Should a melee spear really do less damage than a thrown spear?

[williams_482]

6 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

The limiting factor is supposed to be that you lose the spear in the process (I think you can pick it back up? But that's assuming you are not being chased down by a bear or other, running for your life). If the target isn't dead after the first throw, you might have a problem. Whereas with melee attacks you can keep poking until the job is done.

The solution that most experienced players adopt is to cary 3-6 spears, throwing all but the last and looking to circle around some obstacle (like a cluster of trees or a small pond) to pick up the thrown spears and repeat. Running around an obstacle is a good strategy anyway against bears because the player handles changes of direction far better than animals will, so the chance to recover thrown weapons is a bonus. 

Carrying all those spears means you can't carry as much other stuff, but that's an acceptable cost if it wins you an otherwise fatal fight. 

[Steel General]

Spears are the real-life cheat-code of melee conflict, the first choice from hunters to soldiers, still being issued in WW1, and the bayonet really brings it all the way to WW2. Even in medieval warfare where swords were standard issue, they mostly started with spears and didn't switch to the sword until they no longer had room to wield a spear. The sword wasn't even a viable weapon against spears until it could be paired with shields, and even then the shield was the primary weapon, because with it you could press your opponents into a helpless ball and stab a sword between the shields - the only real defense against a shield press is to have shields just as sturdy and press back, and then spears become useful for everyone behind the front. (While shields were being used with spears before swords existed, they weren't sturdy enough for a press.)

Trying to fit spears to the performance of other melee weapons is a sacrifice of realism for the sake of gameplay from the beginning. The only drawback is crowding, and even then you can just grip the shaft closer to the head unless you're also backed up to a wall.

And there is no realism in having bronze through steel do different damages - the only difference should be durability.

19 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

For rough comparison:
A ~4 kg spear thrust at ~10 m/s is ~200 J of energy. If the spear is thrusted much slower (because 10m/s is a generous speed!) then the number goes even lower.

KE = 1/2 * 4 * 10^2 = 200 J

A thrown spear in realistic human ranges (~25–35 m/s) is:
KE = 1/2 * 4 * 30^2 ≈ 1800 J

The easiest fix to this math is to add the wielder's mass to that of the spear in the thrust: KE = 1/2 * 80 * 10^2 = 4000 J

The throw is faster than the thrust because at range it costs nothing to recover balance, but putting that much force into a melee thrust would incur a moment of vulnerability. If a recovery (say, 1/2 second of drunk-style movement and passive shield-use) were added to the throw then people wouldn't do it at point-blank range so often.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 hour ago, Steel General said:

The easiest fix to this math is to add the wielder's mass to that of the spear in the thrust: KE = 1/2 * 80 * 10^2 = 4000 J

every source I could find said that wasn't feasible unless the wielder was charging with the spear. The thrust would only carry the mass of the arms used to thrust it.

Also the speed would be slower around 3-4 m/s which is the average speed of a human male running with both hands occupied.

KE = 1/2 * 80 * 3.5^2 = 490 J

Even if it were a full fencing thrust, not all of the weight of the wielder would transfer. I would guesstimate somewhere between 30-40kg and a higher speed of maybe 6m/s instead. Plugging that in we get:

KE = 1/2 * 35 * 6^2 = 630 J

Both numbers are still lower than the thrown spear, which even if it slowed to 20m/s would still have 800 J of KE behind it at the moment of impact.

KE = 1/2 * 4 * 20^2 = 800 J

That's a lot of energy

Edited Tuesday at 06:30 PM by Teh Pizza Lady
clicked submit too early

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Steel General said:

The sword wasn't even a viable weapon against spears until it could be paired with shields

Really depends on the sword. For the most part swords are sidearms and status symbols, but if you want to get really technical you have cases like the zweihander, which were meant for creating openings in pike formations in addition to just being a handy way to control space against multiple opponents. The main advantage of a spear is the reach, but once the opponent gets past the pointy end the weapon loses a lot of effectiveness.

 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

11 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Really depends on the sword. For the most part swords are sidearms and status symbols, but if you want to get really technical you have cases like the zweihander, which were meant for creating openings in pike formations in addition to just being a handy way to control space against multiple opponents. The main advantage of a spear is the reach, but once the opponent gets past the pointy end the weapon loses a lot of effectiveness.

 

hard to poke when the poking bit is pointing in the wrong direction, eh?

[Steel General]

19 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

every source I could find said that wasn't feasible unless the wielder was charging with the spear. The thrust would only carry the mass of the arms used to thrust it.

Also the speed would be slower around 3-4 m/s which is the average speed of a human male running with both hands occupied.

That run would still end in a hard thrust - the speed of the charge is added to it, not substituted for it. The chief benefit of the charge is in the momentum delivered to the body, not the kinetic energy delivered through the weapon (though a clean run-through is rarely disappointing, it's not the expectation).

21 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Even if it were a full fencing thrust, not all of the weight of the wielder would transfer. I would guesstimate somewhere between 30-40kg and a higher speed of maybe 6m/s instead.

