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Author Topic: My comments from testing arena mode, on combat/damage (plus a few other things)  (Read 31679 times)

G-Flex

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First: Creatures have an extraordinarily difficult time hurting each other successfully. It seems that multiple successive blows aren't much/any more harmful than just a single blow. A high-skilled dwarf with adamantine equipment can consistently fracture a bronze colossus' skull, over and over again, yet the skull will never break, and bite attacks that simply tear a creature's muscle over and over don't do much either, it seems. I have an iron man stabbing an ettin with a pike right now, and is good enough at it to fracture the ettin's skull multiple times, and the ettin's wound page is almost entirely red/cyan, yet nothing is happening.

Successive attacks should matter more. After all, if you can tear skin, you can keep tearing skin until you get at what's underneath, and if you can fracture a skull, you can fracture it until there's not much left, and also get at what's underneath there (if there is anything). Wounds essentially seem to be limited to what an individual attack can cause, here, which is odd. A bronze colossus should not have to die from a single skull fracture, but it also shouldn't be able to accrue eighty of them and still be as affected as if he had accrued one or two.

Death from blood loss doesn't seem to happen a lot either, at least not from regular wounds. From magma, sure, but not from constant bite wounds and pikes-through-the-groin.

As far as creatures damaging each other is concerned... try putting, say, two hydra against each other. Basically nothing will come of it; they'll fight for ages and never kill each other.


For what it's worth, some bronze colossus body parts also don't drop as the body part, instead being called "bronze colossus's bronze" or something like that, as if it's just a bronze tissue chunk.


Also: Temperature transfer also seems messed up. You can dump lava right on top of an elephant and it can walk away wounded but alive. Creatures survive in magma for far too long. While they should die almost instantly in most cases, I've actually had creatures drown before getting burnt to death. Also, they seem to either die of melting or blood loss, which is strange, since they should mostly burn to death instead. Magma also seems to be unable to set corpses/remains/bodyparts on the ground on fire, except maybe after an extraordinarily long time. This is highly opposed to what should happen, which is severe burn wounds and almost instantaneous death. I put a Blizzard Man in the lava, for instance, and right now he's not even drowning (swimming I guess?), and is in a pool of his own grease (all his fat seems to have melted and drained out of him), full of yellow wounds (burnt and gushing a blank-named material, e.g. "Its fourth finger, right hand is gushing  ."), on fire, spewing smoke, and just sort of... there. Basically, it's the Blizzard Man Eternal Flame, never dying, always greasy.


Fire men seem particularly messed up, for what it's worth. They attempt to attack, but when they do, it "goes straight through" (or whatever the message), presumably because they can't attack with their nonsolid form. They also drop "flames" that don't go away, and weird stuff like that. In fact, I'm honestly not sure how combat against those is supposed to work; how do you kill something made of gas/plasma with a sword? At any rate, there are clearly some issues there.



I have no idea if any of this is due to any fundamental problems with the combat system. I sort of hope it's not, and that it's just due to some simple oversights. The new material/body/combat stuff is extremely neat and interesting, so I hope these issues aren't too difficult to hammer into workable condition. Captain also mentioned something about necks/throats not connecting to the bodies/heads properly, so maybe you'll want to ask him about that, although he's probably told you already.

There are some other more mundane bugs, like animals dropping prepared organ meats, bolts not doing much of anything to creatures, and creatures wrestling the teeth out of other creatures, but people have probably mentioned those a lot.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2010, 06:00:36 am by G-Flex »
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NoctisVampire

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Re: My comments from testing arena mode, on combat/damage
« Reply #1 on: April 02, 2010, 04:49:25 am »

Yes...have to agree...now adamantine bolts just dents unarmored elf skin...new version have rendered ranged weapon useless it seems. Combat system was totally overhauled in this version,and weapon balance will need to be redone soon...
As all of us knows...this version is highly experimental in nature, being too long from last releast and having too much feature and changes added in all at once...actually I'm expecting something lile this :P
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G-Flex

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Re: My comments from testing arena mode, on combat/damage
« Reply #2 on: April 02, 2010, 04:53:21 am »

Small addendum:

For obvious reasons, gold shouldn't be the best of materials out of which to build a weapon: It's way too soft to hold an edge, and is too heavy to be used effectively.

However, I just did a couple arena tests: A bunch of dwarves with gold short swords vs. a bunch of dwarves with iron short swords.

The gold swords won, hands-down. In all tests, a significant number of the gold dwarves survived after the iron ones were dead. I'm not entirely sure why, but I thought it might be worth mentioning. These tests were done with unskilled dwarves who had no items except the weapons.


One problem seems to be that gold and iron have the same MAX_EDGE. I know you can sharpen gold probably fairly sharp, but it's so soft it won't hold it anyway. However, currently the game doesn't handle this occurring, so the only way to fix this would be to lower MAX_EDGE to give it softer edges in the first place.

The other problem seems to be that, realistically, dwarves should have much more trouble swinging something so heavy. Evidently, they don't.


The same problems probably occur with lead, for what it's worth (I don't see why not, it's another soft, heavy metal). I can't imagine what historical warfare would have been like if lead weapons were that good!


I'll be editing this post after I'm done testing with gold vs. iron hammers as well.


[EDIT]

Jesus Hell. I set up ~16 dwarves with gold warhammers against the same number of dwarves with iron warhammers.

Only two or three of the dudes with gold hammers died, at the point when all the iron hammerdudes were dead.

This doesn't bode well!

I imagine that this test had a more extreme outcome simply because the weight matters more when blunt weapons are used.

