Mod: Squirrel Balance Mod (Current Ver: v0.05)

[Squirrelloid]

Off-topic digression is off topic. More or less. I'd rather talk about what the mod has done in game terms, but hey, I can take the time to respond about the physical basis of some of the changes.

Originally Posted by Eximius Sus

This is flawed. Humans made swords. Therefore swords are beautifully evolved to use humans. Not the other way around. Same with armour. Frankly, giants should have nearly zero encumbrance for armour if fighting humans if you want to be practical. The reason is that they only need leggings and groin. And if you really want to take that business all the way a giant should be using a 18 foot long great sword and therefore is killing pikemen before armour even becomes relevant. How is a 6 foot tall human with an 18 foot pike supposed to deal with a sword as long as his pike? Frankly, he can't. If I was chosing weapons for giants vs. humans I'd just pick giant scythes. Cut off all the feet of the humans with a 12 foot scythe blade and completely ignore their weapons.

And so on and so forth. Which also doesn't take into account the simple cube/square problem that the femurs of giants would be so insanely large in ratio to height that they could completely ignore attacks to their legs. A human femur is about 2" diameter. Let's apply the cube/square law of structural design. An 18 foot tall giant in humanoid form would weigh 200 lbs * 18/6 cubed = 1800 lbs. This would require a femur of 6" diameter. Introduce me to the man who could cut through a 6" bone with an axe. I'd love to meet him.

Or lets take another example. I have a big bowie knife. You are a 2 foot tall midget with a scalpel. What on earth are you going to do to the parts of my body you can even reach that I would care about? Slice off my toenails? I stick on some greaves and a groin protector and let you slice little 1/2 inch deep cuts into my thighs and just shrug it off. In the meantime, my reach is 36 inch plus the knife so I've been smacking on you when you are still 24 inch from even touching me.

Of course, someone is going to say give the midget a pike. So he's got a pike with a tip the size of a screwdriver and 6 feet long. I've a pike with a tip the size of his entire head and 18 feet long. Let's face it. In almost all melee combat, the taller guy with longer arms wins. There are exceptions but they are rare.

An 18 foot humanoid creature would have a totally different height to width shape. Mythical giants are frankly nonsense. So why bother trying to be realistic? Just balance it.

All this changes with bows but there's a really cool thread I found on the main page about that. I wonder what bow that 2 foot midget uses? It probably shoots something like 2 inch common nails.

For someone who seems to have heard of scaling laws, you're really missing some important parts.

First, you don't understand how scaling actually works. If a human at 6' tall weighs 200lbs, that implies k*6^3 = 200. we also have a giant standing 18' tall, k*18^3 = x lbs. k = 200/6^3 = 200/216 ~= 0.926. Therefore, the 18' tall giant weighs approximately 5400lbs, and that's assuming he's proportional to a human. This same answer can be gotten by (18^3)/(6^3) * 200, which is the proper way to do what you tried to do (not (18/6)^3). I don't even know where your femur estimate comes from, but its horribly horribly wrong and vastly underestimates the necessary bone strength. Bone strength should grow as cross-sectional area. We've increased mass by a factor of 27, so we need to increase cross-sectional area by a factor of 27. Assuming humans do have a 2" diameter femur, that's pi*2^2 = 4pi x-sectional area for a human. Our giant needs 27*4pi = 108pi x-sectional area, which is >10" diameter femur.

Second, an 18' tall giant can't actually exist if we're adhering to scaling laws because he collapses under his own weight. He simply doesn't have the muscle strength to support himself. Even getting the required structural support from bones means he doesn't look much like a human anymore (3x taller but his femur is 5x as wide, to start with). To look anything like human you'd have to make the joints rigid and locked to get the necessary structural support at that size, otherwise the skeleton flies apart when the muscles fail. And of course, that 5400lbs becomes a low-ball estimate when we start allowing his body shape to vary, because that estimate was assuming he was proportioned like a human (which clearly fails!).

So yes, mass grows as size^3, but muscle strength only grows as size^2. (Muscle strength *is* determined by muscle cross-sectional area.) That slow growth of muscle strength does mean giants should fatigue out faster than humans doing just about anything, because they have less strength per mass, and therefore require more effort to just move around, much less fight.

Since we've already postulated human-like giants exist, something funky is going on. The game tells us the funky thing going on is that giants are as strong relative to their size as humans. This means they should fatigue just as fast.

As far as what a smaller opponent is going to hit... how does the achilles heel sound. Lethal in minutes, perfectly reachable from ground level, and the vein is near the skin surface at that spot. There's also of course an available vein in the groin area too, but the ankle is harder to protect adequately without interfering with movement.

Swords are designed for use by creatures with opposable thumbs. If we had apes with human intelligence, i see little reason why they couldn't learn to use a sword. I don't even know what point you're trying to make there. Humans have made armor for other animals (horses, elephants, etc...), so the concept of armor does not depend on a human wearing it. Nothing about the concept of 'a weapon you swing' or 'metal protection' is specific to human physiology. I mean, I agree, we have designed versions for our use. But you have to also show that versions could not be designed (as well) for a hypothetical intelligent ape in order to prove that said intelligent ape could not be as or more capable with them. Gear can be redesigned as necessary (although i doubt it would be necessary for a sword), the creature using it... not so much. One thing actual evolution teaches us is that innovations can be repurposed for different tasks than they were selected for. Its not enough to show what purpose it is good at because it was selected to be that way, its also necessary to show that it can't be used in some different way to claim that a use is unsuitable or less suitable. I mean, bird feathers likely originally evolved as a method to cool the body (much like sweat glands and hair follicles), that didn't stop that innovation from becoming coopted for flying.