Friendly Fire

[Ares]

The rate of friendly fire is far too high. If my small dog pops in front of me as I shoot my bow (masterwork, with 97 skill), without fail it always hits it. How can I not shoot over it? I can understand if two people are in active combat, and your ally is between you and the target, that more often than not you will hit them without significant skill. However, with enough skill you might be able to wait and choose your shot when it opens. What I would suggest, is two-fold. First, mitigating factors should make it easier to shoot past an ally. For instance, in the example I gave, it should be very easy to shoot past my small dog at a charging bear. But it should increase in challenge with more distance, the larger the size of your ally, the smaller the size of your target, and made significantly more difficult if your ally is engaged in combat rather than just standing or running/walking (since in the frenzy of action, they will be moving unexpectedly, but if they are just standing it is easier to judge your shot to miss them). The second "fix" I propose is that if you shoot at a target with an ally in the shot's direct path, should you fail your roll and would otherwise hit them, a second roll should be made. If you succeed the roll, you will not fire at all, and will instead lose the action with the message: "You are unable to find a clear shot." It should be based primarily off of your weapon skill and eyesight, with either speed, dex, or agi playing a smaller role to simulate your ability to act during the appropriate window of opportunity, and the challenge of the roll should increase/decrease based off of all the criteria I mentioned before (distance, size of targets, in/out of combat).

So in my initial example, say I am shooting at a bear 14 spaces away, with my small dog on a leash directly in front of me. It should be moderately challenging based off the distance, but due to the relative size of the targets (small dog versus large bear), and the proximity of the dog to me (directly adjacent), it would require an abysmal roll to miss and hit my dog. If I did fail that roll, however, I would then get a second roll heavily based off my skill and eyesight to check whether I pull back my shot to avoid hitting my beloved pet.

This would also help with hired allies. As it is, I either avoid hiring anyone who has a bow, or endeavor to first take it away from them, because they more often than not end up riddling myself, my animals, and my other allies with arrows if I don't.

[PALU]

I never recruit companions that have missile weapons, because they completely ignore whether allies are in their line of fire or not, causing posses brought to deal with robbers to have archers cause about as much damage to allies as they do to enemies.

I too shot my first dog (not fatally, though) applying the logic that I would shoot far over it at a distant target (probably a Njerp) when the dog stood in the tile directly in front of my character.

I believe the problem is that height isn't factored in into the calculations, so the dog is covering the rather small target to a large extend in the X/Y plane (when the apparent size of the actual target is taken into consideration).

Always breaking off when selecting to fire while the target is obscured isn't a good idea, as you did decide to try to fire at a target despite there being a significant risk of hitting an ally. I wouldn't mind some kind of "safer" firing mode where you could indeed abort if you thought the risks of hitting an ally were too large (in particular if companions and enemies could do the same to reduce their risks of friendly fire), but there would still be a significant risk, and it may well be that the time is better spent trying to move to get a better angle (but you can still hit allies with shots that go astray even when they're not in the direct line of fire).

[ineedcords]

I agree with the gist of  the OP; I hope friendly fire gets toned down, significantly both for PC/Companions as well as for the bad guys [Njerps, Robbers etc.].

In addition, I hope dogs get some missile (arrow/javelin) exceptions soon thanks to their -typically- short height.
1) On and around the MISSILE FLIGHT PATH and RECEIVING TILE: missiles that are not aimed at dog itself should rarely hit it, with increasing miss-chance as distance between missile-target-tile and dog increase.
2) On and around the MISSILE ORIGIN TILE: when dogs are close to the same-party-shooter [PC/Companion/BadGuy], it should be near-impossible to hit a dog that is standing next to/close to the shooter/or leashed to the shooter (due to height mismatch dog should never be in the flight path of the arrow missile).

Edit: wording

[JP_Finn]

I agree with the dog issue. It’s most relevant when the game/Njerpez/robbers are towards East on the zoom in.
I’m pretty sure Sami’s calculations include terrain, elevation in them. But some reason dog/animal size isn’t factored. I hope 🤞🏽(👍🏽 in Finnish) that one version the “bug” gets squished / dog size calculation is implemented.

[d2shr6o8av]

+1

Assuming that the target is a: adult person, stag/elk, reindeer, bear (maybe)

Shooting at a target far away:
The only friendly beings standing in front of you that have any chance of getting hit are an adult person or reindeer.

