New Damage System (w/ Demo)

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SAAj

SAAj

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Hello, all. I recently bought Mount & Blade: Complete and absolutely love it. The only issue I have with it is that armor acts as simple damage reduction. I have an alternate damage system that I feel adds some realism to the use of armor, as well as the tactical use of certain weaponry against certain armor types. This system is at the heart of a small group of mods that alter controls and movement to more realistically represent the way characters would move and behave in different types of armor.

I am fairly new to programming; I have been learning on my own using online tutorials and an excellent program (Scirra Construct) written in Python. I originally posted this over at MBX, but a lot of the boards seem to be fairly inactive. I thought I might get better results here. While you're more than welcome to critique the system itself, I'd also like to know from veteran M&B modders what kind of technical expertise I would need in order to implement this. I know for a fact that I couldn't do it using the in-game editor, and since I'm still very new to coding, I'm not sure to what extent I would have to alter the game in order to achieve this, or even how receptive the engine would be to such a modification.

Is it feasible? Is it possible? What, specifically, should I learn in order to do this?

Mechanics

The HP bar is replaced by a 'Wounds' bar, which acts as a percentage (0-100%) rather than as points. Every time you take damage, it is added to your wounds, which then act as a percent chance to kill you.

Example: if you have 0 wounds and take 20 damage from a dagger, you have a 20% chance to die from that attack. If you survive and take another 20 damage, your total wounds are now 40, meaning you have a 40% chance to die from this second attack, and so on.

Some characters are naturally tougher than others. It would be a sad state of affairs indeed if a Nord huscarl curled up and died as easily from a dagger wound as some pansy archer. A character's innate toughness is rated by its fortitude. When damage is taken, it is divided by the character's fortitude rating. A typical non-combatant will probably have the lowest fortitude rating, 0.5, meaning that they will take double damage from attacks. A dagger wound that would probably just injure a seasoned soldier with a fortitude rating of 1 is twice as likely to kill a non-combatant. At the other extreme, the toughest of the tough have a fortitude rating of 2, taking only half damage from all attacks. While attacks to the torso are calculated at the character's standard fortitude rating, attacks to the head are calculated at half fortitude (since it is a more sensitive area), while attacks to the legs are calculated at double fortitude (since there are no vital organs in the legs).

Example: A huscarl, being the manly man he is, charges into battle with only a greataxe and a loincloth. He is immediately greeted with a throwing spear in the stomach. This spear deals 40p, nothing to scoff at. But our huscarl is not some lady-in-waiting; he has a fortitude rating of 1.7 by which the damage is divided. Instead of the normally-grim 40% chance to die from the attack, he has only a 23.5% chance. He grits his teeth, keeps charging, and returns the courtesy by knocking the spearman's head off.

Even with high fortitude, this seems too chaotic, since it will seem like anyone can get lucky and score a kill if they shoot enough arrows. However, armor changes everything. Each piece of armor has a coverage rating which determines what percentage of your body it covers. When a character attacks that part of your body, the armor's coverage rating acts as a percent chance for the attack to strike armor rather than unprotected flesh. Each type of armor has different damage reductions (in absolute values, not percentages) against different damage types; if the attack does enough damage to overwhelm the armor's damage reduction, you take the remainder of the damage.

Example: You are wearing a leather vest that offers 80% coverage of your torso and 25c damage reduction. You are attacked by a 20c scimitar that happens to strike the armor. Since it does less damage than the damage reduction against cutting attacks, you ignore the attack. Let's say, however, that you are hit with a 40c poleaxe that also strikes armor. Your 25c damage reduction would not stop the attack, but it would reduce damage by 25, from 40 to 15. If your enemy is smart, he'll simply thrust with the poleaxe instead; leather armor only negates 5p.

In addition to wounds, characters can sustain injuries. Injuries can not kill the character, but they can prevent it from successfully performing various actions. The character's body is divided into the head, torso (which includes arms), and legs, each of which behave differently when injured. A leg injury acts as a percent chance that the character will stumble per step taken, a torso injury acts as a percent chance that the character will falter per attack or block attempted (meaning they fail to deal or block damage), and a head injury acts as a percent chance to perform a random action per action attempted (in other words, your character may get confused and take a step forward instead of to the left, or block low instead of attack high). In addition, head injuries act as a percent chance that the character will briefly lose sight/hearing every time it takes a hit to the head. Both torso and leg injuries impair characters in terms of riding; either one can result in failure to mount, dismount, or control a horse.

Example: An archer has been hit in the shoulder by a sling stone for 15b; with a fortitude of 1 and no armor to protect him, he has received 15 injury. Every time he fires an arrow, he has a 15% chance of shaking and dropping the arrow instead.

Different types of weapons have different ratios of wound versus injury damage. Generally, cutting weapons deal equal wounds and injuries, since they can easily sever muscle and blood vessels alike. Piercing weapons deal more wounds than injuries, since they can easily hit vital organs but rarely do significant damage to muscle and bone. Bludgeoning weapons deal less wounds than injuries, since they can easily break bones but rarely deal fatal damage unless they cause internal bleeding.

Example: A knight gets overconfident and charges a shield line. As he breaks through, a warhammer catches him across the chest, dealing 10b/60b (10 wound/60 injury) damage. Though he is unaccustomed to taking hits and has a fortitude rating of 0.8, his breastplate offers 40b damage reduction. While this is enough to keep the attack from being potentially fatal (the 10b wound damage is negated by the armor), he still feels the impact of the remaining 20b injury damage divided by 0.8; 25 injury damage rocks his body, fracturing two ribs and resulting in a 25% chance to fail any attempts at attacking or blocking.

These are the basic principles of the system. It seems overly complex, but it comes down to a few simple steps. When a character is attacked:

1. Roll coverage to see if the attack hits armor.
2. If the attack hits flesh, proceed to step 4.
3. If the attack hits armor, apply the appropriate damage reduction.
4. Divide the damage received by the character's fortitude rating.
5. Add the adjusted damage to the wounds and/or injuries for that body area.
6. If wounded, roll the new wound total as a chance to die from that attack.

Alterations

The modifications from native will be something along the lines of 2 damage stats for each weapon (wounds/injuries), a fortitude rating for characters, a second HP bar for characters (for injuries, with the primary HP bar acting as the wounds bar), and 4 new stats for armors (coverage and the 3 types of damage reduction). There would also need to be new animations for stumbling and faltering on attacks/blocks, as well as aesthetic effects for brief flashes/blackouts when taking hits to the head. There may also need to be numerical values assigned to all possible inputs, so that the system can randomly roll inputs for head injuries.

