Damage Types: Pierce, Slash, and Crush

[HJ]

Since we're discussing it, here are some possible answers, if you don't mind:

1) How will the different armors and weapons be spread among the nations? Potential problmes I see here are either giving all nations access to the same sets of numbers (boring if you ask me) or risking imbalances in certain nations that cannot handle certain attacks or defenses very well. Furthermore, if you want to provide for more coverage of attacks or defense you will increase the number of units that each nation has by roughly 9 units!!! That seems just insane to me, but it wouldn't kill anything, just make the game more annoying by having to keep track of those ~9 new units.

It might exactly be the point to create slight imbalances. Even now there are slight imbalances: not all nations have the priests of same power and hence cannot handle undead attacks equally, for example. Or thay have mages of different strength, or they don't have cavalry. These imbalances cause you to adapt, and I don't see why would SPB system be any different. It's not like you won't do *any* damage with piercing attacks to the undead, e.g., it's just that you won't do as much as you would with bludgeoning ones. Hence, a very simple solution would be to build more units numerically to get the same result.
And the notion about annoyance to keep track of new units is exactly where we differ. I'm not asking for new units, but if they were added, for whatever reason, I would perceive it as anything other than annoyance, unlike yourself. It seems to me that some people simply don't want to learn new stuff and new tricks in the game system they already know well. Btw, I'm a new player to the Dom series, although not games in general, and I don't find this addition overwhelming at all, with regard to previously stated assertions that it would make the game less newbie-friendly.

2) What kind of scale are we talking about for the effectiveness of the three new damage types? Potential problem, if its too big the game really becomes rock/paper/scisiors, if its too small, then its game play value is diminished (other than for the imersion quality, which is not really high on the list of why to add this system I think).

It's kind of hard to tell beforehand, without actually giving it a try, but I certainly wouldn't want to see things like immunities and strict rock/paper/scisiors system, as I already said. The thing to strive for would be to achieve distinctive shades of gray, not black and white system or uniform blur that we have now.

3) If the nations are to rely more on independant troops to fill their holes (assuming they don't get coverage for each area) how is the starting position imbalance addressed? Outside of scripted maps I don't see how this would work. It might be fine for SP, but I can see the MP people taking issue with this potential problem.

It would depend on how lucky you are? If you can't handle it this time around, well, better luck next time. Isn't it how it functions now as well?

Btw, I only play SP. And I don't want to get into another discussion on how SP improvements ruin the MP game and vice versa. I'll just say that I liked it better in the old days when all games were SP, and hence it was gameplay that counted. Today, most games don't have gameplay or good AI, since that's going to be covered by other human players anyway, so why bother coding it. Me not like that, in short....

4) Not so much a question as a clarification...
There are three new damage types (and the corolary resistances to them) call them S, P, and B. How fine of a matrix would be involved in determining the varing levels of S, P, B and rS, rP, and rB? Would we have 9 different units comprising all the combinations? 18 units? 3 units? What? Moving to a completely different direction in unit creation would fix this somewhat, that is buying the base unit with money, then buying the base equipment for that unit with resources and equiping your base units in a similar fasion as your commanders, however, I expect a solution like that would be fairly unweildy for the Devs to want to implement. That suggestion would definately add to micro too.

Well, those were my initial thoughts when I started to play the game: "wouldn't it be cool if I could buy the equipment as well". But I'm not asking for that, and I don't believe the initial idea had this in mind either. Apart from that, the answer would be pretty much identical to the answer to question 1).

[ October 08, 2003, 16:19: Message edited by: HJ ]

[HJ]

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.

[PDF]

The proposed changes are neat in themselves and would be Ok for a RPG or small battles tactical system, but I don't find them very fit for Dominions...
It would create a lot of micro-optimizations issues and won't add much to the game. Let's keep Dominion a strategic level game with detailed yet simple combat mechanics (Attack+dice vs defense+dice, strength+wpn damage+dice vs prot+dice) rather than going into Combat Mission type discussion about the penetration of a hurled javelin at 23° angle under rain on a chainmail sloped 15° but previously repaired by a one-eyed dwarf having Earth 2 skill ...

[DominionsFan]

Originally posted by PDF:
The proposed changes are neat in themselves and would be Ok for a RPG or small battles tactical system, but I don't find them very fit for Dominions...
It would create a lot of micro-optimizations issues and won't add much to the game. Let's keep Dominion a strategic level game with detailed yet simple combat mechanics (Attack+dice vs defense+dice, strength+wpn damage+dice vs prot+dice) rather than going into Combat Mission type discussion about the penetration of a hurled javelin at 23° angle under rain on a chainmail sloped 15° but previously repaired by a one-eyed dwarf having Earth 2 skill ...

