Weapons, Armor and the Hit to Kill Ratio

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@darksoulshin Sometimes less is more.

Your approach to the problem is both creative and ambitious -and I commend you for it, but it's akin to building a NASA-level robot just so it can make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You can make a PB&J yourself without having to pour great amounts of time and resources into creating a high-tech machine to do a simple task.

Realistic Battle Mod mitigates a lot of the issues with armor functionality and damage, but the point is we should not have to rely on a mod just make one of the basic and fundamental aspects of the game (the combat) work correctly. It should be a part of the Native Bannerlord experience. Taleworlds really bungled up damage calc, which is head-scratching and tragic because they have a successful blueprint called Warband which they can use as a free cheatsheet anytime.

As for PVP, your idea for Joint Hurtboxes and Armor Hurtboxes has merit, but the fact that armor pieces are purely cosmetic in multiplayer is a huge obstacle. This isn't so much a problem with your idea as it is an indictment on Taleworlds for moving forward with an absurd creative direction that runs antipodal to the proven successful Warband method of equipment selection. The armor is just a skin with no practical value, and with that in mind we can see just how bad Taleworlds missed with mark with Bannerlord.
 
Sometimes less is more.

Your approach to the problem is both creative and ambitious -and I commend you for it, but it's akin to building a NASA-level robot just so it can make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You can make a PB&J yourself without having to pour great amounts of time and resources into creating a high-tech machine to do a simple task.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.
What I propose is simple: put some extra hurtboxes and make some uncoverable, and finally raise the armor value of the armor a lot in proportion to their "realistic protection".
This is the tip at the end of the story, nothing complicated to program, because it doesn't require any more skills than they used to make the game as it is.
The thread simply specifies more details for the developer. While it is long and sometimes complicated, it ultimately says the above, which is disarmingly simple.
After that the choice between the number of hurtboxes and the number of models in battle (or one or the other) depends on what we want.
I want a core game that works and is deep in gameplay, even if the battles won't be 1000 vs 1000.
The opposite would be ... flat.
Realistic Battle Mod mitigates a lot of the issues with armor functionality and damage, but the point is we should not have to rely on a mod just make one of the basic and fundamental aspects of the game (the combat) work correctly. It should be a part of the Native Bannerlord experience. Taleworlds really bungled up damage calc, which is head-scratching and tragic because they have a successful blueprint called Warband which they can use as a free cheatsheet anytime.
Mods tweak the damage and armor value formulas.
They do not solve the main problem, which in my opinion is first of gameplay and then of numerical values.
Mods don't limit attack spam, they accentuate it.
To a legionnaire with a high armor value you have to hit him many times to knock him down, and if you lunge with the sword and hit him in the face, where he has a helmet that DOES NOT COVER THE FACE, that helmet grants him an armor value that does not. reward your accuracy with the thrust.
Applying this logic to the whole model, if the model wears protections of equal armor value in all points, attacking one point is almost like attacking another (except for some arbitrary constant that modifies the damage in point with respect to the other, thus generating damage localized).
Only if the enemy model does not have a piece of armor can you use that exposed area to damage it heavily ... but a legionnaire has only his face uncovered and, according to the current game system, it is covered although visually it is not.
Mods do not solve this underlying problem and cannot (they cannot go and change the number of hurtboxes on models, otherwise they would have to redo their entire armor catalog to tell them which hurtboxes they need to cover).
Unfortunately, the problem is in the hands of the developer and TW.
As for PVP, your idea for Joint Hurtboxes and Armor Hurtboxes has merit, but the fact that armor pieces are purely cosmetic in multiplayer is a huge obstacle. This isn't so much a problem with your idea as it is an indictment on Taleworlds for moving forward with an absurd creative direction that runs antipodal to the proven successful Warband method of equipment selection. The armor is just a skin with no practical value, and with that in mind we can see just how bad Taleworlds missed with mark with Bannerlord.
1) TW has a problem with the fan base, which wants working armor, doesn't want classes and wants to choose armor without it being cosmetic for its own sake.
2) have a problem with archers (especially in multiplayer but also in singleplayer).

I am offering them a solution that solves many problems, including these 2, but the fan base does not support what I propose (this suggestion specifically) because they want everything to be done immediately and in a "seemingly simple" way (which in practice means that doesn't work).
Actually the "simplest" way to perform but which requires the TW to work on the armor catalog and the choice, both for the TW and for the base, to opt for a deep gameplay giving up large numbers.
 
What you're proposing isn't 'simple', you're asking the devs to essentially recreate every single model and designate additional hitboxes to them and the multitude of variations/values based on every single different armor piece (your legionnaire helmet example). From the added attack animations needed for this to work feasibly, the NPCs to also implement this, and a whole bunch of other factors others can explain better (not a developer).
It would be truly wonderful if the combat is more realistic where you can be more specific in attacking visibly 'exposed' points on an individual enemy. This can maybe be done for 1v1 games (like For Honor?) or smaller pitched battles but you cannot expect this to be at all possible for 500v500 battles or even 250v250; that's adding in a ridiculously, exponential amount of calculations/computations. Not to mention making sure nothing crashes in large battles as they still do sometimes (at least for me).