I'm not even sure what force diagram would lead to this result, except to imagine that the wielder's arm is collapsing or grip is slipping during the impact, and that's user error

It's easy to test for yourself: grab a stick, face a sturdy wall, and thrust - if you can overbalance yourself backwards with that impact, then a good portion of your body's mass was in it (as a lever with the ground as the fulcrum), not just the arm (which would entirely contain the recoil if that was the only mass involved in the strike), and if you set yourself to not overbalance then much more mass is in it. If you step into the thrust with your body extending and the impact transfers all the way through your feet to the ground then your whole mass was in the impact - which is to say, had the wall dodged you would have been thrown off-balance, because all your mass is moving with that thrust.

25 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The main advantage of a spear is the reach, but once the opponent gets past the pointy end the weapon loses a lot of effectiveness.

Depends on maneuvering room - if the spear-wielder is part of a formation then they need to drop that and draw a short sword. Otherwise, the haft makes a fine staff for bashing, and shortening the grip, while an imperfect balance, will sure surprise someone who thinks they've gotten past the problem. When the spear is too long for those tactics it's mostly not used outside of a formation, so they make it long enough that getting past the first point still leaves two more to go to get to the front line.

[Kreeate]

Here's a simple real world exercise to observe the different damage aspects of a spear.

 

1. Have a wooden target at say 25 feet away.

2. Take spear No.1 and throw it at the target.

3. Take spear No. 2 and walk up to the target. Stop 2 feet away.  Thrust as hard as you can with spear No. 2.

4. Take spear No. 3 and walk right up to the target and place the tip of the spear on the target. Now push as hard as you can.

 

Want to guess which spear penetrated the most?

Edited Tuesday at 08:21 PM by Kreeate
typo

[LeviticusFox]

You can impart more energy in a single moment into a thrown spear because the human body is very good at throwing things, but when you stab something you can follow through and continue applying force because you're still holding it, that matters a lot for fleshy soft targets. Any argument you could make that one should do more damage than the other comes down to sematics like how the spear is designed, how stong the person using it is, if they're good at throwing, if the target you're throwing at is below or above you and the spear gets extra energy from gravity, etc.
The weirdos spewing formulas and talking to chatGPT have totally lost the plot lol

Edited Tuesday at 08:31 PM by LeviticusFox

[DeanF]

7 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

every source I could find said that wasn't feasible unless the wielder was charging with the spear. The thrust would only carry the mass of the arms used to thrust it.

Also the speed would be slower around 3-4 m/s which is the average speed of a human male running with both hands occupied.

KE = 1/2 * 80 * 3.5^2 = 490 J

Even if it were a full fencing thrust, not all of the weight of the wielder would transfer. I would guesstimate somewhere between 30-40kg and a higher speed of maybe 6m/s instead. Plugging that in we get:

KE = 1/2 * 35 * 6^2 = 630 J

Both numbers are still lower than the thrown spear, which even if it slowed to 20m/s would still have 800 J of KE behind it at the moment of impact.

KE = 1/2 * 4 * 20^2 = 800 J

That's a lot of energy

I've been digging around in experimental archaeology papers where folks attack ballistic gelatin with spears, and I think we were probably both wrong.  Or less accurately, we were both partially right.

But to be clear, you are still inappropriately using KE = mv^2 to model a thrust spear.  I have explained why, even if you refuse to hear it.  That only works for the thrown spear, because it is a projectile, a closed system.  But a thrust spear is an open system, with the wielder shoving more energy into the target over time, so you have to look at the total work, W = ∫F dxW.  A thrust spear will deliver more energy to a target than a thrown spear.  But the thing is, even though you did the math wrong your conclusion isn't wrong.  Or at least no more wrong than mine was.

As I said quite a while ago, terminal ballistics gets complicated... and messy.  The method of energy delivery matters.  For instance, a pointy projectile will penetrate deeper than a blunt projectile of similar energy.  Ah, but that blunt projectile might slow more and actually stop inside the target, thus transferring all of it's energy to the target, whereas the pointy projectile passes completely through the target and dumps less energy into it in the process because it wastes some to fly on uselessly after it leaves the target.  A thrown baseball and an arrow have remarkably similar kinetic energy, but one is going to penetrate a lot better than the other.  Lots of factors matter.

Messy.

So, what is "damage"?  Total energy?  No, probably not, which is unfortunate for the thrust spear.  Total tissue disruption?  Might be on to something, but you could disrupt a lot of non-vital tissue without degrading the target much.  Depth of penetration?  Again, partially- the deeper you penetrate the more likely you are to hit a vital structure.  The FBI though that depth of penetration was the answer after the Miami Shootout, leading to their adoption of 10mm handguns, but they have now reversed themselves on that and gone back to 9mm.  (Firearms terminal ballistics is one of my areas.)  Another thought experiment- would you rather be impaled all the way through by a smallsword with it's 1.5cm-wide blade, or cleaved halfway through by a battleaxe?  And which has "better penetration"?

So, back to experimental archaeology.

Bottom line- it turns out that thrown spears do penetrate very well, even though they have less energy.  Because energy application over very short timescales helps for penetration, and that's what a thrown spear does- less total energy, but it is applied nearly instantaneously.  And that equates to penetration because of the high impulse, J = F dt.  (I think that I mentioned something like that earlier?)