I do not agree. Diversity and complexity is always better. Well maybe not for everyone.

[licker]

Originally posted by DominionsFAN:
[/qb]

I do not agree. Diversity and complexity is always better. Well maybe not for everyone. [/QB][/quote]

Diversity and complexity are quite simply not always better, its the old issues of absolutly no absolutes

The pertinant questions about diversity and complexity for this specific system are what we are interested in though. It should be obvious to everyone that the proposed system adds both, the question then comes down to how much value do those additions contain. This is where the differing opinions come in.

Thanks for your answers HJ, I accept them for what they are, but they still don't quite give me enough specifics to be able to provide anymore feedback on the system. My main concern really is how will the new system be divided among the existing units (national and independant). If there are no changes to the existing units, other than to reclassify their weapons and armor, there will be holes in all the nations. You are right to say that adding more imbalance isn't necessarilly a bad thing, but at some point it is, it makes certain nations completely untenable in certain situations, and that holds for both SP and MP. I actually play very little MP myself, so most of my concern with any addition to a game lies on the SP side, and as I've said before, I don't see this system adding much to my game playing experience, honestly, I can see several ways to implement it that would really annoy me. Thats why I posed those questions, I need more information on the specifics of the implementation before I can really decide if I think the system adds enough to the game play to make it worth while.

Furthermore, I still think that if we concern ourselves more with unit (weapon) diversity than with immersion or combat realism (which are unimportant to me for the most part) then the mechanism already exists in Dom to tweek units and weapons to achieve more diversity. I understand and appreciate the arguments about greatswords being less effective against skeletons than mauls, but to me its a reletively unimportant distinction that doesn't need a major rework of the weapons system to solve. Personally I don't think it needs to be solved at all, as the existing mechanisms seem to work fine, but minor tweeks to the existing system seem more reasonable to me than a total change of that system.

Anyway, glad to see more people voicing their opinions on this subject, hopefully the pros will come up with a balanced, interesting, and workable system that everyone can get behind. Its the job of the cons to ensure that that is the end result though

[HJ]

I have to go, so only a short answer this time around.

I don't think I can provide you with a more detailed explanation of the system. Even if I gave you all the stats for all weapons and armour, it won't be me who is going to do the coding and implementation, but the devs. We can discuss the nature of the system (will weapons only do one kind of damage, e.g.), but anything more detailed than that is impossible to ask from anyone else apart from the people who are actually making it work.

I also would like to address the "not adding enough to gameplay" argument. Well, not every addition has to be groundbreaking. If it adds to the gameplay, even a little, it has my vote, since it's going to make it a little bit more enjoyable (all caveats included). The strenght is in details, litlle things, that add up to be more than the sum of the parts. Hopefully...

[licker]

Originally posted by HJ:
I have to go, so only a short answer this time around.

I don't think I can provide you with a more detailed explanation of the system. Even if I gave you all the stats for all weapons and armour, it won't be me who is going to do the coding and implementation, but the devs. We can discuss the nature of the system (will weapons only do one kind of damage, e.g.), but anything more detailed than that is impossible to ask from anyone else apart from the people who are actually making it work.

I also would like to address the "not adding enough to gameplay" argument. Well, not every addition has to be groundbreaking. If it adds to the gameplay, even a little, it has my vote, since it's going to make it a little bit more enjoyable (all caveats included). The strenght is in details, litlle things, that add up to be more than the sum of the parts. Hopefully...

I don't really need specific numbers, I want a more general treatment on a nation by nation basis (oh and indies too). More along the lines of what holes and how many will nations have.

As to additions to games... I agree not everything has to be ground breaking, but any addition should add more gameplay than it takes away entertainment from being too complex or adding to micro, or whatever. I'm not saying that that is necessarilly the case here, just that I can envision that being the case, in which case the addition to game play had better be closer to ground breaking than not.

Again, this is a fine idea, just that it hasn't been demonstrated how this improves game play outside of adding more numbers for people to crunch. Sure sometimes thats fun, and sometimes it adds to game play, just to me, as this system stands right now, it doesn't sound like more fun, and it doesn't seem to add much to game play. Obviously others have a different opinion from mine, and that's the entire point of this thread (now) to discuss those opinions and see if common ground can't be found.