Changing damage types

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Xan
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Post by Xan »

toms wrote:Don´t start the "we make the game for us" prayer again!! :evil:
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Post by toms »

Tomsik wrote:Hardness is nice idea IMO, but...
1. Somebody would have to code it.
2. Somebody would have to set initial values for it, for all units.
3. Somebody would have to balance it.
That´s what I say too.
Tomsik wrote:And obviously idea should be accepted first.
I don´t accept this. It makes Wesnoth to an other game. :shock: :(
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Post by jonadab »

Cuyo Quiz wrote: As i see it, crushing would be a matter of weight and leverage. Your comomn mace/club doesn't have it, but if you have a heavy mace, flail, large axe or long or strong arms, you would likely "crush" your opponent.
The longer and harder I think about this, the more certain I become that this is a difference of degree, not of the _type_ of dammage, but the amount. There's an entire continuum, and at each step along the way there is a strong similarity, but when jumping from the low end to the high end of the spectrum there is, by virtue of sheer quantity, an enormous difference.

Consider: human fist, brass knuckles, steel knuckles, gauntlet, billy club, rifle butt, wooden bat, aluminum bat, iron sceptre, standard mace, large knobby mace, standard flail, heavy flail, fifty-pound sledge, Dwarvish war hammer, falling anvil, speeding Mack truck, freight train, ...

The difference between a fist and a war hammer is one of degree. Granted, it's a whole *lot* of degree: there are at least a couple of orders of magnitude going on, here, more than the numbers used in the game properly represent, from a realism perspective.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation for how much force the war hammer could inflict... How big is one of those things? One imagines the head of it is at least larger than the head of a man? Perhaps a foot long, and six inches in each other dimension? What's it made of? Given that Wesnothian dwarves know enough metallurgy to make firearms, we've got to assume their hammers are made of nothing less dense than iron at the least, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they've got lead or even something more like tungsten in them. The hammer's head could easily mass 50kg even if it's just iron, 75kg or so with lead in it, or over 100kg if they've got a lot of something dense in it like tungsten. The dwarf swings the thing fast enough to get two hits in the same time a skilled swordsman gets maybe five, six tops, so it's maybe a third of the speed of a light sword. The force that's going to exert is... like, wow. If realism were the only important consideration, and a fist is 4-4 impact, then a war hammer could be something on the order of 100-2 impact.

That *might* be considered unbalanced, though. You know, just a little.

So if it seems unrealistic that a fist is 4-4 impact and a war hammer is 17-2 impact, it's not because they're both impact attacks. That part makes sense. The "problem" (as far as realism is concerned) is that things have been balanced somewhat for gameplay reasons.

I really don't see separating crush from impact. I don't see what real value it adds. If you want to make the war hammer and the wose seem more awesome without unbalancing the game, maybe make them higher dammage with only one hit, or something, although in terms of gameplay I tend to think fewer hits per attack makes the battle's outcome undesireably more dependent on dice rolls (because, at the battle level, it increases the standard deviation). Going the other way, perhaps the fist attack (and the mage staff attack, and other things like that) is stronger than would be realistic.

(And now that I've mentioned falling anvils, it is inevitable that someone must suggest a cartoon faction, which would need to have at least one level-3 unit with a 50-1 falling anvil ranged attack. Further discussion of such a thing belongs in the Ideas forum, however.)
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Post by JW »

I'm pretty sure that adding physical damage types has been dropped as an idea, but I could be wrong.
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Doc Paterson
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Re: Changing damage types

Post by Doc Paterson »

Dave wrote:In general the criteria for possessing 'crushing' damage is that the force must be powerful enough that a defender possessing armor or shield will be at no advantage compared to an unarmored unit.

Units that have armor or shields don't have better resistance to this
That wouldn't make any sense to me.....


I don't see how a unit wearing plate armor could ever take the same damage from a giant hammer as a unit wearing leather/cloth. Heavy armor does absorb heavy impact....I just don't see any way around that.

Does anyone remember the "Bear Suit?" That guy that made an extremely durable suit of armor, then videotaped himself being struck in the stomach with giant swinging logs, hit by cars, tumbling down a cliff, etc. etc.... The original idea was to create a suit that scientists could safely observe grizzlies from (a pretty funny concept).

I couldn't help but think of that when it was suggested that heavy armor would give irrelevant protection against massive impacts.
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Re: Changing damage types

Post by Darth Fool »

Doc Paterson wrote:
Dave wrote:In general the criteria for possessing 'crushing' damage is that the force must be powerful enough that a defender possessing armor or shield will be at no advantage compared to an unarmored unit.

Units that have armor or shields don't have better resistance to this
That wouldn't make any sense to me.....


I don't see how a unit wearing plate armor could ever take the same damage from a giant hammer as a unit wearing leather/cloth. Heavy armor does absorb heavy impact....I just don't see any way around that.

Does anyone remember the "Bear Suit?" That guy that made an extremely durable suit of armor, then videotaped himself being struck in the stomach with giant swinging logs, hit by cars, tumbling down a cliff, etc. etc.... The original idea was to create a suit that scientists could safely observe grizzlies from (a pretty funny concept).

I couldn't help but think of that when it was suggested that heavy armor would give irrelevant protection against massive impacts.
Project Grizzly, now out on DVD! It is hilarious. On thinking about this more, I think it makes sense that Crush damage is just impact damage with a very large damage # and we don't split the two. If we really wanted to have armor have more of an impact, so to speak, we could implement the "hardness" proposal. If so, I would implement it as an ability "armored" where before resistance is applied, the damage is reduced (perhaps differently) for each type of damage by a fixed amount. Unlike resistance, this could negate all of the damage. Thus Dwarven Guardsmen and Heavy Infantry might have +2 Impact, +1 slash armor. Drakes might have +1 impact, +1 slash, +1 fire. Woses might have +5 impact, etc...
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Post by JW »

Darth Fool for president.
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