Vanilla Weapon Overhaul (v5.1)
Tweaks vanilla equipment with the goal of improving balance and variety in a way that is systemic and intuitive. Aims to strike a good balance between realism and vanilla-esque spectacle. Shifts attack stats in a way that presents more trade-offs and decision-making complexity in selecting an attack or weapon.
Description of melee attacks and weapons can be found in the pinned discussion (ran into the description size limit), and all the specific numbers involved in each attack and armor can be viewed via the public spreadsheet linked there.
Tougher Bodies or its peripheral nerve healing version are not strict requirements, but clothing will have very high shear resist without them or manual edits to the hair, plant thread, and silk material templates.
Weapon Changes:
1. Added many new attacks, all weapons now have 4 or 5. Some utilize overlooked weaponizable parts of the weapons while others reflect making attacks with alternate levels of precision or commitment.
2. I’ve made it a priority to ensure all new and existing attacks provide a useful function to their respective weapon, and that each weapon has a useful function in the grand scheme of available weapons.
3. Flat slaps are removed from all weapons, as they had no useful purpose (they’re identical to slashes apart from being unable to penetrate layers)
4. Each attack name has been given its own consistent rules, such that if you understand the name you can understand the function of the attack without looking up the exact attack profile. There’s no subterfuge, inconsistent design, or random unexpected numbers you couldn’t possibly anticipate without going into the files.
5. A complete overhaul of contact areas and penetration depths that makes them a much more relevant factor, able to meaningfully differentiate the behavior of two different slashing or piercing attacks.
6. Slashing and piercing attacks generally have less momentum (stabs especially), while underperforming blunt attacks have vastly more to the point where they’re competitive with the war hammer bash.
7. Large weapons require multigrasp but are now powerful enough to justify sacrificing the use of a shield.
8. Scimitars and short swords are no longer statistically identical
9. The ambiguous “long swords” are now definitively longswords
10. Utilized attack prep / recovery times to simulate weapon reach – longer weapons are more likely to attack first, while the shortest weapons get a slight increase in overall attack speed to compensate.
11. Weapon and ammo weight has been brought down into more realistic ranges.
12. Standardized weapon equip requirements such that smaller creatures aren’t excluded from certain weapon types. It is no longer implied that weapon smiths are a hivemind dedicated to making every battle axe, pike, and mace in the entire world the same size for sole purpose of enforcing rollercoaster height checks on short people for the privilege of single-grasping a dagger.
13. Giant axe blades, enormous corkscrews, and large serrated discs cost 4 bars. Spiked balls and two-handed weapons cost 3 bars. Menacing spikes and most one-handed weapons cost 2 bars. Daggers and knives cost 1 bar.
Armor Changes:
1. The main goals here are to increase the amount of potential uniform strategies, decrease the amount of items that are strictly inferior to others, and invite more resource-scarcity driven decision-making. This is mainly accomplished through buffing underperforming armor/clothing and making dominant armor/clothing types harder to layer and/or more expensive to produce.
2. The breastplate has been renamed to “heavy cuirass” and has been given upper arm coverage, while the leather armor has been renamed to “cuirass” and has lost its upper arm/upper leg coverage. They can both be made with metal, bone, shell, and leather, as can all other plate armors.
3. Gloves and chausses can be made from mail, similar to leggings.
4. The mail shirt has been renamed to “hauberk” to reflect that it extends to the upper legs, unlike the shirt.
5. The heavy cuirass and greaves have stricter layer permits such that there is more reason to consider their otherwise inferior alternatives like the cuirass, leggings, or extra clothing.
6. All loose cover-layer clothing had their layer permits reduced. Cloaks and hoods also had their layer sizes increased, making them thicker but less stackable.
7. The layer permit of caps has been increased from 15 to 30 and their coverage has been increased from 50 to 80 to help them compete with helms.
8. The block chance of bucklers has been increased from 10 to 17 and their weight has been decreased as much as possible (for iron bucklers this is a 2 kg reduction).
9. Hand and foot clothing/armors have been made thicker to bring them more in line with other clothing/armors (they were and still are much easier to penetrate due to the lower size of the underlying body parts, which affects the armor size calculation)
10. As with the “gauntlet equip fix” mod, 1 pair of gloves, gauntlets, and mittens can be worn together.
11. The material costs of most metal armors have been increased and melt item returns have been standardized at 90% for items that are not produced in pairs.
12. Foot armor layering has been opened up considerably: layer permits of socks and shoes are now 50, low boots: 30, high boots: 20. Low/high boots, shoes, and sandals are now shaped to avoid the stacking of shoes and boots. Sandals had their coverage lowered from 100 to 75, layer size increased to 35, and layer permit increased to 60.
13. Skirts now occupy the cover layer (worn over greaves rather than under greaves), and braies occupy the over layer instead of the under layer
14. Trousers layer size decreased from 15 to 10, thong/loincloth from 10 to 5. All skirt layer sizes increased from 10 to 20, and layer permits decreased from 100 to 40.
15. Structural_elasticity_woven_thread has been removed from all clothing, as it prevented the material properties of non-metal cloth from having any effect.
16. The face veil and mask no longer appear overly frequently whenever they’re available to a civilization.
17. Consistent availability of armor and clothing for dwarf, human, goblin, and elf civilizations.
18. The helm, both cuirasses, and greaves have 95% coverage instead of 100% to simulate the small vulnerabilities they’re likely to have and lend more importance to underlayers.