Game Balance

Overall, this will make archers significantly more powerful and cavalry significantly more vulnerable, since piercing attacks will make mincemeat of chainmail and horses (as they did in real life). Even heavy cavalry in the Middle Ages could not charge crossbowmen without support; it's about time piercing attacks, especially ranged piercing attacks, got the respect they deserved. Likewise, heavy blunt weaponry will be the bane of every knight's existence (again, like in real life). One flanged mace is worth a hundred swords against a plate helm, and knights will learn to fear a shield line bristling with warhammers. There is no such thing as a negligible attack in this system; every strike can kill or cripple, and there is an adequate offense against every armor type, even if some offer more overall protection than others.

Demo

I have built a demo using Construct to give players an idea of how the new damage system works. It's pretty rough around the edges, but it should be fairly simple to understand. I wish I could export it to Flash or HTML5, but this version of Construct only exports to .exe for now. Please let me know if either the link or the .exe do not work correctly, or if you have any other questions regarding the system. Thank you for your time and patience; any and all feedback is welcome.

http://www.mediafire.com/?aaqwj9tbune7e5q
 
I'm a bit confused by
this:
SAAj said:
I am fairly new to programming; I have been learning on my own using online tutorials and an excellent program (Scirra Construct) written in Python. I originally posted this over at MBX, but a lot of the boards seem to be fairly inactive. I thought I might get better results here. While you're more than welcome to critique the system itself, I'd also like to know from veteran M&B modders what kind of technical expertise I would need in order to implement this. I know for a fact that I couldn't do it using the in-game editor, and since I'm still very new to coding, I'm not sure to what extent I would have to alter the game in order to achieve this, or even how receptive the engine would be to such a modification
Click to expand...

vs

this:
SAAj said:
Demo

I have built a demo using Construct to give players an idea of how the new damage system works. It's pretty rough around the edges, but it should be fairly simple to understand. I wish I could export it to Flash or HTML5, but this version of Construct only exports to .exe for now. Please let me know if either the link or the .exe do not work correctly, or if you have any other questions regarding the system. Thank you for your time and patience; any and all feedback is welcome.
Click to expand...
What exactly is the demo file?


As to this:
SAAj said:
Is it feasible? Is it possible? What, specifically, should I learn in order to do this?
Click to expand...
You need to learn how to code with the M&B module system, and specifically make extensive use of the ti_on_agent_hit trigger and numerous agent, troop and item slots (since you cannot add new abilities/item stats directly).


I'll leave this here for the time being, though if you want the discussion to move fully to a technical/coding direction, it will need to be moved to The Forge proper.
 
It would be a sad state of affairs indeed if a Nord huscarl curled up and died as easily from a dagger wound as some pansy archer.
Click to expand...

He may not curl up as quickly, but a fatal stabwound is a fatal stabwound, even if it does not incapacitate immediately... :twisted:

That, of course, would only be relevant if you were going for a more realistic approach, in which case the most severe limitation isn't going to be the damage system, but the very limited combat interactions possible within the engine.
Not to mention the fact that a combat-centered game in which fighting is the worst possible option and to be avoided at all costs and by any means isn't going to be very appealing except perhaps to a bunch of masochists.


And a more complex damage calculation that still arrives at roughly the same results as the current system, barring the odd instakill and hilariously unfunny random chances to be screwed over that everyone will just love in MP, seems like a lot of effort for very little gain.
 
I'll wade in, hope this is all taken without causing offense, but we're going to talk game-design mechanics  :lol:

BTW, building this elaborate demo of your proposed mechanics is kind've cool, but only those of us who have reasonable expectations about our security are likely to run a random EXE from somebody we don't know.  Just sayin'.

OK, now that I've seen the demo, it's clear you don't have any Module System code built.  So we're just talking game-design theory and practice. 

I can save you a lot of time, in terms of turning the theory into working gamecode.  You don't have to write this from scratch, practically all of it exists already.

Look up Fancy Damage System; it will allow you to fully realize this in terms of final in-game behavior and logic, including a lot of things that you haven't considered.  The version in the Blood and Steel source is the cleanest in terms of dealing with 1.143's quirks and is well-commented. 

The Blood and Steel code has a sequence roughly like this:

1.  Hit occurs, raw damage results.  This arrives from the engine side, plus any weapon-specific code.
2.  Chance to get a critical hit occurs, if true then damage is multiplied somewhat (may result in insta-kill).
3.  Chance to dodge, thus avoiding the damage entirely.  This doesn't just represent dodging, but all the other freak accidents of combat.
4.  Damage is increased based on personal skill and army bonuses (superior training and tactics; your army gets a force multiplier if your character is a skilled general or leader, just like RL).
5.  Damage is decreased, ditto.
6.  Special weapon effects, including special code for situations like polearms vs. horses and horse damage in general (to prevent horses from doing 0 damage too frequently, since that's not realistic but Warband's code results in that frequently) and explosive ordinance, amongst other things.

There are more details; basically I treat Heros and Players differently than ordinary sword-fodder, and other stuff is happening.  Don't worry about that yet.

But, at least in the general area of expanding damage systems and providing more ways to influence outcomes, I've already done this: it's well-tested by thousands of people, it's fairly well balanced (within the specific realm of Blood and Steel's balance, which is unique) and the code's Open Source.  Feel free to use it as a base, it will save you hours of goofs and blind alleys.

Secondly, let's talk about your system, and why it may need some alterations.  This is based on all the stuff that's happened over the last year and a half with my mod, which is, so far as I know, the only one using this code in full, although a lot of mods use the earlier versions in one form or another now, which is great.  Anyhow, all the following is based on user feedback and stuff; something like 50,000 people have tested the mod since this stuff was put in.

1.  As pointed out by others, your system as proposed leads to random insta-kills.  I don't think it's realistic, nor do I think it will be Fun.  Here is why, in gory detail.

A random chance of death occurring per damage event isn't all that realistic. 

IRL, you take a small stab wound, you're hurt, but you're not going to die during that battle, period. 

You take a cut on a big muscle; life sucks and you're not at 100%, but you're probably still functional. 

You get knocked on the head; maybe you see stars for a few minutes, but if you aren't concussed or get a skull fracture, you're basically OK.  Even if concussed or fractured, though, you may be OK for quite some time before you suddenly collapse (which is why IRL, head injuries are a big deal).

There is, basically, a threshold; a solid strike that breaks a limb, does serious damage to the head or neck or a deep penetration wound is going to make you a casualty at some point, due to shock or blood loss, but again, it may or may not be instant; people have often survived horrific damage for some time, if they're pumped up on adrenalin. 

So it's not realistic to just kill 'em there; they may be bleeding to death, but they may be functional, for battle purposes, or they may be going into shock and they're out.  Your system is too simplistic, basically; if you want to approach realism, you need more details, you need to handle cases more like how things work in the real world. 

However, as I'm going to point out later, realism, per se, isn't necessarily in the interest of good gameplay; you really have to balance the two interests carefully.

If you want to simulate realistic injuries and long-term problems from wounds, a bleeding system and critical hits would be far more appropriate. 

Crits provide some insta-death.  You cut the guy's arm off; he's out.  That's appropriate, you got a good whack in.