Shooting past a friendly animal that is adjacent to both you and your target:
Likely to friendly fire: adult person/reindeer/cattle.
Moderate chance to friendly fire: dogs (imagine a dog jumping/climbing to reach for the target’s neck).
Unlikely to friendly fire: Sheep, pigs, small reindeer, and small cattle.

[lizziMan]

interesting information

[Adamsor]

I can confirm that elevation for sure have an effect on how you shoot.

I was training my bows skill by shooting at the hill on 2 separate characters, 2000 tries for each at least so I believe it's accurate. That hill looked the same graphically and shooting distance and location was the same.

Some of the shoots were of course fails, but for Kaumo ~180 cm character all of them never have traveled far, and stopped at most few tiles from the one I've targeted. For 150-160 Seal tribesmen some of them were traveling very high, even 1 map tile away.

That made me come up with conclusion, either height of character make a difference (high enough character would be always aiming downwards) or that even the terrain looked the same, height difference was actually different. If I'd have to guess I'd say both. I believe that terrain height is generated and only big differences in height are indicated visually. On attached photo you can see 2 arrows which point down and while red arrow indicates higher height change, terrain down is „flat”.

 Terrain that is then „flat” can be in (un)real world bumpy a little or small changes in terrain can accumulate over longer distances. To make a statement that size of the dogs doesn’t matter and those always block shooting line I believe more measurable experiment is required, for example shooting down from a hill and performing perfect head strike to a humanoid with dog in between.



That isn’t said anywhere, but for experienced shooter (97 skill level) it wouldn’t be a bad idea to aim at the legs to slow down pray, which would additionally increase odds of hitting low targets in between.

Edit: I found wrong example, on attached photo actually height change indicated by red arrow doesn't require climbing. I'll try to find better one as I'm pretty sure it happens.

Edit 2: Found example near the water which should have the same altitude.

[Sami]

Friendly fire adjustments are currently on the coding table so this is a good time to reply to this thread.
What will be done with the friendly fire is that the NPCs will be able to reason whether there's a chance to hit a friend/companion on the missile flight path, and then refuse to take a shot if the risk is high. The friendly fire problem mostly persists with companions, although all the NPCs can suffer from it at times. The planned additions will bring a lots of new variables to the missile combat, and there will be proper dev. news post about it soon enough.

When it comes to the mentions about hitting your own dog in front of you, eg. when shooting at a bear in the distance. Well, that's something that can happen, but on the contrary to common beliefs here the creature height are being considered in the missile hit calculations. And it goes without saying that terrain elevation is also considered. And the final outcome is naturally a combination of these. So, shortly, you should be able to shoot over your dog, especially if the target creature's height is greater.
Assuming you're on the same elevation there should be zero problems with this - also assuming that target creature isn't prone, which also matters.

So, the dog-hitting cases reported here would need a screenshots as a background information so that we could actually see what factors might interfere there.
If you feel like having made an unjust accidental hit eg. to your dog feel free to follow-up with a report and screenshot and we'll investigate.
See, even though there is math in place already everything can be always made more precise.

To see if things work as intended I did a little tests with a dog in the shooting line, and a bear as a target.
Here come the screenshots. Things worked as expected and intended for this character.


The bear is 3 paces, 6 meters away in the south. Shot over the dog with no problem.



The bear is 16 paces, 32 meters away in the south. Shot over the dog with no problem.



The bear is 11 paces, 22 meters away in the north, and at slightly lower elevation than the character and his dog. Shot over the dog with no problem.



The bear is 16 paces, 32 meters away in the north, at lower elevation and prone. Only now the shooting angle is the kind that the dog gets hit.


Well, it's true that if you imagine that you've got a dog right in front of you, very close, its body maybe touching your leg, and it's sitting still, not moving at all.
Then, surely you could shoot over it even in the latest scenario. You could lean over and hold the bow over it's head.
But in the game one tile is 2 meters, and we can assume there's possibility of free move. The dog isn't necessarily sitting against your leg.
It can move about and even leap. If it's even a meter away and suddenly raises it's head on the moment you take a slightly blown shot to a target between 70-150 cm in height (withers height of a bear) at 32 meters away and at lower than your elevation... well, it shouldn't be an accidental hit everytime, but occasionally, for sure.
If you take a shot at around 50 cm height, eg. the chest of a prone bear, 32 meters away... the propablity of an accident increases quite a bit.

All in all, feel free to report the related cases you may find odd, and rest assured that the NPC missile AI will be soon adjusted for quite a lot better.