother to yield higher coverage of a body part in total.

The biggest problem is we have a set of armor with 100% coverage which is strong enough to negate pretty much every melee hit so why use anything else.
Theres no downside… i am not yet sure how to remedy this. maybe we should make certain pieces of armor complement eachother and add new pieces to fill in vacancys.

Or perhaps instead we can somehow improve clothings coverage somehow with the tailoring kit instead of improvin theire armor value.

[Random_dragon]

And don’t forget that mail is supposed to be worn with padding underneath. o3o

[Valpo]

And don’t forget that mail is supposed to be worn with padding underneath. o3o

yes but that for me is a chainmale armor. Who would wear chainmail directly over the skin??? lel

[Random_dragon]

True. Dunno if the in-game version implies padding though. That’s one thing I’d made sure to do back when More Survival Tools included some medieval gear as well, which I yanked out before PRing.

Also, again…sand jackets. o3o

[Coolthulhu]

[quote=“Valpo, post:9, topic:9516”]The biggest problem is we have a set of armor with 100% coverage which is strong enough to negate pretty much every melee hit so why use anything else.
Theres no downside… i am not yet sure how to remedy this. maybe we should make certain pieces of armor complement eachother and add new pieces to fill in vacancys.

Or perhaps instead we can somehow improve clothings coverage somehow with the tailoring kit instead of improvin theire armor value.[/quote]

Not sure how would complementing work. And implementing it would require a good idea, not just an idea.
A mediocre idea would be to make “coverage miss” increase the coverage of other parts under it. Maybe only parts with some special tags. That way if you missed the breastplate you’d have a bigger chance to hit the collar.

I’m against the tailoring kit buff. Restricting something as vital as coverage improvement to an already overpowered item is not the right way to do it.

[Yossarian23]

Doesn’t coverage already work like it should? If you have a 40% breastplate and an 80% leather vest with a 100% cotton shirt then 4/10 torso hits will strike the plate. 8/10 hits that penetrate the plate will be further reduced by the mail shirt. 100% of torso hits which are not stopped by those outer layers will be reduced by the meager protection of the cotton shirt.

I should note that I manually layer all of my armor according to how I would actually wear it. If you don’t layer the armor like that, stupid things can happen.

[Random_dragon]

I should note that I manually layer all of my armor according to how I would actually wear it. If you don’t layer the armor like that, stupid things can happen.

You mean you don’t wear your backpack under your kevlar vest like the rest of us? o3o

[Valpo]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:13, topic:9516”][quote=“Valpo, post:9, topic:9516”]The biggest problem is we have a set of armor with 100% coverage which is strong enough to negate pretty much every melee hit so why use anything else.
Theres no downside… i am not yet sure how to remedy this. maybe we should make certain pieces of armor complement eachother and add new pieces to fill in vacancys.

Or perhaps instead we can somehow improve clothings coverage somehow with the tailoring kit instead of improvin theire armor value.[/quote]

Not sure how would complementing work. And implementing it would require a good idea, not just an idea.
A mediocre idea would be to make “coverage miss” increase the coverage of other parts under it. Maybe only parts with some special tags. That way if you missed the breastplate you’d have a bigger chance to hit the collar.

I’m against the tailoring kit buff. Restricting something as vital as coverage improvement to an already overpowered item is not the right way to do it.[/quote]

That would be hard to do and calculate properly. Maybe i can come up with a nice formula. I ll ponder on it.

[Kryxx]

[quote=“Yossarian23, post:14, topic:9516”]Doesn’t coverage already work like it should? If you have a 40% breastplate and an 80% leather vest with a 100% cotton shirt then 4/10 torso hits will strike the plate. 8/10 hits that penetrate the plate will be further reduced by the mail shirt. 100% of torso hits which are not stopped by those outer layers will be reduced by the meager protection of the cotton shirt.

I should note that I manually layer all of my armor according to how I would actually wear it. If you don’t layer the armor like that, stupid things can happen.[/quote]

Which causes issues when you want to cover for ‘wet’, it needs to be the highest coverage and on the outer layer. Go figure. Somehow the skin get’s wet even if the wetsuit is worn as final layer.

[Coolthulhu]

Which causes issues when you want to cover for ‘wet’, it needs to be the highest coverage and on the outer layer. Go figure. Somehow the skin gets wet even if the wetsuit is worn as final layer.

Coverage doesn’t do anything for wetness. You can test it by wearing knee-high boots (waterproof, 60% coverage) and socks (not waterproof, 100% coverage). It only matters that the first item which covers each bodypart hit with water is waterproof.

Doesn’t coverage already work like it should? If you have a 40% breastplate and an 80% leather vest with a 100% cotton shirt then 4/10 torso hits will strike the plate. 8/10 hits that penetrate the plate will be further reduced by the mail shirt. 100% of torso hits which are not stopped by those outer layers will be reduced by the meager protection of the cotton shirt.

The problem is that it is:

[ul][li]Not balanced, because low coverage armors are all too unreliable to be worth wearing over leather[/li]
[li]Not realistic, because armor with chinks in it can be only bypassed if you’re aiming for the chinks, not by randomly bashing until you phase though the armor[/li][/ul]

Consider the barbute helmet. It has an Y-shaped opening in it, so that you can look through it. The opening is obviously too small to let in any non-piercing damage through, but due to how coverage works, zombies can somehow cram their heads through it to bite you in the eyes. Same for football helmet, armored gloves, some boots etc.

[Yossarian23]

Seems totally plausible to me that a zombie could scratch, bite or poke through the uncovered area on a barbute helm. Same with a football helmet. They couldn’t do so reliably, and the current rules don’t allow them to do so.

A breastplate isn’t armor with chinks. It is a piece of metal which covers less than half of your torso. Walking up to someone and ending their life by sticking something sharp into their abdomen is virtually impossible if that person is wearing a breastplate. But the rest of that person is still fleshy, vulnerable, and stabbable.

[Coolthulhu]

[quote=“Yossarian23, post:19, topic:9516”]Seems totally plausible to me that a zombie could scratch, bite or poke through the uncovered area on a barbute helm. Same with a football helmet. They couldn’t do so reliably, and the current rules don’t allow them to do so.

A breastplate isn’t armor with chinks. It is a piece of metal which covers less than half of your torso. Walking up to someone and ending their life by sticking something sharp into their abdomen is virtually impossible if that person is wearing a breastplate. But the rest of that person is still fleshy, vulnerable, and stabbable.[/quote]

Scratch or poke yes, no way a bite or punch to the face would get through.

There are no breastplates in the game as far as I recall. There are full plate armors, one of which has 100% coverage (as expected) but weirdly low armor values (less than leather armor), the other has 90%, which means one in 10 punches phases through it as if it wasn’t there. And this magical phasing doesn’t depend on size of the attacker or the size of the weapon used for the attack. A skewer is just as likely to bypass armor as a wooden barrel.