A bleeding system is really easy to implement, although I didn't put one into my code; it's just a clock event that subtracts from hitpoints or kills the Agent when they're out of hitpoints.  You can add little bits like tourniquets easily enough via some user commands and a chance that NPCs tourniquet themselves every bleeding turn.  Very straightforward logic here.

Same thing with shock; if somebody takes a hit and will become a casualty, you can keep them alive for X cycles until their adrenalin wears off and they collapse.  That's something I haven't implemented; I may do that, for better simulation of Beserkirs and the like :smile:


2.  However, you really need to think about players and their situation.  Pure realism won't work terribly well; as others have pointed out, if combat is made too lethal, then people are going to be very reluctant to fight at all, and just watching AI guys fight isn't fun.  Again, that may be "realistic", in that players will treat themselves as mortal... but the bots won't; they'll continue to act as normal.  Final results won't feel terribly real.

More importantly, if your system deals with armor protection in a sufficiently realistic way, then it makes a lot of troops terrifically vulnerable and others very OP. 

For example, you talk about that Nord huscarl.  Yeah, he's tough, but he's not tough like how he is in Native; that was blatant balance stuff done to keep the Nords semi-viable. 

IRL, a Swadian knight should eat him for breakfast; he's in mail or mail and plate, with padding underneath either, whereas the Nord doesn't even have decent hand protection.  They both have shields, they're both expert warriors.  It's not much of a contest; armor really mattered, IRL, which is why smallish armies of men-at-arms were the 13th-16th century's equivalent of main battle tanks, until firearms made them less viable.

Those two warriors were separated by 2-3 centuries of conflict (the Swadians are sort've vaguely modeled on 12th-13th century knights, the Huscarls are vaguely 9th-10th), and there are good reasons why Huscarls weren't what one saw on battlefields, dominating men-at-arms. 

Warband is not historically accurate; I know you know that, but you need to really grok it.  And if you offer "realism" and it doesn't work like history, players will complain, a lot.

In Blood and Steel, where the armors are all fairly realistically modeled (with exceptions here and there for things where gameplay > realism), this caused a lot of serious balance issues until I did a bunch of non-canonical, non-historical things to give the lightly-armored factions enough punch to be worth playing with.  IOW, been down this road, man.  Took over a year to get balance to not totally suck, with thousands of testers to give feedback, and it's still not perfect, you should read what I get every version about X being OP, Y being UP, Z being "i hate u 4 braking mi gaem".

In short, tread cautiously.  You're basically constructing a model of 'balance' that will wreck Native's balance, which is already pretty, erm, questionable, completely.  If all you want to play is Swadians and Sarranids, go right ahead, but really historically-accurate realism pretty much makes the other factions, well, dead, because they're modeled after earlier periods.

3.  You're not dealing with the core issues of mechanics and balance, i.e. the stuff in Native that is already there, causing unrealistic, even silly, outcomes. 

For example, Power Strike and Shield are both incredibly powerful, and have a huge impact on combat outcomes.  I got rid of them in Blood and Steel because of how much they distorted the combat model; it's a bit silly that some guy magically pumps more hitpoints into a shield, just as it's silly that people can get run over by animals weighing half a ton and not get hurt, but that was the way things were balanced.  I replaced it with other things that can be criticized for being silly, but that's game design.

In short, you can have realism or you can have game-balance, kind've, in Native.  You can't have both.  So, you're then going to have to tackle that problem by re-balancing and buffing factions. 

Players will then get grumpy, demand changes, and pretty soon you're not working on a balance system, you're maintaining a mod.  Nothing wrong with that, but keep in mind that's what you're going to be looking at.


4.  If you want to tackle realism and you're willing to tackle the armor issues, you'll hit another hitch, which is that the armor system is modeled in a very general way. 

It applies percentages of damage vs. armor values, flat, with no explicit modeling of armor types and their specific resistances.  For example, plate is great against cuts, good against piercing, mediocre vs. blunt trauma, whereas a suit of cour bouilli over maille with padding underneath might provide inferior protection vs. piercing, but better protection vs. blunt trauma.

So the obvious thing to do, code-side, is to check the armor and weapon and adjust accordingly.  This is pretty hard to do efficiently, given the way the engine works; for efficiency, you want to check if the armor is in a range of armors that provide similar protection or assign the armor some values via an item slot, preferably during the initial setup of the game.  Same with weapons; their damage arrives at the code we have to do meaningful adjustment with raw, so you'll need to re-adjust it.

Then there's another issue; blunt causes non-lethal damage, unless you make some fancy adjustments.  The engine's expectation is that blunt is always non-lethal; obviously that's not realistic, and a hit from an Iron Staff to the head should probably, y'know, kill people.  But it doesn't, unless you factor that in.  I got around that by shifting all but a smidgen of weapons in Blood and Steel to Cut or Pierce; it works reasonably well, since blunt trauma "pierces" armor through the transmission of shockwaves into the flesh and bone beneath.


Lastly, you'll hit the fact that you can't do range-checks unless your armors are all strictly arranged in order of their types of protection in the MS code, since they're just integers, engine-side.  So you'll end up having to move every single armor and re-ordering them really strictly (if nobody here has seen Blood and Steel's items, go look, come back; it's not just done because I'm a pedant). 

It's a lot of work, and when you've done all that, people's save games don't work any more, because the game engine is very literal about the integers, so if 300 used to mean "Appaloosa" and now means "Iron Shield", your players are now attempting to ride a shield.

So... basically... I've been down this whole road, man.  I know what you're about to see happen; at the very least, grab the latest Blood and Steel source, look for the damage system core stuff in module_mission_templates.py and see how it works, it's a good starting-place.

TL:grin:NR version:  the code's already available to do a very fancy model of damage; I have serious issues with the over-simplification of your modeling but by all means, take what's already available and run with it, it's why all my stuff is Open Source :smile:
 
Adorno said:
Sounds fascinating. I'm a little worried bout the head injury system, that could become seriously annoying.
Does this work in both single- and multiplayer? And if so, do you think it's balanced?
Click to expand...

The head injury system is in place to promote the advantages of superior attack angles and protection provided by high ground and mounted melee combat, as well as to the emphasize the importance of helmets. As an alternative to random inputs, it may be easier (both in terms of programming and usability) to substitute delayed reactions, so that the character's reactions become sluggish (not necessarily slow in execution, simply in input reception) after taking repeated blows to the head.

It could be used for both single- and multi-player, though I would argue that realism, rather than balance, is the goal. It does serve to power up the archers while also making the armored cavalry a little less god-like, but balance is not the goal. It will increase the level of entropy within the system, especially in sustained engagements, making heavy armor a less reliable way to gauge life expectancy. Weapon selection will become important because certain types of damage will be all but essential against certain types of weaponry.
 
