[ywl]

Originally posted by HJ:

quote:

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Originally posted by ywl:
Some more questions while licker is still at it.

How about the various magical spells and attacks? The armor negating ones (e.g. lightning) are fine. But how about the ones which are affected by protection or only armor piercing (1/2 protection, I guess): various forms of fire, "Geyser", "Cold bolt", "Blade Wind", "Gifts from Heaven", "Acid Rain", "Magma Eruption"?

How about monsters? Life drain of undead (armor piercing only), breaths weapons, crushing of Water Elementals (also armor piercing only)? Also, how much piercing and slashing should we assign to the monster and animal bites and claws? Piercing for longer claws and slashing for shorter?

The problem is classification of damage to piercing, slashing and bashing are only good (to a limited extent) for melee weapons. It fails (badly IMHO) if we want to use it on wider circumstances. Using a single protection number may be rough, but it's at least simple and approximate most situations equally well (or bad).

Why would that be a problem? The same way you attribute damage to melee weapons, you can also attribute it to other things, depending on how someone (the devs) envision them. It's the same thing like saying "how do we attribute defense to different armours?" in the present state of the game. Yet it has been done, and they decided that this shield will have a defense value of 2. In the same way they can say that bite does crushing damage, and that particular spell does slashing damage. That is, if the system works by attributing only a single type of damage only per weapon.

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The problem is the Piercing/Slashing/Bashing system is not good for anything more than a dagger .

To be serious, what I meant was if we want damage types and specific armor versus them, we have to incorporate them into the spell system of Dominions. For example, we might need:

Physical (for respect of the original discussion):
Piercing: self explanatory;
Slashing: also self-explantory;
Bashing: for small bludgeon weapons;
Crushing: for large heavy physical objects ("Earth-Quake", "Gift of Heaven")

Magical:
Lightning;
Fire;
Cold;
Life-draining: undeads, "Hand of Death" and variants;
Magical: unclassified spells such as "Astral Fire" (or maybe "Nether Dart"?);
Mental: "Mind Burnt" and related;
Chemicals: how about "Acid Spray"?

It'll be more complicated to my taste...

And also, Dominions has a system to deal with these magical damage already. Fire resistance, for example, grant 100% (in Dom 1) or 50% (in Dom 2?) protection to Fire. Some armors grant it.

The question is why we need different number crunching for different physical damage. A simpler and more compaitible system could be to separate the weapons into "Edged" and "Blundgeon". Some creatures or monsters, e.g. Skeletons, Abominations, because of their lack of vital organs, might have "resistance" and 50% damage to edged weapons.