Poll: Damage Types

[Mortifer]

Originally posted by licker:
Heh, I was hoping more people would vote for making it moddable, that's what I voted for. Give the players the tools to improve or destroy the game, always more fun that way

That is an excellent idea licker, but I doubt that it will happen, because modding that would require heavy scripting more than likely.

[Saber Cherry]

You know, if weapon damage types were integrated into the game - and especially if dual/multi type weapons were allowed - then the magic weapons could be made more interesting, as well. For example, even if crush/slash/pierce were not used, a magic fire sword could still be dual-typed fire/physical. Then, for example, Caelean armor could be tagged to provide full protection from physical damage, but half protection from fire damage, so a fire sword would cut through them like buttah. Against fire elementals, physical damage would be dealt. And Undead could also be given reduced protection versus fire (or bonus damage from fire) so that they would take extra damage as well. In fact, I think this (undead taking bonus fire damage) is important, after hearing that Banishment has been weakened.

Currently, some weapons are scripted to do bonus damage against certain enemies (miget masher, flambeau) but damage types would allow a more generalized and complete system.

A complete system would have an array for each unit/armor, like this:

fire | ice | elec | gen.magic | crush | pierce | slash | gen.pyhsical

Then, in each Category there would either be an integer, with a protection modifier:

.f | .i. | e | m | c | p | s | gp
0 | -3 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 0

In other words, versus ice, the armor would give 3 less protection, and against pierce, 3 extra protection, and so forth.

...or a floating point damage multiplier:

.f | ...i.. | e | m | ..c | ..p. | ..s.. | gp
1 | 1.5 | 1 | 1 | 0.9 | 0.8 | 0.7 | 1

(the extra dots were added for formatting reasons)

In this case, the creature would take 50% extra damage from ice (150% total), and only 80% damage from piercing weapons.

Weapons would simply have a Boolean array, checking each valid damage type, so a Caelean ice lance would look like this:

.f | .i | e | m | c | p | s | gp
0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0

In other words, it would be dual-typed ice and pierce. Against Winter Wolves, which are immune to cold, it would have to resort to physical pierce damage, and thus Caelean weapons would no longer ignore the etherealness of Winter Wolves, but they would for the other 3 spirits.

-Cherry

P.S. In the unit stats screen, only all the active armor modifiers would be shown. So if the entire protection array was 0, no icons would appear. But if the array was all zero except for a -3 ice and +3 pierce, the creature would gain two icons, an ice vulnerability (-3) and a pierce resistance (+3). These would show along with all the other icons (regenerating, trample, mindless, and so forth).

[ October 15, 2003, 17:33: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]

[Sandman]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Hmm this isnt my area but Im not sure I agree with this. As I remember such things in other games platemail was usually great against crushing, but slightly susceptable to piercing weapons that came in thru the chinks. Chainmail was better vs piercing but more susceptable to crush. Both had some armor defense against everything, just slight advantages vs some.

Even if I accepted that plate armor is worse against 'piercing' than chainmail (which it isn't), what about the fact that most plate armors were worn with a secondary layer of chainmail underneath? Are we going to give all knights two armor Ratings?