Caba`drin said:
I'm a bit confused by
this:
SAAj said:
I am fairly new to programming; I have been learning on my own using online tutorials and an excellent program (Scirra Construct) written in Python. I originally posted this over at MBX, but a lot of the boards seem to be fairly inactive. I thought I might get better results here. While you're more than welcome to critique the system itself, I'd also like to know from veteran M&B modders what kind of technical expertise I would need in order to implement this. I know for a fact that I couldn't do it using the in-game editor, and since I'm still very new to coding, I'm not sure to what extent I would have to alter the game in order to achieve this, or even how receptive the engine would be to such a modification
Click to expand...

vs

this:
SAAj said:
Demo

I have built a demo using Construct to give players an idea of how the new damage system works. It's pretty rough around the edges, but it should be fairly simple to understand. I wish I could export it to Flash or HTML5, but this version of Construct only exports to .exe for now. Please let me know if either the link or the .exe do not work correctly, or if you have any other questions regarding the system. Thank you for your time and patience; any and all feedback is welcome.
Click to expand...
What exactly is the demo file?


As to this:
SAAj said:
Is it feasible? Is it possible? What, specifically, should I learn in order to do this?
Click to expand...
You need to learn how to code with the M&B module system, and specifically make extensive use of the ti_on_agent_hit trigger and numerous agent, troop and item slots (since you cannot add new abilities/item stats directly).


I'll leave this here for the time being, though if you want the discussion to move fully to a technical/coding direction, it will need to be moved to The Forge proper.
Click to expand...

The demo is a simple Flash-type .exe; it utilizes very basic programming. Currently, I only know how to work within the GUI interface. As for moving it to The Forge, I'm fine with that. I wasn't entirely sure which of the two forums it belonged in, but yes, I would definitely prefer technical input in terms of what editing/modding software I should use. Is there software specifically designed to present the module system as a user-friendly GUI, or will I just have to wade into it and learn how to code in earnest?
 
BTW, you can't get whether a hit is on the head or other body parts, unless it can be done via Script Enhancer.  Engine doesn't pass that data to the function we have for this stuff.

For the details about implementation, you really should have asked around the Forge first; certain things are either not available or can only be derived indirectly (with associated math costs).
 
This reminds me of Dwarf Fortress a little bit.  This + Decapitation/Dismemberment = Semi-3D Dwarf Fortress!
 
jackx said:
It would be a sad state of affairs indeed if a Nord huscarl curled up and died as easily from a dagger wound as some pansy archer.
Click to expand...

He may not curl up as quickly, but a fatal stabwound is a fatal stabwound, even if it does not incapacitate immediately... :twisted:

That, of course, would only be relevant if you were going for a more realistic approach, in which case the most severe limitation isn't going to be the damage system, but the very limited combat interactions possible within the engine.
Not to mention the fact that a combat-centered game in which fighting is the worst possible option and to be avoided at all costs and by any means isn't going to be very appealing except perhaps to a bunch of masochists.


And a more complex damage calculation that still arrives at roughly the same results as the current system, barring the odd instakill and hilariously unfunny random chances to be screwed over that everyone will just love in MP, seems like a lot of effort for very little gain.
Click to expand...

A major element I've omitted from this version of the system is bleeding damage over time. It involves an HP meter that represents blood, with x*time delta damage sustained, x representing the total damage from injuries sustained. So if you got stabbed for 5 damage, you would bleed for 5 damage every x seconds until you staunched the wound or bled to death. If you got stabbed again for 5 damage, you would now be bleeding for 10 damage every x seconds, 5 per wound. If you got hit with a bardiche or something, you would probably bleed out within seconds. This would make it more realistic, but also much more difficult, to the point where it would be almost unplayable (kind of like real life). I decided I would draw the line between realism and playability there.

This system does make combat a very risky option, and it's definitely not for everyone, but I personally prefer it because I believe the fear induced by that small bit of chaos is a vital element of warfare, and helps enrich the experience. The native damage system, in which horses are running around with a dozen arrows and a javelin sticking out of them, is too lenient for my tastes. The issue I have is that there is too much certainty, allowing the player to take calculated risks that would not be possible in real combat. By introducing a level of entropy that can be controlled through various means (armor, evasion, diplomacy, etc.), the system introduces a touch of fear, a respect for uncertainty, that keeps players from making the cool, calculated decisions that separate the native damage system from the terror of a real battle.

The calculation does arrive at roughly the same results on a large enough scale, but on a personal level, it's quite different. Whereas a saber versus chainmail in the native combat system would simply take persistence to score a kill, it is nearly impossible in this system. The player must think tactically. Certain weapon/armor matchups simply will not work, a vital aspect of medieval warfare that is somewhat lost in the game because all weapons do one type of damage and all armors reduce one type of damage; the closest the native system comes to acknowledging special properties is to say that certain weapons deal extra damage against shields. This takes it to a whole new level that, while not outwardly achieving much of a difference on a grand scale, makes individual encounters much more thought-provoking.
 
SAAj said:
Overall, this will make archers significantly more powerful and cavalry significantly more vulnerable, since piercing attacks will make mincemeat of chainmail and horses (as they did in real life). Even heavy cavalry in the Middle Ages could not charge crossbowmen without support; it's about time piercing attacks, especially ranged piercing attacks, got the respect they deserved. Likewise, heavy blunt weaponry will be the bane of every knight's existence (again, like in real life). One flanged mace is worth a hundred swords against a plate helm, and knights will learn to fear a shield line bristling with warhammers. There is no such thing as a negligible attack in this system; every strike can kill or cripple, and there is an adequate offense against every armor type, even if some offer more overall protection than others.


http://www.mediafire.com/?aaqwj9tbune7e5q
Click to expand...

Well just to the horses/blunt weapons. Dont use term real life when youve most propably never seen well trained warhorse and absolutely never seen him in a battle situation or if youve never been bashed through head in well made helmet with warhammer.

Horses generally can not just survive (or better said HAVE) multiple greave halberd wounds, but they were many times still fit to carry their rider out of danger (and could even heal and fight afterwards). Also forget to stop any horse by that gentle poke you see in warband- if you thrive for reality that in this situation you either kill a horse and loose your pike (and break your arms and is thrown few yards back) or retain your pike and do no damage at all. (as most propable scenario in one on one with horseman- that he simply sidesteps you point and cracks your skull open is not possible to do in this game right now) These weapons were allways used en masse in several ranks (same with bayonet) as even if horse was well trained and armoured if there was no gap he couldnt just gallop through, best he could do would to slow down and run around, but if gap was already there or made by accident then even few horseman inside of formation could wrak havoc upon their enemy. (Look into what happened at the battle of Grandson where Louis de Chatel-Guyon and few horseman were able to kill 30 swiss and get to standards in the middle of a pikesquare of 10000 Swiss before they perished)

And crossbowmen without protection were nice meal for any cavalry at least in middle ages- as they could only dream about more than one or two volleys from efective range before horsemen were already among them- and they had better options than assaulting line of them frontally. Therefore ranged and cold weapons (pikes especially) were mixed together- ranged weapons were best means of killing cavalry, pikes were best means of preventing them to cause harm.

