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Topics - Matti-patti

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Suggestions / Allow pre-loading of crossbows without nocking
« on: January 09, 2024, 11:34:16 AM »
Currently it's only possible to load crossbow in advance by wielding it and then wielding an arrow in the other hand. Problem with this is that it makes crossbows practically unusable with skis. In addition if you change the nocked arrow to one of different type you need to reload the crossbow for some reason. I'd propose that it should be possible to load a wielded crossbow in advance by using the apply action. The load action should be the default selected action in the apply menu (over the bowstring one) to save bit of keystrokes. After this the crossbow persists in loaded state until unwielded or shot with. If you load the crossbow by wielding an arrow at the same time as we currently do, the crossbow should also maintain the loaded state even if the arrow is unwielded or changed to a different one.

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Suggestions / Give the "arrow-tip" treatment to javelins
« on: December 16, 2023, 09:17:05 PM »
In other words, allow us to manufacture bone javelin-heads, buy iron javelin-heads and ability to manufacture javelins using them. Then we can choose to use simple sharpened point as now, or make a more proper javelin with the new heads. With this I believe javelin making should also be moved under the carpentry skill, allowing player to manufacture fine and masterwork javelins with proper tips. Possibly staff making should too, to make it harder to get the proper materials for good quality javelin.

I don't think the stat line of the weapon needs to change, as the point attack is already excessive for sharp wooden stick.

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It's not just matter of having to smash the ice yourself, I can almost never find the things during winter since they blend in with the snow.

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Suggestions / Add cooking with wooden bowls
« on: November 28, 2023, 12:23:17 PM »
There has been traditional usage of wooden containers for cooking in Finland, and this could theoretically go back to URW's times. I.e. särä: https://areena.yle.fi/1-50799207

In practice it would involve wooden bowl or similar new speciality item that would be patched a bit with quick dough and then placed in fireplace (which represents traditional Finnish chimneyless ovenstove) with burned out fire and cooked for hours, akin to meat stew and porridge recipes. The container should suffer wear in the process and be good for only few usages.

As pot is rather large investment early on, this would allow some basic cooking to be done by starting characters.

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Suggestions / Birds should be less intimidating
« on: June 20, 2023, 08:45:45 PM »
This is something that has been bothering me for a long time. Please make it so that we can zoom out to the world map even if there is some random grouse hovering in the air nearby. Birds in the air tend to be chill about the player's presence so that they can stick nearby and you need to run away from the bird before you can zoom out. None of the birds are ever aggressive to the player either. The only potential exploit cases I can think of is that the player might zoom out to prevent a bird of prey from killing another bird or prevent it from stealing a meat cut you left lying around on the ground, which are of doubtful utility.

Similarly I'm not sure dogs should be so hung about birds of pray (i.e. bark in alarm) as they are insignificant animals to the player. It's unnecessary info clutter.

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Suggestions / Add more "manufacturer" NPCs
« on: June 19, 2023, 10:32:05 AM »
In the category of super obvious suggestions: now that there is presumably some kind framework for the orders systems, it would be nice to see other relevant NPCs.

For example bowyers who make bows and arrows (possibly player would need to supply the arrowheads?), rough/decent clothing from female npc from villages (possibly with rather long manufacturing times as they have other things to do than make you clothes), rare dedicated seamstress NPC who make fine and masterwork clothing in at least Driik and Reemi villages. Maybe (already present) craftsman NPCs should be able to supply you with more general items like paddles, punts, yarn, snares, nets etc.? The readily available stock in villages could then be revised to be more basic accordingly (though I think they should always have some stuff there, a desperate player might want to steal an axe, for example).

It's worth noting that there would be some thematic issues with ordering fur clothing, since furs are mechanically player's prime loot and currency, but fur clothing isn't priced accordingly. For example fine reindeer fur goes for 250 value (25 value/pound) while fine fur shirt is 200 (28,58 value/pound). Maybe (forest) reindeer furs should have the price cut down to half to bring them in line with elk fur for value/pound, though I feel the added value from the expert manufacture is still rather small. The fur clothes could be also made more expensive, but fine furs (warmth 6, but very heavy) are already bit iffy for warmth when compared to rough nettle and linen clothing (warmth 2, but much lighter), so they aren't terribly useful for players except for the items for extremities.

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PC height is given incorrectly when using metric units. After conversion it's 15-20cm taller than what is given in imperial units. Example from test case: imperial height 79 inches (200,66cm) vs. stated metric height 219cm. Using 3.71 Steam version, tested on both Win 7 and Win 10 systems. Worth noting the conversion was working fine in 3.63 and earlier and when importing a character from that version to 3.71 the imperial units were the ones that remained correct.

