0004590: Elephant killed by three hoary marmots - Issue with pain

Dwarf Fortress Bug Tracker - Dwarf Fortress

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Project

Category

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Date Submitted

Last Update

0004590

Dwarf Fortress

Combat -- General

public

2011-04-28 20:55

2014-12-27 19:31

Reporter

NW_Kohaku

Assigned To

Toady One

Priority

normal

Severity

major

Reproducibility

always

Status

resolved

Resolution

fixed

Platform

Windows Vista

OS Version

Service Pack 2

Product Version

0.31.25

Target Version

Fixed in Version

0.40.01

Summary

0004590: Elephant killed by three hoary marmots - Issue with pain

Description

Combat is fairly unbalanced in the current version, due to the way that unarmored targets take damage. I can semi-reliably get three hoary marmots (or any similarly tiny creature that is just barely large enough to have teeth that can pierce the skin) kill an elephant.

The size difference means the hoary marmots always hit, and will break the skin, while the elephant has a relatively very small chance of hitting the target. In six turns, the hoary marmots have bitten the elephant 18 times, which is enough to cause the elephant to faint from pain.

The elephant will subsequently never wake up because the hoary marmots will keep biting the elephant, keeping it in a coma.

It takes a LONG time to actually kill the elephant. The marmots can't even cause the slightest bit of bleeding most of the time, unless they get a lucky hit on the tail or maybe the trunk. The elephant only very slowly bleeds to death. It takes hours of the game running at 100 FPS for the elephant to slowly bleed out.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that ANY sort of tear in the skin inflicts the same number of "pain points", regardless of the actual size of the laceration - a pinprick is the same as flaying off all the skin on someone's body in a single stroke.

Steps To Reproduce

Simply set up a battle in the arena with a lone elephant on one team and marmots on the other.

This also works with creatures that are supposed to be very fierce predators, like giant tigers.

3 marmots-on-1 elephant has a slight chance of going the elephant's way if it gets lucky in the first round or two and manages to actually hit something before it faints, but 4-to-1 almost always results in an elephant's defeat.

Additional Information

Removing pain from the elephant makes it capable of winning battles against many more creatures. Simply removing pain receptors from the skin makes it more capable of winning battles. NO_PAIN elephants can win against about 10 marmots, but will eventually faint from exhaustion unless you play the elephant yourself, because it charges itself into exhaustion.

Deon specifically modded many creatures to have many fewer pain recepters because of this flaw, because it means that almost ANY set of 18 attacks will knock even huge creatures unconscious, and generally makes unarmored combat a matter of pure attrition.