And blunt damage or any damage: Look into lancer charge at Omdurman and youll see that in real fight two handed swords are quite impropable to cause any serious injury at all even through cloth- how its possible? Easily- youre nervous and stressed fighting for your life your enemy is moving, dodging fighting for his- its hugely propable you hit him with the flat or not at all. Same with maces- you can dream about maces halberds etc. being doom of knights. Unless youre superman its so hugely impropable to kill a man in steel armour with single blow, let alone with tiny mace, if hes moving, you can just as well predict where lightning will strike. Best way to kill him is to slide your dagger through his visor or armpit while other two men are holding him in place. Fight itself never produced huge caualties in little time with this style of warfare, most killing appeared after one side broke and ran away. (Swiss at Marignano lost 8-14000 men dead or wounded but this was in 28 hour battle) On the other hand two handed sword in this game has killing rate of almost a machine gun it can kill anything in any armour almost intantly.

But otherwise concept is good.  :smile:
 
xenoargh said:
I'll wade in, hope this is all taken without causing offense, but we're going to talk game-design mechanics  :lol:

BTW, building this elaborate demo of your proposed mechanics is kind've cool, but only those of us who have reasonable expectations about our security are likely to run a random EXE from somebody we don't know.  Just sayin'.

OK, now that I've seen the demo, it's clear you don't have any Module System code built.  So we're just talking game-design theory and practice. 

I can save you a lot of time, in terms of turning the theory into working gamecode.  You don't have to write this from scratch, practically all of it exists already.

Look up Fancy Damage System; it will allow you to fully realize this in terms of final in-game behavior and logic, including a lot of things that you haven't considered.  The version in the Blood and Steel source is the cleanest in terms of dealing with 1.143's quirks and is well-commented. 

The Blood and Steel code has a sequence roughly like this:

1.  Hit occurs, raw damage results.  This arrives from the engine side, plus any weapon-specific code.
2.  Chance to get a critical hit occurs, if true then damage is multiplied somewhat (may result in insta-kill).
3.  Chance to dodge, thus avoiding the damage entirely.  This doesn't just represent dodging, but all the other freak accidents of combat.
4.  Damage is increased based on personal skill and army bonuses (superior training and tactics; your army gets a force multiplier if your character is a skilled general or leader, just like RL).
5.  Damage is decreased, ditto.
6.  Special weapon effects, including special code for situations like polearms vs. horses and horse damage in general (to prevent horses from doing 0 damage too frequently, since that's not realistic but Warband's code results in that frequently) and explosive ordinance, amongst other things.

There are more details; basically I treat Heros and Players differently than ordinary sword-fodder, and other stuff is happening.  Don't worry about that yet.

But, at least in the general area of expanding damage systems and providing more ways to influence outcomes, I've already done this: it's well-tested by thousands of people, it's fairly well balanced (within the specific realm of Blood and Steel's balance, which is unique) and the code's Open Source.  Feel free to use it as a base, it will save you hours of goofs and blind alleys.

Secondly, let's talk about your system, and why it may need some alterations.  This is based on all the stuff that's happened over the last year and a half with my mod, which is, so far as I know, the only one using this code in full, although a lot of mods use the earlier versions in one form or another now, which is great.  Anyhow, all the following is based on user feedback and stuff; something like 50,000 people have tested the mod since this stuff was put in.

1.  As pointed out by others, your system as proposed leads to random insta-kills.  I don't think it's realistic, nor do I think it will be Fun.  Here is why, in gory detail.

A random chance of death occurring per damage event isn't all that realistic. 

IRL, you take a small stab wound, you're hurt, but you're not going to die during that battle, period. 

You take a cut on a big muscle; life sucks and you're not at 100%, but you're probably still functional. 

You get knocked on the head; maybe you see stars for a few minutes, but if you aren't concussed or get a skull fracture, you're basically OK.  Even if concussed or fractured, though, you may be OK for quite some time before you suddenly collapse (which is why IRL, head injuries are a big deal).

There is, basically, a threshold; a solid strike that breaks a limb, does serious damage to the head or neck or a deep penetration wound is going to make you a casualty at some point, due to shock or blood loss, but again, it may or may not be instant; people have often survived horrific damage for some time, if they're pumped up on adrenalin. 

So it's not realistic to just kill 'em there; they may be bleeding to death, but they may be functional, for battle purposes, or they may be going into shock and they're out.  Your system is too simplistic, basically; if you want to approach realism, you need more details, you need to handle cases more like how things work in the real world. 

However, as I'm going to point out later, realism, per se, isn't necessarily in the interest of good gameplay; you really have to balance the two interests carefully.

If you want to simulate realistic injuries and long-term problems from wounds, a bleeding system and critical hits would be far more appropriate. 

Crits provide some insta-death.  You cut the guy's arm off; he's out.  That's appropriate, you got a good whack in.

A bleeding system is really easy to implement, although I didn't put one into my code; it's just a clock event that subtracts from hitpoints or kills the Agent when they're out of hitpoints.  You can add little bits like tourniquets easily enough via some user commands and a chance that NPCs tourniquet themselves every bleeding turn.  Very straightforward logic here.

Same thing with shock; if somebody takes a hit and will become a casualty, you can keep them alive for X cycles until their adrenalin wears off and they collapse.  That's something I haven't implemented; I may do that, for better simulation of Beserkirs and the like :smile:


2.  However, you really need to think about players and their situation.  Pure realism won't work terribly well; as others have pointed out, if combat is made too lethal, then people are going to be very reluctant to fight at all, and just watching AI guys fight isn't fun.  Again, that may be "realistic", in that players will treat themselves as mortal... but the bots won't; they'll continue to act as normal.  Final results won't feel terribly real.

More importantly, if your system deals with armor protection in a sufficiently realistic way, then it makes a lot of troops terrifically vulnerable and others very OP. 

For example, you talk about that Nord huscarl.  Yeah, he's tough, but he's not tough like how he is in Native; that was blatant balance stuff done to keep the Nords semi-viable. 

IRL, a Swadian knight should eat him for breakfast; he's in mail or mail and plate, with padding underneath either, whereas the Nord doesn't even have decent hand protection.  They both have shields, they're both expert warriors.  It's not much of a contest; armor really mattered, IRL, which is why smallish armies of men-at-arms were the 13th-16th century's equivalent of main battle tanks, until firearms made them less viable.

Those two warriors were separated by 2-3 centuries of conflict (the Swadians are sort've vaguely modeled on 12th-13th century knights, the Huscarls are vaguely 9th-10th), and there are good reasons why Huscarls weren't what one saw on battlefields, dominating men-at-arms. 

Warband is not historically accurate; I know you know that, but you need to really grok it.  And if you offer "realism" and it doesn't work like history, players will complain, a lot.