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Suggestions / Buff metal armor, nerf leather and furs
« on: March 17, 2021, 07:40:54 PM »
So as I'm finalizing my collection of masterwork mail set in my current game, I find myself wondering the same question that I always do: why bother?

Leather (or bear fur) gives you protection of 3 against point and 3 against edge. Point is I think overall more important since it includes normal arrows, and NPC archers seem more likely to carry them than broadheads. Two layers of this is 6 point and 6 edge. Mail is 5 point and 8 edge, which is at best slightly better. The problem is that mail is heavier for that protection. Leather shirt is 6 lbs, bear fur shirt is 7 lbs and together they are 13 lbs. Mail habergeon weights 22 pounds. It's simply not weight effective, and in addition to that you can repair the leather and furs yourself and they are easier to acquire.

But you can put the mail on after you wear the leather and fur shirts right? You can sure, but the trend continues. Bear fur cloak and overcoat are still at least as good as long mail hauberk. And after you have finished wearing every possible fur and leather garment, the next step after that is not the mail, but the linens. At some point along there you end up wearing heavier protection than early modern period cuirassier in bulletproof plate, all while not touching metal armor. And the northerner lightweights I like to play find themselves unable to bench press a squirrel fur.

Something is very very wrong here.

Now there are some useful pieces of metal armor, namely those that are otherwise hard to stack protection on: mittens, coudes, cowls (downright essential) and the spectacle helm. But other than those metal armor is a vanity project, equivalent to collecting silver accessories. If somebody has an argument why expensive (and at least in masterwork quality, hard to find) metal armor being for vanity makes for good gameplay I'm all ears but I can't figure why.

It doesn't strike to me as realistic either. Combatants used metal armor if it was available and affordable, and they wore it with ultimately fairly light clothing (equivalent to about single layer of furs here). If it wasn't available, people didn't wrap themselves into leather and fur balls.

One possible solution would be to make wrapping your joints in multiple layers of heavy clothing more penalizing than just the weight, but this would require new coding. However it seems more simple solution would work because the whole premise that leather is more weight effective than metal armor seems questionable at best.

Three links of interest:

https://todsworkshop.com/blogs/blog/arrows-v-s-armour-agincourt-myth-busting

Shooting late medieval warbow (i.e. something we arguably don't really have here in URW) with period accurate wrought iron and case hardened wrought iron arrows at period accurate 2,5-1,5mm thick steel breastplate. The arrows break and fail against the armor.

https://www.academia.edu/5520314/Arrows_Against_Linen_and_Leather_Armour

A study of arrows against linen and leather. Of particular interest because he actually stacks the leather so far it's heavier per square meter than 2mm plate. The 76 lb draw weight bow is also probably good approximation of our longbow.

https://www.academia.edu/7691143/Arrows_against_mail_armour

Study against mail by the same author.

What I first want to address is that I'm fine with plate being weaker than it should be. By all accounts it was tremendously effective and fighting styles evolved for getting around rather than through it. But we have only a few pieces of plate armor in URW, there is no mechanism for transforming non-penetrating edge/point hits into some blunt damage and there is no possibility for Njerp or bandit to grapple you while another stabs you into weak spot. Additionally the plate we have can be assumed to be weaker, e.g. helmets could be of segmented type with lots of holes in the plates and blade traps on the surface.

The comparison between the mail and the triple layer leather is very topical and I think something that can be translated into URW. I'm assuming it ​takes about square meter of material to make shirt covering torso, shoulders and upper arms. In practice it seems making a T-shirt tends to need bit more depending on the cut of the cloth being used and of course the person being clothed, but I'm assuming there is some wastage and that this figure is a good enough approximation. Using this assumption I convert the armor used in David Jones' linked studies above into URW terms and briefly examine whether the protective qualities of the materials in URW are reasonable in light of Jones' studies.

So the scenarios:

Three layers of thick shoe sole leather for weight of 16,4 kg per square meter, that is to say a theoretical (if utterly impractical) shirt made of them has weight of 16.4 kg or 36 pounds. This is 6 URW leather shirts for total protection of 18 point and 18 edge. All arrows penetrate this assembly, however the leather seems quite effective at reducing the depth of penetration. The bodkin does better than the broadhead.