The thrust spear will deliver more total energy, but more slowly, so it has less impulse and doesn't punch deeply very quickly.  You can get a thrust spear to penetrate deeply, but it takes a while of applying the force, and also depends upon the medium- some are easier than others.  But it is still more total energy, so for instance the thrust spear will push the target back much further than a thrown spear will.  W = F*d, and the thrust spear does a lot more work.  And if the target is pushed against something that doesn't move so that none of the energy is wasted moving the target and can instead get put into penetration, then the thrust spear will generally out-penetrate the thrown one.  Well, depending upon the medium.

So, my one comment that perhaps the thrust spear just needs more knockback may have been wisdom from the mouths of babes.  You can push with a thrust spear in a way that you cannot with a swung sword, for instance.

Which spear penetrates better also depends upon what you are trying to penetrate.  Naked flesh (i.e. ballistic gelatin) is different than leather, which is different than plate.  Sometimes a thrown spear works better and sometimes a thrust one does.  Generally, the thrown spear outperforms the thrust one against harder targets, like armor, and less against naked flesh, where the thrust spear can penetrate very well pretty quickly.  As I said, the medium matters.

And here's a point that neither of us brought up: precision.  The thrown spears often missed the target entirely, whereas thrust spears never seemed to.  Recall that I mentioned that penetration does sort of matter because you have to reach a vital structure?  Well, shot placement matters too when trying to hit a vital structure, and it turns out that the thrust spear is much more precise.  The thrust spears hit the center of the gelatin blocks much more reliably than the thrown ones, and thus might more reliably target vital structures like heart or lungs.

So... it's complex.

This is all unfortunately spread out over many different papers, and yes there is a lot of my interpretation in that summation above.  There is no paper that I can find that directly compares them.

Edited Wednesday at 01:42 AM by DeanF

[DeanF]

I've been digging around more in the experimental archaeology literature, and I found some interesting things.  I was motivated to get to the answer, and I learned a lot.  I apologize, though, because these papers are are behind paywalls for most people- I get access through my organization's library account.

First, there was a flawed study that would seem to show what Pizza Lady alleges.  See: Ballistic Study Tackles Kinetic Energy Values of Paleolithic Weaponry, Archaeometry, Coppe et al. (2019)

This study does directly compare thrown spears versus spear thrusts using a ballistic pendulum, and they got data that seems to roughly agree with Pizza Lady.  But it turns out that their methodology was flawed.  When the spear thrust was tested, they did so with the spear impacting the pendulum at the extreme end of the thrust.  So someone was just barely tapping the pendulum with the spear held out as far as it could reach.  It had no follow through as a human would actually use in real life.  Which meant that their results corresponded well with KE=mv^2.  Their values for the thrust spear were something like 2-5 J, which is simply ridiculous because there is tons of data on human punches from the athletic literature and a human male can punch 200-500 J, with truly elite professionals reaching 1200 J.  It is ridiculous to believe that a spear thrust would generate so much less.  So they were widely criticized for this.  The exact words used in some critiques were that they "failed to replicate the full thrust event".

So this is the sort of things you get when non-physicists try to play with ballistic pendulums or use equations that they don't fully understand.

But studies like this (there were other earlier ones) motivated other investigators to do it correctly, and those papers are out there, too.  So these are not theoretical values derived from formulas- they are actual measured results using pressure plates, ballistic pendulums, and ballistic gelatin.  And they used the correct technique, with follow-through on the spear thrusts.  See:  Early Spears as Thrusting Weapons: Isolating Force and Impact Velocities in Human Performance Trials, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Milks, Champion et al. (2016).  These investigators used military personnel who had had bayonet training, so that they would thrust correctly.

And it turns out that thrown spears and spear thrusts have about the same energy. 

From all of these various papers:

• A typical realistically thrown spear mustered 70-180 J.  With poor aim and maximal effort they got more like 100-200 J.  And there were outliers up to 400 J.
• A spear thrust generally generated 100-400 J.  But the spear thrust more reliably attained the higher end of the scale, rather than 400 J being such an outlier.

But the really good studies tend not to focus on Joules; they show Force-Time curves instead, and that tells us some things.  Please see the first figure, attached.  Disclaimer- all of these graphs were AI-generated and are idealized to demonstrate the concept, though the numbers do correspond roughly with the various studies.

So even though the total energy is about the same, the thrown spear applies a very high force for a very brief time, whereas a spear thrust applies a lower but more constant force over a much longer period of time.  And this has implications that I alluded to in prior posts.

Frist, I have to make a correction about one of those earlier posts of mine.  I used the word impulse, but I used it incorrectly.  I should have said peak force instead.

On the graph, peak force is obvious, since it is the highest point on the curves- very high for the thrown spear and lower for the spear thrust.  In layman's terms peak force translates into armor penetration.  But impulse is represented as the area under the Force-Time curve, and is the amount of momentum change inflicted upon the target.  Or in layman's terms impulse is how much "knockback" the strike produces.

Obviously, the spear thrust has much higher impulse than the thrown spear, whereas the thrown spear has a much higher peak force.