In Blood and Steel, where the armors are all fairly realistically modeled (with exceptions here and there for things where gameplay > realism), this caused a lot of serious balance issues until I did a bunch of non-canonical, non-historical things to give the lightly-armored factions enough punch to be worth playing with.  IOW, been down this road, man.  Took over a year to get balance to not totally suck, with thousands of testers to give feedback, and it's still not perfect, you should read what I get every version about X being OP, Y being UP, Z being "i hate u 4 braking mi gaem".

In short, tread cautiously.  You're basically constructing a model of 'balance' that will wreck Native's balance, which is already pretty, erm, questionable, completely.  If all you want to play is Swadians and Sarranids, go right ahead, but really historically-accurate realism pretty much makes the other factions, well, dead, because they're modeled after earlier periods.

3.  You're not dealing with the core issues of mechanics and balance, i.e. the stuff in Native that is already there, causing unrealistic, even silly, outcomes. 

For example, Power Strike and Shield are both incredibly powerful, and have a huge impact on combat outcomes.  I got rid of them in Blood and Steel because of how much they distorted the combat model; it's a bit silly that some guy magically pumps more hitpoints into a shield, just as it's silly that people can get run over by animals weighing half a ton and not get hurt, but that was the way things were balanced.  I replaced it with other things that can be criticized for being silly, but that's game design.

In short, you can have realism or you can have game-balance, kind've, in Native.  You can't have both.  So, you're then going to have to tackle that problem by re-balancing and buffing factions. 

Players will then get grumpy, demand changes, and pretty soon you're not working on a balance system, you're maintaining a mod.  Nothing wrong with that, but keep in mind that's what you're going to be looking at.


4.  If you want to tackle realism and you're willing to tackle the armor issues, you'll hit another hitch, which is that the armor system is modeled in a very general way. 

It applies percentages of damage vs. armor values, flat, with no explicit modeling of armor types and their specific resistances.  For example, plate is great against cuts, good against piercing, mediocre vs. blunt trauma, whereas a suit of cour bouilli over maille with padding underneath might provide inferior protection vs. piercing, but better protection vs. blunt trauma.

So the obvious thing to do, code-side, is to check the armor and weapon and adjust accordingly.  This is pretty hard to do efficiently, given the way the engine works; for efficiency, you want to check if the armor is in a range of armors that provide similar protection or assign the armor some values via an item slot, preferably during the initial setup of the game.  Same with weapons; their damage arrives at the code we have to do meaningful adjustment with raw, so you'll need to re-adjust it.

Then there's another issue; blunt causes non-lethal damage, unless you make some fancy adjustments.  The engine's expectation is that blunt is always non-lethal; obviously that's not realistic, and a hit from an Iron Staff to the head should probably, y'know, kill people.  But it doesn't, unless you factor that in.  I got around that by shifting all but a smidgen of weapons in Blood and Steel to Cut or Pierce; it works reasonably well, since blunt trauma "pierces" armor through the transmission of shockwaves into the flesh and bone beneath.


Lastly, you'll hit the fact that you can't do range-checks unless your armors are all strictly arranged in order of their types of protection in the MS code, since they're just integers, engine-side.  So you'll end up having to move every single armor and re-ordering them really strictly (if nobody here has seen Blood and Steel's items, go look, come back; it's not just done because I'm a pedant). 

It's a lot of work, and when you've done all that, people's save games don't work any more, because the game engine is very literal about the integers, so if 300 used to mean "Appaloosa" and now means "Iron Shield", your players are now attempting to ride a shield.

So... basically... I've been down this whole road, man.  I know what you're about to see happen; at the very least, grab the latest Blood and Steel source, look for the damage system core stuff in module_mission_templates.py and see how it works, it's a good starting-place.

TL:grin:NR version:  the code's already available to do a very fancy model of damage; I have serious issues with the over-simplification of your modeling but by all means, take what's already available and run with it, it's why all my stuff is Open Source :smile:
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I will definitely look into the Fancy Damage engine as a basis, and I agree, you've done a lot more than I have. There are a few points on which I deviate conceptually from your system, but it gives me a wealth of data to work with. Thank you.

I'm trying to strike a middle ground between realism and intuitive playability, in the sense that I want players to be mindful of what types of attacks they use against what kinds of armor. A brutally realistic system would be difficult to understand on an intuitive level; I've purposely condensed it to head/torso/legs (area) + light/medium/heavy (armor) + cutting/piercing/bludgeoning (attack). The main issue I had with the old system was that characters could simply take too many hits, especially in armor, and that it was too easy to take calculated risks; if you have 100 HP and a poleaxe will hit for 80, you could run into one poleaxe for sure knowing you will survive. That, to me, is absurd. It's not enough, in my opinion, to have a simple crit system, since the chance to take overwhelming damage should be based not simply on the weapon or wielder, but on the enemy's armor, physical state, and so on. This is why random instakills are, in my eyes, a necessary evil. They force the player to address combat as inherently entropic, using variables such as armor and maneuvering to minimize the entropy. Carelessness on the player's part should not result in inherently unfavorable odds, but rather in inherently less predictable odds.

I actually have a bleeding system very similar to the one you described (it also accounts for the level of exertion and how that affects the bleeding rate of different types of wounds, as well as whether or not the wound is open or plugged, such as by an arrow). I decided that it's simply not as playable in a real-time action-oriented setting as it would be in, say, a turn-based tactical setting, so I didn't include it. The reason I used cumulative wounds per body area to represent a higher chance of death is because the more wounds you have sustained, the greater the chance that the next attack will strike an already wounded area, penetrating even deeper and being even more likely to hit vital organs or otherwise deal serious damage. The reason I prefer this over the bleeding system is because once you've taken a decent-sized wound in the bleeding system, you have to retreat. You've got X amount of time to get treated or you will bleed out. In this system, if you take a hit, you can simply retreat from the front lines to a lower-risk area and assist or command; the only time you put yourself at greater risk of death is when you put yourself in harm's way.

As you said, addressing certain issues will cause others to pop up. I've been doing this for years in tabletop RPGs, so I know your pain. The big issue that I wanted to address was the absurd number of hits certain units could take, and the unnatural certainty with which they could do so. This has been addressed. If it means that Nords will have to run for the hills when Swadian knights come at them, I'm fine with that. It also means they can put a javelin through the horse's chest before it reaches them, or break its legs with a maul. They will have to use a wider variety of tactics rather than simply powering up their attack and defense and hoping for the best. Since this is not intended to be a competitive multiplayer mod with balance as the main goal, I'm okay with all of this.

I can see how blunt damage will be a major issue, code-wise. I don't know enough about M&B to say how I'll deal with that, but since I'll need two attack values per weapon anyway (wound and injury), I'm sure adding those will also allow me to add arbitrary new damage types that I can then substitute.

