QuoteThat was one concern about the damage deflecting system, for sure. I decided to leave it in for now for simplicity's sake and because it's hard to think of a better alternative that doesn't jam complexity into the game for very little benefit. Besides just zeroing out armor for soft clothing, I suppose (which also isn't satisfactory).
QuoteI've not played that long in 1.0 but I can already feel that the deflection on cloth items needs to be changed a bit.
Nothing feels more frustrating than having a colonist with armor and an autopistol get downed by a tribal raider with a club and magical cloth duster that deflects BULLETS
One idea to fix this might be to have armor penetration values on the various weapons, which basically ignore a certain amount of armor value. Wearables like cloth T-Shirt would have lower armors, that can still deflect attacks with a low armor penetration. A jacket might have an armor of 7, a club might penetrate 4 armor, so it will do a bit less damage to a jacket wearer than if they were naked. Basically 3 damage 'spills over' after armor penetration is taken into account. Swords would pierce clothing relatively easily compared to clubs with their higher armor penetration values, but high level armors could still resist sword blows. This allows clubs to do high or near equal damage as swords to unarmored targets, but have trouble applying damage to heavily armored targets.
A tribal cloth might have an armor of 2 or 3 - it will deflect some fist blows, sometimes, and mitigate a tiny bit of damage but not much else. Pistol Bullets would have a high armor penetration like 100, so unloading a pistol into a cloth tunic provides higher amounts of damage.
Power armor might have an armor of 200, so would deflect pistol bullets, but sniper rifles might have an armor penetration of 250 and so still occasionally pierce through etc.
Just an idea and numbers only as examples, but may provide a way of having both clothing and armor work a little more realistically, where they can all provide some levels of protection against some things, but it depends on the attack type, so bullets don't get stopped by a tshirt. I imagine all of this would happen after the hit/miss calculation as part of the damage calculation.