As I said, the area under the Force-Time curve is impulse (N*s).  But Force x Distance is work (N*m = J), and the area under a Force-Distance curve is energy delivered to the target (also J).  Please see the second figure, attached.  The important point is that with good technique and a long follow-through, the spear thrust can exceed the energy delivered by the thrown spear.  This is why the spear thrust would more reliably produce energies at the higher end of the scale.  That being said, it is easy to understand why an ideal long thrust might not happen reliably in a real fight- the enemy gets a vote.  The thrust spear will also often penetrate more deeply than the thrown spear, but only assuming an unarmored target or one with armor that the thrust can penetrate fairly easily.  Please see the third figure, attached.

Because that is the strength of the thrown spear- armor penetration.  That's what the high peak force means.  It will punch through armor.

But regarding an unarmored target, well, skin fails at about 10-30 MPa (thickness varies by body location).  That's a low bar, and the spear thrust will penetrate skin easily.  Ergo, excellent penetration against unarmored targets.

Please see the fourth figure, attached.  Assuming that a person thrusting a spear can maintain the thrust for at least 150 milliseconds or so, penetration will usually be deeper than for the thrown spear.  But that's only against the bare skin of an unarmored target, or at least one with light armor that the spear penetrates easily.  The thrown spear will better penetrate through heavier armor because of the high peak force, whereas the spear thrust might not penetrate at all if the armor is heavy enough.  Note though that "knockback" probably still applies even without armor penetration.

But this should all demonstrate why penetration is governed by pressure and work, not just kinetic energy.

Edited Thursday at 03:05 AM by DeanF

[Teh Pizza Lady]

On 4/28/2026 at 3:25 PM, LeviticusFox said:

You can impart more energy in a single moment into a thrown spear because the human body is very good at throwing things, but when you stab something you can follow through and continue applying force because you're still holding it, that matters a lot for fleshy soft targets. Any argument you could make that one should do more damage than the other comes down to sematics like how the spear is designed, how stong the person using it is, if they're good at throwing, if the target you're throwing at is below or above you and the spear gets extra energy from gravity, etc.

Any argument you could make for thrusting a spear into the side of a bear should come with the requirement that it be made while actually thrusting a spear into the side of a bear in real life. Then and only then you will understand why throwing > thrusting.

I have to side with the devs on this one, no matter what the graphs say. The human body isn't a hydraulic press. It's a bag of fleshy snacks held together with bony toothpicks all wrapped up in a convenient wrapper called clothing and armor. A mere hindrance to the determined predator, really.

On 4/28/2026 at 3:25 PM, LeviticusFox said:

The weirdos spewing formulas and talking to chatGPT have totally lost the plot lol

to be perfectly fair, he started it.

 

EDIT:

@DeanF

After a thorough review of your posts, I can confirm that you are right.

But only when the spear is thrust by a rigid robot with zero flex or give at an unarmored, stationary, cooperative target that doesn't move, fight back, or have opinions about being stabbed...like a bear

Your physics are sound when the conditions are ideal in a lab.

However in a real encounter, the conditions will never be ideal. The target has a vote, your body is not a rigid force-delivery machine (your grip slips or shifts, your elbows flex, your shoulder rotates to absorb recoil; the body is full of involuntary shock absorption systems that cannot be overridden even with perfect technique), and a thrown spear just simply... does not care about ANY of that. Because it can't. Because you already threw it as hard as you could.

It's a video game and the number for throwing a spear simply is higher because you are literally throwing away your weapon after a lengthy wind-up and aiming period. It just feels better. When the thrown damage was nerfed, the player base rioted.

Also I threw a homemade spear at a barn once. It stuck in the wooden pole. I got in trouble. Why did I throw the spear? Because it didn't hurt my hands like stabbing the pole did and it was an imaginary enemy that I just couldn't damage otherwise because thrusting the spear just didn't deal the same kinetic force as throwing it did.

Idk what else to tell you, dude.

Edited Thursday at 04:28 AM by Teh Pizza Lady

[williams_482]

8 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

However in a real encounter, the conditions will never be ideal. The target has a vote, your body is not a rigid force-delivery machine (your grip slips or shifts, your elbows flex, your shoulder rotates to absorb recoil; the body is full of involuntary shock absorption systems that cannot be overridden even with perfect technique), and a thrown spear just simply... does not care about ANY of that. Because it can't. Because you already threw it as hard as you could.

In fairness, many similar penalties and limitations apply to a seraph following the standard Vintage Story spear fighting tactical doctrine of flinging spears as quickly as possible while running backwards. 

[DeanF]

On 4/27/2026 at 2:04 PM, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Idk what else to tell you, dude.

Oh, I don't think that you have anything to tell me.

On 4/27/2026 at 2:04 PM, Teh Pizza Lady said:

If you don't believe me, pay better attention in class.

I'm not the one who wrote that snark, and then proceeded to get the physics wrong.  That's always funny.    So who started it?

Well, I was the OP, so I guess that you could still argue that I started it...

Any criticisms about rigid robots in spear thrust testing applies equally to the thrown spear.  High stress will impact perfect technique for throwing a spear just as much as for thrusting a spear.  This was even shown in the data- the best energies of the thrown spear rely upon prioritizing effort over aim (their words).  And it turns out that you cannot miss hard enough to kill a bear.