In any case, thank you very much for the detailed explanation. I will definitely look into your engine and learn from your work. Hopefully I can strike a balance between realism and tactical intuition that works for at least some people.
 
xenoargh said:
BTW, you can't get whether a hit is on the head or other body parts, unless it can be done via Script Enhancer.  Engine doesn't pass that data to the function we have for this stuff.

For the details about implementation, you really should have asked around the Forge first; certain things are either not available or can only be derived indirectly (with associated math costs).
Click to expand...

I'll definitely poke around The Forge a bit more. The use of tools like Script Enhancer is really what I'm here for.
 
oliver255 said:
This reminds me of Dwarf Fortress a little bit.  This + Decapitation/Dismemberment = Semi-3D Dwarf Fortress!
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I'm flattered that anyone would compare my work to Dwarf Fortress. If you don't hear from me for several months, I'm on another Dwarf Fortress binge.
 
SAAj said:
oliver255 said:
This reminds me of Dwarf Fortress a little bit.  This + Decapitation/Dismemberment = Semi-3D Dwarf Fortress!
Click to expand...

I'm flattered that anyone would compare my work to Dwarf Fortress. If you don't hear from me for several months, I'm on another Dwarf Fortress binge.
Click to expand...

Good luck with that!  Dwarf Fortress is an amazing game and sucked half of my life into it.  :grin:
 
dochtorgajo said:
SAAj said:
Overall, this will make archers significantly more powerful and cavalry significantly more vulnerable, since piercing attacks will make mincemeat of chainmail and horses (as they did in real life). Even heavy cavalry in the Middle Ages could not charge crossbowmen without support; it's about time piercing attacks, especially ranged piercing attacks, got the respect they deserved. Likewise, heavy blunt weaponry will be the bane of every knight's existence (again, like in real life). One flanged mace is worth a hundred swords against a plate helm, and knights will learn to fear a shield line bristling with warhammers. There is no such thing as a negligible attack in this system; every strike can kill or cripple, and there is an adequate offense against every armor type, even if some offer more overall protection than others.


http://www.mediafire.com/?aaqwj9tbune7e5q
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Well just to the horses/blunt weapons. Dont use term real life when youve most propably never seen well trained warhorse and absolutely never seen him in a battle situation or if youve never been bashed through head in well made helmet with warhammer.

Horses generally can not just survive (or better said HAVE) multiple greave halberd wounds, but they were many times still fit to carry their rider out of danger (and could even heal and fight afterwards). Also forget to stop any horse by that gentle poke you see in warband- if you thrive for reality that in this situation you either kill a horse and loose your pike (and break your arms and is thrown few yards back) or retain your pike and do no damage at all. (as most propable scenario in one on one with horseman- that he simply sidesteps you point and cracks your skull open is not possible to do in this game right now) These weapons were allways used en masse in several ranks (same with bayonet) as even if horse was well trained and armoured if there was no gap he couldnt just gallop through, best he could do would to slow down and run around, but if gap was already there or made by accident then even few horseman inside of formation could wrak havoc upon their enemy. (Look into what happened at the battle of Grandson where Louis de Chatel-Guyon and few horseman were able to kill 30 swiss and get to standards in the middle of a pikesquare of 10000 Swiss before they perished)

And crossbowmen without protection were nice meal for any cavalry at least in middle ages- as they could only dream about more than one or two volleys from efective range before horsemen were already among them- and they had better options than assaulting line of them frontally. Therefore ranged and cold weapons (pikes especially) were mixed together- ranged weapons were best means of killing cavalry, pikes were best means of preventing them to cause harm.

And blunt damage or any damage: Look into lancer charge at Omdurman and youll see that in real fight two handed swords are quite impropable to cause any serious injury at all even through cloth- how its possible? Easily- youre nervous and stressed fighting for your life your enemy is moving, dodging fighting for his- its hugely propable you hit him with the flat or not at all. Same with maces- you can dream about maces halberds etc. being doom of knights. Unless youre superman its so hugely impropable to kill a man in steel armour with single blow, let alone with tiny mace, if hes moving, you can just as well predict where lightning will strike. Best way to kill him is to slide your dagger through his visor or armpit while other two men are holding him in place. Fight itself never produced huge caualties in little time with this style of warfare, most killing appeared after one side broke and ran away. (Swiss at Marignano lost 8-14000 men dead or wounded but this was in 28 hour battle) On the other hand two handed sword in this game has killing rate of almost a machine gun it can kill anything in any armour almost intantly.

But otherwise concept is good.  :smile:
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I'm not a rider myself, but I grew up near horses and have several friends who are breeders. I know they're incredibly resilient, but it doesn't change the fact that they were nowhere near as well-protected as the rider. The Battle of Cressy is a perfect example of how vulnerable they are to heavy archery like longbows and crossbows.

Just as there are people who survive multiple gunshot wounds, there are certainly horses that survive multiple pike or halberd wounds. But it's certainly not worth taking the risk. In many areas, such as many parts of pre-Moghul India, it was highly frowned upon to intentionally injure a horse, which had a lot to do with cavalry tactics. If, like so many Scots, you have no moral qualms with cracking a horse's legs with your two-hander, you will fight horses very differently than someone who is trying to take down the rider without hurting the animal.

I agree that polearms should break when attacking horses, for sure, and that the heavier polearms should be grounded; a spearman standing in the open should not be able to thrust at a horse without getting thrown back, regardless of what happens to the horse.

As for maces and similar weapons, they were used by fast cavalry such as the Mongols to great effect; the flanged mace was a devastating weapon when combined with the momentum of a horse, and armor didn't mean much against that kind of concussive damage.

I don't own a giant sword collection or know how to train a warhorse, but I know a bit, both from history and from some practice, about how weapons and horses function in real-world applications. Simply put, horses were a lot more vulnerable than they are made out to be in movies, as was heavy armor.
 
Just keep in mind that the theory stuff should really wait until you see what the engine can do and understand how gamecode works; some of what you've talked about may not be able to be done, some of it will be hard to implement without performance issues without doing some major changes to Native that will most likely break savegames. 

The vast majority will be doable, though, with various caveats about practical concerns.

As for the balance issues, trust me, I know where that goes.  I had to keep buffing the Nords for ages before they quit sucking enough that people didn't complain, so just keep that in mind; you'll get what you want, np, the problem is always what players want vs. what you can do :wink:


Pikes were braced and designed to break.  The whole point of their length was to be long enough that what was described did not happen frequently.

Moreover, even well-trained war horses frequently shied from pikes.  Horses aren't very bright, by human standards, and could be trained, but they aren't suicidal, and it was difficult to get them to charge spears.

Swiss pikemen were already very dangerous well before firearms, and knights on horseback were largely an anachronism, fighting mainly on foot, by the time firearms took over, unless an opportunity existed to charge or their opponents weren't using pikes or the other anti-cavalry techniques available.

Crossbowmen were not just sitting ducks. 

This is a view of how things worked that isn't actually all that accurate.  Sure, their rate of fire was low, but people had to get to them first, which was often rather difficult.

