Armors and Their Attributes Thread - Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension

Update (2013/12/07): Revised data dump for Dominions 4.03:
Dl.dropboxusercontent.com
The primary features of this dump are:

Dl.dropboxusercontent.com

No unknowns are now present as of this dump.

In the process of making this dump, I encountered several bits which may represent presently unknown or unused armor attributes. These are noted in the dump.
Of the six or so attribute bits, I am only completely certain of the one which corresponds to a restriction against mounted units using the armor. There is another attribute which probably corresponds to ferrous armors and this is named as such in the dump. Regarding ferrous armors, I searched some of the old Dom 3 threads and saw some people making a distinction between armor-rusting effects and armor-breaking effects. The bit which distinguishes whether an armor is ferrous or not may play a role in determining an armor's susceptibility to rusting effects, if this is true.

Some other observations:

• Base armors for magic item armors are generally not marked with any special attributes. For example, the base armor for the Weightless Tower Shield is not marked as being only suitable for unmounted troops. This is because that attribute comes from the magic items table rather than the armors table. (See the #nomounted magic item modding command.)
• The Wooden Mask (the base armor for the Spirit Mask magic item) probably has a stats bug. However, the magic items attributes override the base armor attributes, so it is largely irrelevant.
• Some of the Dawn armors and Anakite armors have one of the unknown attributes in isolation from the other unknown attributes. Usually, all of the unknown attributes show up together with the exception mentioned in the next bullet point.
• One of the unknown attributes only appears when the restriction against mounted use is not present.

If anyone has any insights into how susceptibility to rusting or other types of damage or how the armor repair mechanics might factor into figuring out the remaining unknown bits (assuming that they are not legacy or not-yet-implemented cruft), then I would be grateful.

Edited by: _noblesse_oblige_

Thank you kindly. I'll be able to cross reference my Dom4 DB armor page against this and possibly even expand the info there somewhat.

However, the mounted unit restriction yuou have there cannot possibly be correct, because it lists even the basic shield as unmounted only. There are numerous cavalry units in the game that use the basic shield, such as all Sauromatian mounted units.

Ferrous is most likely accurate and the Wooden mask does indeed have a bug, probably due to being first copied from some armor and then the stats changed. Ferrous armor becomes weakened when subjected to things like rust mist, while e.g. leather armor is supposedly not affected. Things like acid rain or acid storm will destroy everyone's armor, never mind if it's ice armor, coral armor, regular armor or whatever else. The Break Armor effect of Star of Heroes also doesn't give a tinker's damn about what kind of armor you have, it will destroy it. Armor granted by magic items is not destroyed to my knowledge, but the same armor as intrinsic to a unit can be.

Take this with a grain of salt though, it may not be all the way accurate.

By the way, can you extract similar data for weapons? I'd very much appreciate that, since testing things like 1-handed vs 2-handed and whether a weapon is a bonus weapon is a goddamn pain in the arse if you have to do it for over 100 weapons. I could really use that a lot more than the armor info.

Edirr wrote: Thank you kindly. I'll be able to cross reference my Dom4 DB armor page against this and possibly even expand the info there somewhat.

You're welcome. Let me know what other information you are looking for. I'm not going cross the line by reverse engineering any of the game code, but am happy to help out by mining the data tables baked into the executable.

Edirr wrote: However, the mounted unit restriction yuou have there cannot possibly be correct, because it lists even the basic shield as unmounted only. There are numerous cavalry units in the game that use the basic shield, such as all Sauromatian mounted units.

OK. I was having some doubts about that too, but was too lazy to look. (I haven't played sides with cavalry all that much.) The difference in attribute flags between the kite shield and tower shield seemed to be a pretty good indicator to me. Also, quite honestly, I'm not sure that an unmounted-only attribute is even honored for basic armors. I suspect that all enforcement is derived from the magic items table and only applies to equipping magic items. As an experiment, I just successfully modded a mounted unit to use a Tower Shield. Perhaps some of these flags are vestigial from earlier versions of Dom or maybe come from porting data from CoE or TaT?

Edirr wrote: Ferrous is most likely accurate and the Wooden mask does indeed have a bug, probably due to being first copied from some armor and then the stats changed. Ferrous armor becomes weakened when subjected to things like rust mist, while e.g. leather armor is supposedly not affected. Things like acid rain or acid storm will destroy everyone's armor, never mind if it's ice armor, coral armor, regular armor or whatever else. The Break Armor effect of Star of Heroes also doesn't give a tinker's damn about what kind of armor you have, it will destroy it. Armor granted by magic items is not destroyed to my knowledge, but the same armor as intrinsic to a unit can be.

Good information - thank you. This was what I was looking for. Assuming that Robes, Imperial Robes, and Wooden Mask all have stats bugs wrt their attributes, then I'll stick with the assumption that we've found the "ferrous armor" flag.

Edirr wrote: By the way, can you extract similar data for weapons? I'd very much appreciate that, since testing things like 1-handed vs 2-handed and whether a weapon is a bonus weapon is a goddamn pain in the arse if you have to do it for over 100 weapons. I could really use that a lot more than the armor info.

I can get similar data for weapons - and that was next on my agenda. I'm off to a bit of a late start today and only really have time to work on these dumps on the weekends, so I don't know if I will have anything until next weekend. Will certainly keep everyone posted as I make progress though.

Edited by: _noblesse_oblige_

Thanks! Do you need the already compiled Dom4 DB weapons page as a reference document? If you do, PM me your email and I'll send it over. Just finished listing stuff and some of the new ones are missing part of their flags (mainly whether they are bonus or 2-handed).

Weapons have a ton more attributes than armor, so being able to cross reference may help you figure out what's what. There are IIRC some similar hidden tags with weapons too, such as fx_wood and fx_iron, but they were never discovered in earlier versions of Dominions.

That would be great. To get my bearings with the armors, I was pulling up individual armor stats from with Dom 4. Having a handy a reference sheet should accelerate the process somewhat. (Of course, your modding manual is a huge help too, since it tells me what things to be looking for.) PM will be sent shortly.

Update (2013/12/07):

Edirr wrote:
Weapons have a ton more attributes than armor, so being able to cross reference may help you figure out what's what. There are IIRC some similar hidden tags with weapons too, such as fx_wood and fx_iron, but they were never discovered in earlier versions of Dominions.

Based on what I learned about the key-value pairs stored in the spell records, I was able to determine that some of the things we see in the armor records are also key-value pairs. This cleared up some confusion about unknown bits since I was incorrectly interpreting a key number as a bitmask earlier. Basically, key 267 is for ferrous materials (fx_iron, as you mention) and key 269 is for flammable materials (fx_wood, as you mention). This means that my earlier supposition that the Wooden Mask had a stats bug is wrong; in fact, the Wooden Mask, Icarian Wings, Robes, and Imperial Robes are all flammable. Also, I no longer believe that there is any mounted attribute for basic armor; Shields and Tower Shields are made of wood and hence flammable and Kite Shields are made of iron and hence able to be rusted. Bucklers are apparently don't have enough wood to be considered flammable.