Also regarding your No True Scotsman argument about labs versus reality- no model is perfect.  But some are useful.  They tell us something.  (I would certainly agree that ballistic gelatin is far from a perfect model.)  Not to mention that you are complaining about something that I had already acknowledged- as I said, the enemy gets a vote, and a perfect spear thrust might be uncommon.  And I do try to be intellectually honest, so I also spelled out the situation in which thrown spears truly do rock- armored opponents.  That may be why javelins continued to be used late into antiquity even after simple bows became de rigueur otherwise.  See: Roman Army.  I'm guessing that the longbow and crossbow ended the reign of the thrown spear and javelin.

Eh, maybe I shouldn't be so critical.  You were, after all, big enough to acknowledge the point when you saw it in a more convincing form.  And you did so even after that argument, which got a little heated.  That's truly uncommon, especially on the internet.  So I give you credit- it speaks well of you, and I can forgive the sour grapes at the end of your last post. 

Personally, I'm still working on me.

Edited Thursday at 03:02 PM by DeanF

[Teh Pizza Lady]

2 hours ago, DeanF said:

Oh, I don't think that you have anything to tell me.

I'm not the one who wrote that snark, and then proceeded to get the physics wrong.  That's always funny.    So who started it?

Well, I was the OP, so I guess that you could still argue that I started it...

Any criticisms about rigid robots in spear thrust testing applies equally to the thrown spear.  High stress will impact perfect technique for throwing a spear just as much as for thrusting a spear.  This was even shown in the data- the best energies of the thrown spear rely upon prioritizing effort over aim (their words).  And it turns out that you cannot miss hard enough to kill a bear.

Also regarding your No True Scotsman argument about labs versus reality- no model is perfect.  But some are useful.  They tell us something.  (I would certainly agree that ballistic gelatin is far from a perfect model.)  Not to mention that you are complaining about something that I had already acknowledged- as I said, the enemy gets a vote, and a perfect spear thrust might be uncommon.  And I do try to be intellectually honest, so I also spelled out the situation in which thrown spears truly do rock- armored opponents.  That may be why javelins continued to be used late into antiquity even after simple bows became de rigueur otherwise.  See: Roman Army.  I'm guessing that the longbow and crossbow ended the reign of the thrown spear and javelin.

Eh, maybe I shouldn't be so critical.  You were, after all, big enough to acknowledge the point when you saw it in a more convincing form.  And you did so even after that argument, which got a little heated.  That's truly uncommon, especially on the internet.  So I give you credit- it speaks well of you, and I can forgive the sour grapes at the end of your last post. 

Personally, I'm still working on me.

I'm only responding because you quoted me and misread my words as sour grapes. It wasn't. I'm also responding because you keep claiming that I got the physics wrong, but have yet to actually point out what I got wrong. Was it my formulas? Or was it the fact that I found them with a quick Google search instead of years of study and research with ballistic gel in a controlled lab environment and said "good enough" and moved on with my life?

Let's go back to where this started. Your original post said that higher thrown damage was "counter-intuitive." My response was simple: faster objects hit harder than slower objects. That is well known by anyone who has ever watched a car race and seen them crash. NASCAR is a classic example of a lightweight race car crashing harder than a much heavier street car by the simple fact that the race car is doing over triple the street car's speed. The only reason the crashes aren't worse is because of all the safety equipment and gear they have in those cars.

Or to put it another way: tape a cannonball to the front of a tank and drive it into a fridge. Then shoot the same fridge with the same cannonball from the same tank. The tank delivered more total energy by orders of magnitude. The fridge has opinions about which one actually went through it. All of those are modeled... I THINK... in your formulas and lab test and ballistic gel experiments. I'm not entirely sure at this point because they all missed the mark on the actual question

In fact, the only problem I have with your arguments is that every time I gave a clean answer to the question on the table, the question changed. The original question was simple, as was my answer. I answered it with KE = 1/2 mv^2 and the answer was yes. Your first response didn't challenge the physics, it argued game balance (which was also address by other posters because if the spear does more damage then why use a falx??) and proposed adding full wielder mass to a stationary thrust, mixing two completely different scenarios. Then the mass argument escalated with an 80kg + 10m/s figure that compounded the same error. Then the conversation became Force-Time curves, weird formulas that are impossible to type with a keyboard, impulse vs peak force, armor penetration coefficients, ballistic gelatin studies, paywalled experimental archaeology papers, and AI-generated graphs, all of which complicated the issue well beyond the original question. None of it was the question. The question was "Should a thrown spear do more damage than melee spear." The answer was yes, because it HITS harder. The goalposts left the entire stadium and are watching the game two cities over.

I concede one thing genuinely: "pay better attention in class" was the wrong delivery for a correct point. The point itself stands. I concede the tone, not the argument, and not because you out-argued me. I recognized the tone could have been better, and that we had drifted into measuring different things entirely where continuing to argue past each other wasn't useful. I do appreciate you taking the time to work on yourself, but the path to the high road should have come much sooner from both of us.

That said, I still firmly believe the game shouldn't include your lab models because the variables required to properly model a hit with a spear do not exist in the code. I've seen it, I work with it, I've written mods to change it. It doesn't measure the angle of the target, the forces applied at the moment of impact, or any of the other variables your models depend on. It cares about two things: whether you hit the target, and whether you are in range of the target hitting you back.