Like archers, they used stakes, caltrops, and friendly infantry as shields against cavalry, and that doesn't count pavises, when they had time to deploy them.

Two-handed weapons were generally heavy enough that any serious hit was dangerous, due to blunt trauma, flat or blade. 

The real problem with them, and the reason why zweihanders and the like weren't terribly common, is that by the time they arrived as a response to plate armor, tactical use of men had changed, and pike formations backed by men using firearms were becoming the norm. 

Pike formations weren't terribly good places to use a zweihander; you did not have enough room for big strokes, so you were reduced to half-swording unless you charged the opposing pikemen ahead of your own.  Therefore the evidence suggests that zweihanders were mainly used by bodyguards and assault troops with a very specific role.

As for killing horses with these arms, it really depends on the horse.  By the 15th century, a warhorse was well-armored against this sort of attack, and generally wouldn't have taken damage, but again, that's the 15th century, and mounted charges were becoming rarer and rarer; in the 12th a lot of horses weren't covered in anything more than a padded quilt, and claymores were pretty useful, but if the riders were boot-to-boot, you just died. 

The Japanese didn't call the No-Dachi (which is a pun; it has a meaning of "horse-killing-sword" as well as just meaning "big sword") that for no reason.  A horse without armor is not incredibly hard to kill, it's just harder to kill than a man without armor.  The reason why knights practiced charging in close formations was to make it much more difficult for individual infantry to operate; if you've ever lined up your cavalry in Warband and then moved, not charged, through infantry, you'd see a fair approximation of how it worked.


Small maces have been tested, and are reasonably dangerous against people in plate armor, because of shock trauma; their problem was also their best trait; reach. 

Unlike a sword, they were very powerful weapons in a melee between dismounted men-at-arms or men-at-arms vs. pikemen, where everybody was packed together without much room to move; but they were generally at a disadvantage if in a one-on-one battle with enough room to effectively use the older styles of shield. 

But the combat conditions of that period generally favored maces; by the period they became very common weapons, the buckler had replaced the larger shields of previous eras; it became more important to have a shield that one could use in a crush, either as a shield or as a secondary arm, than to have full coverage.  If people used a sword instead, it was either because they were fighting against lightly-armored infantry or they were using a sword they could stab with that was tough enough to beat with, such as an epoc.

As for speed, I have no idea where you get the idea that guys in armor were impossible to hit, or that you'd just be "guessing", but IRL, it's not that hard to hit people with stuff; that's why they had to block.  Especially if one is locked into a melee; IRL, it would not have been uncommon for the front ranks of the combatants to be literally pushed together to the point where they could hardly even fight, with the second ranks attempting to stab or bash you over the shoulders of your opponents.

Look into what happened at the battle of Grandson where Louis de Chatel-Guyon and few horseman were able to kill 30 swiss and get to standards in the middle of a pikesquare of 10000 Swiss before they perished
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One should be very cautious about making a generalization from a case, and I certainly would not have picked this battle in particular. 

Those "few horsemen" represented far more money, treasure and time investment than the 30 pikemen, and from a tactical standpoint, they accomplished little.

This is a battle where the Burgundians lost 10:1 tactically, and was a strategic defeat as well, after all, and led to the total defeat of the Burgundians at the Battle of Murton. 

So, er, don't tell us how awesome cavalry were vs. silly Swiss with long poles, eh? 

They weren't; in fact, it can be argued that  that whole mode of combat finally died during this very war you're talking about, after teetering on the brink after Crecy and Agincourt.  Mounted shock cavalry were great while they weren't countered, but faded rather quickly when new methods made them more expensive than useful.

What Native shows, however, is nothing like how it actually worked, so we're in agreement about that :wink:

 
i suppose it's worth saying that pretty much no games afaik do armour correctly. Plate armour is meant to deflect blows which should really not do any damage to the character physically. it'd be better to shake them up a bit and give the attacker a chance to deliver a follow up. In all accounts i've read of infantry coming up against plate armoured guys, even cataphracts with mail in the early days, their number one problem was that they could scarcely actually inflict any damage on the armoured dudes. It's not like how it is in M&B (and every other game) where you have to just keep shooting/stabbing until his armour's "hit points" slowly whittle down. You could have a slight chance of hitting a flaw or joint in the armour and doing damage but for the most part, if your weapon was deflected by armour, no amount of persistence would magically make it strong or forceful enough to penetrate the suit.
That's why they opted to crumple the armour with blunt weapons and concuss the wearer inside.

I also dont particularly agree with the "percentage of likelihood someone will die" thing. It'd take a lot of careful balancing to ensure you didnt get freak events when someone simply refuses to die because they get "lucky" with the random numbers... And by the time you rig it up so that you avoid such situations, it's no different to a traditional HP system with slightly randomised damage values (unless you actually know how it works internally, but we write game code to be played, not to be read)

I've done a lot of musing on this topic myself. This isnt really explicitly M&B related but like xenoargh, i cant help but join in. All i can really come up with as a kind of solution to dealing with damage and death in games is such:
when someone is hit, the possibilities of the outcome are
death/incapacitation (dont let anyone tell you these should be treated as two separate things, fight-to-fight in video games. The difference is only in effect outside of the battle)
serious injury (losing your senses, losing use of a limb, bleeding)
and being stunned (disabling you from defending yourself for some period of time)

I suggest "HP" should be done away with completely. I realise numbers will always need to be used, but these numbers are for the computer to know how dead we are, not us. We need to know how dead we are in more human-accessible ways.
I would suggest instead of "HP" there could be some kind of scale for how aware and capable you are. As you are knocked around, your vision becomes more blurry, your actions more sluggish, perhaps you could even fall to a knee in some occasions These are all things which are immediately identifiable to us as "being slightly more dead" without needing any abstract interpretation. On the flip-side, these are effects which will lower your ability to fight, and increase the chance of the enemy overpowering you... Rather than it being just a number on a screen (while everything else about your character and abilities is totally as-normal... except maybe some blood stains)
This lower awareness could slightly subside over time, showing partial recovery/adrenaline. Hell, it could even be tied to some kind of perseverance/pain tolerance/aggression stat. But of course you'd never be quite yourself again.

If this was the deal, we could eventually just beat our enemies senseless until they were on the ground, unable to fight, with completely bloodied, blurry vision, or use their minor stupour as a wonderful opportunity to put a blade in one of the joints of their armour (either by pure chance or actual player directed skill... this is an issue unrelated to "damage systems")

I'm probably going way off track, and i imagine this will never be applicable to M&B but idk. it's something we all know is really broken in most games. I mean, we're still using pretty much the exact same portrayal of damage as was used in 1980s CRPGs. We may as well flash when we're hurt too. Speaking of which, when will someone make an M&B mod where you jump on crates to break them and take the contents.... which is obviously going to be a huge coin
 
Very well-thought out. Probably too hard to get into the M&B engine, but if something like this was in M&B2 I'd be very happy.
 
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