Presenting:
Grimlocke's Historic Arms & Armor mod

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A mod to replace the stock weapons and armor with historically accurate late 14th, early 15th ones from the European continent.


Main features:

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69 weapons - Numerous weapons added for each weapon skill, two-handed versions for all weapon safe daggers and spears.
30 armor pieces - Including somewhat experimental padded and cuir bouille (boiled leather) armor.
11 ammo types - Various contact areas, most types are just for 'flavour'.
5 shields - Not much I can do with these yet, but some other types added for flavour if nothing else.
Rebalanced weapons - Reduced massive contact areas, regulated the armor penetration to be more realistic and gave weapons a realistic weight.
Rebalanced armor and clothing - Thickness kept equal among armor pieces making protection much more even. All clothing is now elastic.
Removed armor pants - Moved leg protection to foot-worn armor, lower body protection was already on upper body armor.
Removed leather armors - No kids, regular tanned leather doesn't protect you for a damns worth.
Moved flails to the whip skill - And made whips and scourges tool instead of weapons.
Moved two-handed polearms to the pike skill - Forcing the silly entity equipment system to not use a shield along with them.
Added a number of civilian weapons - By making them tools with various uses civilians now carry daggers and cudgels.
Added and modified trap components - Optional, well everything is, but can be easily left out.


How-to-use:

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This mod alters these files (and every entry in them):
item_weapon
item_armor
item_ammo
item_gloves
item_helm
item_pants
item_shield
item_shoes
item_trapcomp

If you have not altered any of these, overwrite. If you have, rename/move either your modified entries or mine.

Next, either replace add the entity_default file (a stock entity file with the correct entity tags added), or use the file containing just the new tags for more easily modifying entities yourself.


This is not by far a final version. But its a decent start and functions well on its own. There are however a number of quirks and ongoing issues:

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The balancing is still somewhat experimental and not all of it is working as I like it. Particularly armor penetration and multiple armor layers seem to be inherently borked in DF.
The biggest problem I have with it is that a blunt or non-penetrating hit needs vast amounts of force to do any damage. More force than is require to outright cut through armor (an impossible feat with real armor).
There is also the issue that wearing more than one layer of armor (say, plate armor with padding underneath) is pointless at things are now.
I have perused Urist da Vincy's excellent combat mechanics threads but sadly could not find a solution (though it did help a ton with other stuff).

The entity equipment placement system is... placeholdery at the best of times. Characters you meet in adventure mode generally wear a random helmet and body armor standard to their faction, but refuse to wear hand and foot-worn armor. Armor levels seem to go largely ignored. Two-handed weapons always spawn with a shield unless it uses the pike skill. (my theory of using the RANGED weapon tag was a bust). Generally I have little to no control over how equipment is used.

Many, many internet hours were spent researching the history, form and function of these weapons and armor, but there is bound to be inaccuracies or things I left out.

Lastly there are some names I can't figure out. What is a general term for someone using a two-handed polearm? Or for a viking-style sword without using any time/place/people names? I'm also not too sure about 'flailman', but 'flailer' is worse for certain.

Things I still plan on adding:

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- A glossary with brief descriptions of the various items. I don't expect everyone to know instantly the difference between a fauchard and a faussard.
- Expanding east European selection, and possibly adding Middle Eastern and Central Asian stuff.
- More expanded cuir bouille. Right now its just really thick leather clothing, which is not very accurate and likely not that great in term of game mechanics. Adding materials and reactions is easy enough, but problems arise once (again) when I try to get entities to use them right.
- I plan to give DFhack scripting a go to try and modify the uniforms entities use. That would solve so, so many problems. Long term project I fear.