I still do not agree that any of this changes the number in the game. The thrown spear should hit harder. At least... the barn post agrees with me... And I would wager that from a balance standpoint (of making the spear a hybrid weapon that can used as both melee and ranged) that it should exist in a place between proper melee and ranged weapons. The longer wind-up and aiming time for the spear wouldn't feel as good if the ranged damage were lowered. The player base agrees with me on this. Having higher melee damage to make it comparable to the falx at each tier would render that weapon useless. The devs agree with me on this. I'm not sure which crowd you are in.

Edited Thursday at 04:22 PM by Teh Pizza Lady
accidentally a word

[DeanF]

1 hour ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

[...]I'm also responding because you keep claiming that I got the physics wrong, but have yet to actually point out what I got wrong. Was it my formulas?[...]

[...] Your original post said that higher thrown damage was "counter-intuitive." My response was simple: faster objects hit harder than slower objects.[...] 

[...]I answered it with KE = 1/2 mv^2 and the answer was yes.[...]

[...]The point itself stands.[...] 

[...]The thrown spear should hit harder.[...]

No, your point does not stand, and I don't care about "out-arguing" you.  That seems more like your goal.  You kept trying to hang your hat on KE=mv^2 to model the energy in a spear thrust.  We can all go back and see it, so you cannot gaslight the issue.  I explained why that wasn't the right way to model it- because it works differently than a simple projectile.  And you poo-pooed that and refused to consider the possibility that you were wrong.  You weren't open-minded.  In fact, you are in essence still claiming that you were right!

Your barn post is wood- not a good model for sticking a spear into an animal.  Unlike with a soft, squishy animal you cannot drive it deeper with a follow through during a thrust.  In effect, the wood is armor.  But if you want to say that the thrown spear should "hit harder", well, that's a poorly-defined term, but it is supportable.  I'll even make the argument for you:  As I pointed out earlier (because I'm intellectually honest) the thrown spear definitely has a higher peak force and that could certainly be interpreted as "hitting harder" in layman's terms.  So it penetrates armor better.  And if the spear thrust cannot penetrate that armor when a thrown spear can then, well, the thrown spear is definitely superior.  Yet against lesser armor the thrust seems superior.  But terminal ballistics is more than any one metric, such as energy or peak force or even penetration.  So enjoy your win.

And I don't think that I ever brought up game balance?  That was LadyWYT.  You may be confusing us.

But yes, I agree that these models are a bit much to dump into a silly voxel game engine like Vintage Story.  (Even if it is becoming my favorite game of all time.)  That's simply not what such games are about, and I'm not proposing that- at that point I just wanted to know the answer.  I'm a scientist, I'm like that.  But with the way the game simply assigns an arbitrary Damage score (and I guess Tier?) such modeling isn't a good fit.  But maybe there is a way to do it a little better short of turning the game into a hardcore physics simulation?  I'm not sure that I really understand how damage works in the game, but to represent the better armor penetration of a thrown spear maybe thrown and thrust damage could be closer to the same but raise the spear's Tier when it is thrown?  Would that represent better armor penetration?  Again, I'm not sure how the game works on this subject.  And I'll certainly conceded that chucking spears at wolves is fun.

You could definitely make game assumptions that result in a spear having damage 2 for thrust but damage 5 thrown.  For instance, assume that the thrust is just a quick jab, as in the flawed study that I cited.  But that really leaves the spear thrust inappropriately sucking as a weapon, and in particular would mean very poor knockback.  But the game doesn't model the other disadvantages of spears, so yes balance becomes an issue.

I guess that given those constraints what I would most like to see is good knockback, and have that be part of the advantage of a spear thrust compared to a thrown spear.  The thrown spear should have very little knockback, though not so little as an arrow.

I suspect that the impulse of a spear thrust is probably also more than a sword swing, for instance, but I'm not sure.  The biomechanics seem to make it harder to apply ongoing force to a swing compared to a thrust.  As a quick check, I can deform my mattress a lot more with a punch-like push with my fist than with my fist held out at arm's length and pushing downward like a swing.  So I suspect that a swung sword does act more like a projectile.  Yes, a sword strike would have follow-though, and it probably would have more total "damage" due to being a lever, I just think it would probably be less of an impulse than the spear and thus have a bit less of a knockback effect.  

So, anyway, that's my bottom line take- make the spear thrust the knockback specialist.

But I'm done with you.  I wish you well.

Edited Thursday at 05:58 PM by DeanF

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Knockback for thrown spears is already in the game. I could see it being added for thrust spears as well.

Edited Thursday at 07:03 PM by Teh Pizza Lady

[DeanF]

3 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Knockback for thrown spears is already in the game. I could see it being added for thrust spears as well.

Hopefully.  I mean, conceptually the whole idea of a spear is to keep the enemy at a bit of a distance, right?  And stop-thrusts are a thing.  A spear's longer reach already does some of that.

I suppose that my proposal has solidified to this: Make knockback the spear thrust's niche, and add a Tier to spears when thrown so that they perform better against armor.  I'm perfectly ok with the lower damage for spear thrusts if it is truly needed for game balance, but give it something.  That something could be a bit of knockback.