I believe I remember asking about this before, actually. I was kind of worried that this sort of thing would happen: That more weight would almost automatically equal a better blunt weapon.

Now, I could understand copper or something, but gold or lead is way, way too heavy to be used effectively in a situation like this.



[EDIT #2]

Wait, theoretically, shouldn't hardness of a material also affect how likely it is to cut something? I'm not sure how (or if) this is currently handled, but it's another reason gold would be a bad idea.



[EDIT #3]

After running more tests, I'm not sure how conclusive my original results were, because now a group of iron shortsword wielders killed the gold shortsword wielders in a landslide. I'm not sure why the results are so skewed. I'll have to do more tests.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2010, 05:14:56 am by G-Flex »
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NoctisVampire

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Re: My comments from testing arena mode, on combat/damage
« Reply #3 on: April 02, 2010, 05:03:30 am »

I believe I remember asking about this before, actually. I was kind of worried that this sort of thing would happen: That more weight would almost automatically equal a better blunt weapon.
I've got it...Just repeated the bolt experiment with steel bolts...and they works not much less effectively than previous version...when adamantine bolts doesn't do any damage beside "dent"ing skin:they almost weigh nothing!
Truly...some serious adjustment is needed...fast.
EDIT: bolts are not blunt weapons...but some rule applies it seems...*sigh*
« Last Edit: April 02, 2010, 05:05:06 am by NoctisVampire »
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Urist McCyrilin

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Re: My comments from testing arena mode, on combat/damage
« Reply #4 on: April 02, 2010, 05:06:14 am »

I simply editted Adamantium to be the heaviest metal. It packs a horrible punch now.
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G-Flex

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Re: My comments from testing arena mode, on combat/damage
« Reply #5 on: April 02, 2010, 05:38:47 am »

It seems like "gold sword vs. iron sword" seems like a toss-up against unarmored dwarves, with maybe a little bit of advantage towards the gold. It's probably so damn easy to cut them up (no armor!) that any differences in material doesn't make a huge difference. Weight should still be detrimental to the gold swords, of course, but it's not. Well, it's PROBABLY not. When it comes to warhammers, gold is still the clear victor in every test.

For my next test, then, I'm putting everybody in copper armor: Chain leggings, breastplate, helm, gauntlets, and high boots. I'm also giving them competent armor user and novice swordsdwarf skills. The only difference, again, is that one group is equipped with golden shortswords and the other with iron.

Test results: There MIGHT be a slight advantage towards iron here, which would make sense - iron is harder than copper, and gold softer than copper. However, most of the damage in the fight came from dwarves hitting unarmored parts (the shots to armor mostly glanced away), which, as established, isn't very difficult to hurt someone by doing regardless of material.

Actually, on examination of combat logs, it does seem that iron has a tiny advantage: It tends to bruise through the chain leggings more than gold does. I want to say that this is presumably because it penetrates copper better, but if it's just bruising, it's not really penetrating, so I don't know what's going on here. What I do know is that the gold swords get deflected by the copper leggings, whereas the iron swords bruise the muscle underneath. Both are deflected always by plate elements of the suit, and by the helm, even if I give the dwarves better swordsdwarf skill. I'm not sure what difference this really makes, though - in the tests, not much.


Re: Adamantine bolts:
To be honest, adamantine bolts probably shouldn't be powerful at all. A missile needs weight behind it in order to penetrate. Obviously you don't want it to be as heavy as possible, but, well, there's a reason bullets have lead in them. An adamantine bolt wouldn't fly very straight, suffering too much air resistance, and wouldn't be able to carry enough momentum to penetrate. This problem is less true for adamantine swords, because with a sword, you provide follow-through, constantly putting force behind it, so it matters a bit less that the item itself is light.



Oh, another thing: It seems like gem/ores are a lot more common now?

I definitely understand why, although personally I'd rather see fewer but more major ore deposits rather than all kinds of normal-sized ones running all over the place. I'm not a geologist, though, and I haven't done enough extensive digging to see how weird it is.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2010, 06:01:48 am by G-Flex »
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Doomshifter

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I ran some tests with an Iron Man, lugging about a Lead Maul ( I entered a contest in the community games thing, I wanted to see how well I might do ;3 ) against a variety of creatures.

It killed the other iron man instantly, took a few swings to take down a human, utterly crushed a gnome but got his limbs ripped off by an ogre.

Did I mention the Iron Man won that last fight? He kept 'pushing' the ogre till he was a bloody, bruised mess while the ogre was overexerted from trying to tear his body in two.

Iron, 1, Ogre strength, 0.
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Max White

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Demon bait is only good for armor now, SHADE is the new boom stick.

Doomshifter

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Demon bait is only good for armor now, SHADE is the new boom stick.
Shade?
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Right now Rampages seem to be Godzilla quietly walking into Tokyo, biting the leg off of one reporter... then creeping off again without a sound.

G-Flex

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It's spoiler material. It's also almost ten times as heavy as platinum, so I can't imagine it actually being good for anything.
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G-Flex

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Oops. It's actually "slade".
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== Human Renovation: My Deus Ex mod/fan patch (v1.30, updated 5/31/2012) ==

Max White

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We couldn't hide that as a spoiler or some witty innuendo now, could we.

Lordinquisitor

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Yeah, it`s incredible hard to kill things now. Once, in adventure mode, my sword managed to get stuck in the throat of my enemy- After twisting it 3 times around in his throat i managed to free my sword.

We fought for another ~80 turns.

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JohnLukeG

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Like I said in another thread, my wrestler in fortress mode achieved legendary status from beating an unconscious gazelle, and eventually died of thirst before it could be killed. 
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