Layer of mail (of 7-10.3 kg per square meter) with 8 layers of linen cloth to 2,92 kg per square meter or about 6,4 pounds to a shirt. I take this as representing mail habergeon and two and half linen shirts in URW, for total protection of 7,5 point and 13 edge. This setup does seem to do slightly less well against the bodkin (which consistently penetrates), however I think it's not nearly enough to justify 8.5 point difference, more like couple. Against the leaf shaped arrow it adopts completely different mode of protection, it reduces penetration much less than triple leather however it rejects 25%-33% of the arrows, something the leather doesn't do at all. This is hard to quantify, but I'd say it does not support difference of 5 points in edge protection. This armor setup is also hard to quantify in the sense that it's working like composite armor that is more effective than sum of it's parts, but since you aren't really supposed to wear mail without backing and mail is the expensive part I think it's worth attributing the effect to the mail. Worth also remarking that if you add 9 kg/square meter linen padding under the mail instead of the 3 kg one it becomes very effective.

For concrete suggestion (and start here for TL;DR) I think it's important that this is kept simple. It must not upset existing armor-weapon balance in the game. It should be quick to implement so it doesn't end up as something pushed a decade down the development plan. I do not touch any other numbers except edge and point except for the bear fur which needs to be kept as rewarding fur to get.

So here are my suggested numbers:

Furs/Leather

Reindeer/Elk: 2 point 2 edge
Generic fur: 2 point 2 edge (remove edge bonus from masterwork)
Bear fur: 2 point 2 edge 6 warmth (rather than armor fur, bear fur is re-imagined as alternative for fine+ generic furs, and it's now simple upgrade on elk/reindeer)
Leather: 2 point (remove masterwork bonus) 2 edge (remove masterwork bonus)

The non-functional furs (squirrels and such) and leathers don't really matter, just as long as they aren't better than above. That being said by weight leather and fur clothing here always represents rather sturdy clothing.

Metal (add to all +1 bonus for both point and edge at fine; add another +1 to both at masterwork for total +2 both):

Mail: 7 point 10 edge (or 9 point 12 edge for masterwork mail)
Lamellar: 7 point 11 edge
Iron: 10 point 12 edge

And for cloth go for 1 point 1 edge for all except the magic nettle shirt which is probably good as is (though I don't quite recall what that was as I don't have one right now).

I do get that 2-2 or 1-1 everything looks pretty boring, but there isn't really lot of wiggling room and single point represents a huge change at these numbers, particularly when stacked.

The basic idea is that every metal armor gets buffed +2, and leather and bear fur are dropped to 2 protection only. Hence, wearing mail and two layers of bear furs or leather gives identical protection as before, but it's made more mail centric. Mail alone is buffed and mail and extra thick padding is made weaker, this is really opposite of what it should be but the synergy is currently impossible to represent. Unarmored NPCs become slightly weaker protected, but they didn't wear much anyway. Clothing remains somewhat effective if you layer it enough due to being light. Since metal armor is heavy, the quality bonuses layer based (which is why I'm suggesting to remove them from everything else together with +50% being too much), the price difference in it considerable due to high base price, the sheer rarity of masterwork armor and the historically variable quality of metal armor I think +2 to both point and edge at masterwork is reasonable.

With these changes, the 36 lb leather coat would be reduced to 12 point 12 edge protection, while the mail plus 2,5x layer of linen would become 9,5 point and 12,5 edge. More reasonable I think?

Lastly it might not be bad idea to rename the leather cuirass into leather vest due to now being less of a piece of armor and more like clothing.

Thanks for reading.

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Suggestions / Repurpose fisher's knife as boning knife
« on: March 04, 2021, 10:54:09 AM »
Currently the fisher's knife doesn't really have a point. It's not a fighting knife like Kaumolais, northern and hunting knives are. It's not the skinning knife the broad knife is and it's not crafting/utility knife the small knife is. It's not cheap and cheerful like the regular knife is.

In practice in real life there is some overlap between filleting knives and boning knives, with the latter tending to be more stiff but often not to the degree it doesn't work for filleting anymore. As such I'd suggest to rename the fisher's knife to narrow or narrow-bladed knife and treat it as a boning knife that also works for filleting. In present state make it the optimal knife for cutting a carcass for meat, and if in future an actual filleting knife role is added that can then be applied to the narrow-bladed knife as well.

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Bug reports / Wool mittens don't spawn in shops
« on: March 04, 2021, 10:13:13 AM »
As per title, wool mittens do not seem spawn in shops in settlements. I have gone through all the towns in Driik and Reemi in multiple recent versions including the current 3.63 and they are never, ever available, I have kept close eye on them. As wool mittens are a rare supplement to fur mittens for for winter wear (it's easy to get frostbite with just fur mittens when the temperature plunges) and are also involved in a spell, I think this qualifies as a bug.

Other piece of clothing that I have never seen in shops is undergarment, though perhaps that's intentional since it has rather imba weight-warmth coverage. (Veils and aprons might be, but I'm less sure, I think I might have seen them rarely though there are none anywhere in my current game)

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