I presume that heavier targets get knocked back less, right?  Hopefully.  Because even with a bit of knockback you should not be able to knock a bear back and kite circles around it  it with a spear in your hand, I think.  A bear should just plow over you and use your spear to pick it's teeth when it is done with you.

Edited Thursday at 10:17 PM by DeanF

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Knockback for thrown spears is already in the game. I could see it being added for thrust spears as well.

 

15 minutes ago, DeanF said:

I presume that heavier targets get knocked back less, right?  Hopefully.  Because even with a bit of knockback you should not be able to knock a bear back and kite circles around it  it with a spear in your hand, I think.  A bear should just plow over you and use your spear to pick it's teeth when it is done with you.

Knockback in the game is kind of weird. I'm not sure that it's a feature of specific weapons, as much as it is an odd side-effect of how the physics engine currently works. In my experience hitting a target will knock it around at least a little bit, allowing the player to somewhat keep a target at arm's length(which tends to be easier to do with a spear given its reach). Most of the time, the target is knocked a step/half-step backwards, but depending on the conditions it can also fly straight up in the air several feet or get launched off to the side, etc. 

[DeanF]

22 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

 

Knockback in the game is kind of weird. I'm not sure that it's a feature of specific weapons, as much as it is an odd side-effect of how the physics engine currently works. In my experience hitting a target will knock it around at least a little bit, allowing the player to somewhat keep a target at arm's length(which tends to be easier to do with a spear given its reach). Most of the time, the target is knocked a step/half-step backwards, but depending on the conditions it can also fly straight up in the air several feet or get launched off to the side, etc. 

I suspect that it scales with damage, too.  It might need to be changed to a separate weapon characteristic.  Arrows should have very limited knockback, for example.

If you want to shove someone off of a ledge then a spear is the way to do it.

Edited Thursday at 10:53 PM by DeanF

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 hour ago, DeanF said:

I presume that heavier targets get knocked back less, right?  Hopefully.  Because even with a bit of knockback you should not be able to knock a bear back and kite circles around it  it with a spear in your hand, I think.  A bear should just plow over you and use your spear to pick it's teeth when it is done with you.

I tested this in single player and you are correct. Brown bears do not get knocked back at all. Black bears do. Smaller animals do as well. 

I didn't try polar bears because they're bigger than brown bears.

[BoxFort]

On 4/27/2026 at 1:40 PM, DeanF said:

Also, I typically argue that reality is already balanced.  So games should model it when able and appropriate.

Not to dogpile, but shotguns and snipers are notoriously difficult to balance because they're super overpowered in reality. shotguns for being just "point within a degree of the target at less than 50 meters", and snipers for being "you saw a single glint off a scope in a tower 300-800 meters away (if you got lucky), and now you're missing a lung".

let go of your romanticised view of realism. while thinking about altering it to be more realistic is a good way to find inspiration, ask yourself "would this actually make the game more fun, or would this create a singular optimal way to play?"

On 4/27/2026 at 7:38 PM, williams_482 said:

If the correct way to fight with a spear against an opponent two yards away is to throw your spear at it instead of stabbing, something is out of whack balance wise. 

the thing is, if the opponent is already 2 yards away and you haven't started charging a throw, the throw will take far too long to charge (if a partial charge throw is not weaker than a full charge then i'd say that actually needs a balance change, maybe to like half charge reaching 85% of the damage), leaving you vulnerable to the opponent's attacks. meanwhile poking it would let you get in at least twice the number of pokes as repeated fully charged throws.

[williams_482]

52 minutes ago, BoxFort said:

the thing is, if the opponent is already 2 yards away and you haven't started charging a throw, the throw will take far too long to charge (if a partial charge throw is not weaker than a full charge then i'd say that actually needs a balance change, maybe to like half charge reaching 85% of the damage), leaving you vulnerable to the opponent's attacks. meanwhile poking it would let you get in at least twice the number of pokes as repeated fully charged throws.

If you're stationary waiting for a charging enemy, you're already doing it wrong (or trapped in a very bad situation). You want to be moving backwards to keep the opponent from hitting you, throwing spears if you have extras or stabbing if you're down to just one. There's an accuracy cost to throwing on the move, but wolves and bears are plenty big enough to be hit from a couple yards away even with the accuracy penalty, and for a 50-100% increase in damage accepting a few misses would be worth it anyway. 

[BoxFort]

2 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

If you're stationary waiting for a charging enemy, you're already doing it wrong (or trapped in a very bad situation). You want to be moving backwards to keep the opponent from hitting you, throwing spears if you have extras or stabbing if you're down to just one. There's an accuracy cost to throwing on the move, but wolves and bears are plenty big enough to be hit from a couple yards away even with the accuracy penalty, and for a 50-100% increase in damage accepting a few misses would be worth it anyway. 

all i'm saying is that poking a charging wolf gets about 2 hits in in the time it takes to fully charge a spear throw, so if you're already that close just poke them. the only issue is if the charge doesn't need to be a full charge for full damage.

