Damage Types: Pierce, Slash, and Crush

[Aristoteles]

Warlords or Ages series are pure strategy games. Dominions has lot more RPg elements than those games.
I agree, this system should be added, if the AI can learn, that how to 'use' it in a proper way.

[WraithLord]

Aristoteles said

Warlords or Ages series are pure strategy games. Dominions has lot more RPg elements than those games.
I agree, this system should be added, if the AI can learn, that how to 'use' it in a proper way.

I tend to disagree. I consider DOM to be a very good strategy game with some RPG elements.
Now, warlords battlecry and, soon to be released, warlords IV are also strategy games with even stronger emphesis on RPG.

[Mortifer]

Hmmm...I think you cannot compare Doms to those games, since those are very different.

[Just a side note: Warlords 4. will be the worst in the Warlords series IMHO. - Its got some horrible design..]

This system would be very good to have, as I said before, but ONLY if it can be implented correctly. The biggest question is the AI. It will use it properly or not. [IE. Make the right decisions with this system - like do not attack an army with swordsmen [[slashing damage]] if that enemy army has got high slashing protection etc.]

[ October 08, 2003, 14:54: Message edited by: Mortifer ]

[WraithLord]

Initially they planned to make a MOM like tac battle for warlords-IV. I was really excited.
Then they opted for that strange battle resolution

[licker]

Originally posted by DominionsFAN:
WOW! This system sounds damn cool! I would be very happy to see it in game!

I have a question. The AI will handle the troops properly if we will have a system like this? I mean you will have to build different troop types than, because of the various weapon damages. So if I build troops with good slashing protection, the AI will know that he must build troops with piercing attacks?
If the AI could handle this situation, than I say do not even hesitate to add this system!

This is more than a 'can the AI handle it' issue though. The bigger question should be (and is to me at least) what difference will this system make? Now alot of the difference that it makes will depend on how it is implemented, so before I continue much further I need more specifics from Saber on how he envisions this working.

Questions:

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.

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).

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.

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.

Ok that's enough questions for now, like I said, I'm not against this idea per se, I just want to explore it further so that when/if it (or something like it) is implemented its been thouroghly thrashed out

[ywl]

Originally posted by licker (Licker's arguments deleted):

Originally posted by DominionsFAN:
WOW! This system sounds damn cool! I would be very happy to see it in game!

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).

[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.