[DeanF]

12 hours ago, BoxFort said:

 shotguns for being just "point within a degree of the target at less than 50 meters",

You make my argument for me.  Sort of.  Remember, terminal ballistics is one of my things, and I get a lot of argument from people who learned the subject from video games.  And real life is indeed balanced...

Shotguns are shitty weapons for modern conflict- no army issues shotguns en mass to their infantry for a reason.  Range and penetration both suck. 

So, the rule of thumb is 1 inch of spread per yard of distance (only slightly more than your one degree, actually- about 1.6 degrees).  Thus shotguns are literally useless beyond 80m or so, at least with shot- slug is different.  Heck, hitting someone at only  50 yards with 00 would be highly questionable to be a "stop".  30 yards is about the point where you cannot truly rely upon it, though I might extend that a bit further for things like Flight Control ammunition.  Slightly.  FBI practice was to transition to slug beyond 30 yards or so. 

It turns out that buckshot effectiveness is highly dependent upon the number of pellets hitting.  Three is the usual number cited, and based totally upon patterning assuming that the shot was accurate the odds come out to ~100% inside 25 yards, 80% at 40 yards, 50% at 50 yards, on up to 10% at 70 yards.  (Note that this is a mathematical model that will overestimate the odds.)  At 70 yards with an M16, I would hit 100% of the time, and with a projectile that is a hell of a lot more deadly than a shotgun pellet.  Heck, I would hit 100% of the time out to three times that range.  With iron sights, no optic.

And at any range buckshot will not penetrate even soft level IIa body armor.  Slugs cannot penetrate soft body armor, either- level IIIa soft body armor is defined as stopping a shotgun slug, no plate needed.  There are specialty armor piercing slugs for shotguns, but they tend to keyhole beyond 10m or so because you are launching long, thin projectiles out of a smoothbore and that doesn't work as well as they do in a tank's main gun.  Shotgun shells are also huge, so magazine capacity is highly limited. 

But they remain overpowered in video games only because the gamerbois expect it.  It is a meme that was established in the early moments of the gamerverse, back when packets were small and the phone modems were hot.  They expect ridiculously high damage at close ranges, and since most video games make armor effectiveness a percent damage reduction (which is very unrealistic) they seem to penetrate armor well.  And that ain't true.

See:

• Gunshot Wounds: Practical Aspects of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques, Vincent DiMaio.
• The Defensive Shotgun, Awerbuck.

For general terminal ballistics reading I usually point people at one of my old schoolbooks, because even though it is based upon old Vietnam War data it is still instructional, and as a government publication it is available for free online:  
Conventional Warfare: Ballistic, Blast, and Burn Injuries, The Borden Institute, https://medcoe.army.mil/borden-tb-conventional-warfare-ballistic-blast
Check out the authors.  Ron Bellamy was one of my professors- a gigantic figure in the field.  His Vietnam Vascular Database was highly respected.

The same generally holds for snipers- reality is already balanced, because few games make sniping as hard as it should be.  Again, in real armies snipers are rare for a a reason.  Wind alone makes it hard as hell.  I do long range shooting and I'll tell you, the hardest part is doping the wind.  Thank God for Kestrels.  But also, too few games implement parallax and fatigue well enough, leaving it far too easy for a sniper to run around, stop, and immediately plug someone.  Some of those rifles are also incredibly heavy, and snipers cannot generally just jump up and run away when they get spotted- it takes time to break down a hide and load up.  Snipers are usually alone or in small teams, so they are easily overwhelmed by firepower or fire and maneuver.  Which is not a great threat in a video game, but in real life you die, so they tend to be very careful and don't shoot a lot.  If they attract too much attention their opponents tend to point some manner of grid square removal system at them.  Barrels heat up and mirage obscures the view, making a series of many sequential shots almost impossible.

But honestly, it is very difficult to demonstrate the downsides of sniper weapons in a computer game.  That's why they seem over-powered.  But real-life is still balanced.  For a bunch of gamer idiots in an arena game they might seem unfair, but for real life militaries their uses are limited.  A sniper team isn't going to take a hardened defensive position with trenches, razor wire, overlapping fields of fire, and mines for you.

Mind you, I'm coming at sniping from a military (and milsim) point of view.  If the Great Lord PUBG just dropped 100 randos into an arena, yes, the snipers would probably dominate. Patience counts. Basically, every player would become a sniper/countersniper.

Edited yesterday at 01:21 AM by DeanF

[LadyWYT]

On 4/27/2026 at 8:49 AM, DeanF said:

So that folks know where I have settled after this long discussion:
I suppose that my proposal has solidified to this: Make knockback the spear thrust's niche, and add a Tier to spears when thrown so that they perform better against armor.  I'm perfectly ok with the lower damage for spear thrusts if it is truly needed for game balance, but give it something.  That something could be a bit of knockback.

This I like better, as it gives spears something interesting to help set them apart more from other weapon choices. I would also add that with a status effect system, the spear could potentially cause a different type of injury than other weapons, such as a nasty puncture wound. I don't think I would give it an anti-armor bonus though, as that seems better suited for a proper mace addition/change to the club. Part of my reasoning there is that clockwork constructs should probably count as armored targets, since they're made of metal, so stabbing one with a spear doesn't seem like it should be as effective as blunt force