What others suggest is much more straightforward and what these devs may be capable of at this point; tweak the number values of armor/weapons (or match what Warband had at a minimum) so they make some common sense. The fact this has been repeated but seemingly ignored by TW is what worries me; give us some plan/roadmap or thoughts on why things are the way it is so we (and modders) can figure out what to expect.
I mean, they changed the pilum/pila at one point to not be throwable (why?) only to revert after us raising a huge issue on? And even then, it still takes a lot of them to break a single shield.
 
Hard to understand?
Didn't say that buddy, just that it's unnecesarilly complicated :smile: . Warband's damage calculations worked just fine and were simple enough.

In the long run, I couldn't care less about how accurate it is to real life models, or how detailed it is, or whatever. I just want an armor system that makes the game fun. It sure as hell wouldn't be fun to have the game thrown into another early access year to develop some overly complicated model that would require rebalancing every single armor piece in the entire game :smile: . The current hitbox system isn't bad, just the damage formula used to calculate damage :smile:

Just making blunt and ouch-rain ignore less armor would go long ways, no need to re-do all the hitboxes in the game for that, right? :smile:

Also yeah, quit derailing the thread with your model, you already have an entire thread dedicated to that :smile:
 
it's so simple that after 2 years you still complain that nothing has changed.
Throughout my thread I clarify why it is not enough to tweak those formulas and above all I explain why impact damage is useful in cases of very well protected people (chainmail + plate, like a legionnaire). In the cases of gambeson+chainmail+ plate, impact damage generally causes more damage than the others(cut and perforation).
But I am talking about the system that I have proposed, which DOES NOT JUST RETOUCH THE FORMULAS.
And I explain that just doing that is not enough, you have to put your hand to hurtboxes and reconceive the armor system.
System that is extremely simple.
This would require overhaul of animations, specifically new attack animations from different angles etc. Which I am for but most of the people at least on forums seem to be extremely conservative when it comes to anything remotely new, they just want warband all over again. I personally want imroved combat system.
 
I don't think we're "conservative" so much as realistic.

Taleworlds has no obligation to redo the entire combat system from the ground up. We already paid our 60 dollars for the combat system they already promised, and did not indicate to us they would do anything like Darksoulshin's system. Can you agree this is true?

They probably have little to no interest in it either. It would be a lot of work for them, for no extra benefit to them, in a game which already has a lot of problems that need fixing more urgently. Can you agree this is true?

Even if they *did* have an interest in doing so, adding so many complicated computations to combat in 500v500 battles would seriously hurt performance in a game which is trying to optimize itself already. Can you agree this is true?

On top of all this, most players don't even care about the entire combat system being reworked from the ground up and would be happy enough with an abstraction.

All we want is for the game to be decently balanced and vaguely realistic. It does NOT have to be a 100% perfect true-to-life simulation. Such a thing would make a marginal difference to how fun the game is. In fact, Taleworlds trying to achieve a super deep simulation is the main reason why development has already stretched into 10 years now.

Armour just needs to have better damage values against arrows and maybe some small changes against blunt damage, that's it.
 
I don't understand why you complain about the armor system.
After all, you don't really want to change it.
I wrote a system months ago that changed the paradigm of "how the system should be" and you can see from the votes that no one wants the system to change in that sense.
I'm not going to write a summary here because in the link you can read it and understand how it works.
If you wanted a more realistic armor system (which not only limits damage but also makes various hurtboxes covered or uncovered), you would have already filled the forum with threads to do so.
But you haven't and apparently you don't want to do this or you don't fully understand what it takes for the system to work the way you really want it to work.
Just tweaking some trivial formula of damage and reduction of the same is not enough.
JOINT HURTBOXES and ARMOR HURTBOXES: an armor system that provide a way to balance factions warfare and make more deep the combat system(suggestions)

I want a change in armor.. but lets not get carried away with complex system.

P.s get over yourself
 
This would require overhaul of animations, specifically new attack animations from different angles etc.
I want to be more specific than you were, because I appreciate your comment.
We keep the model animation distinct from the control system or commands.
Not necessarily multiple animations are related to pressing multiple keys.
A practical example: IN super smash bros (any game in the series) there are 2 types of jumps, the high jump and the low jump.
Both are performed with the same key (the one relating to the jump).
How do you do one or the other? With a different release time of the jump button.
If you release the button before 6 frames (1 / 10th of a second if the game goes at 60 fps) then do the low jump.
If you release the key after 6 frames then perform the high jump.
(this only shows how no more keys are needed to make more animations). in the specific case, being both jump animations, this command structure in which you use a single button for 2 actions, works well when the actions involved are similar to each other but with a slight difference, perhaps linked to the magnitude of a characteristic of that type of action (in the case of the jump the characteristic of which the different magnitude is highlighted is the height reached with the two types of jump).

Let's move on to us and the angles.
Currently in play there are 4 angles (2 horizontal, 1 vertical and 1 lunge).
Let's focus on the horizontal ones and consider a blow that starts from the right of our character and goes to the left.
Suppose we want this blow to start from the bottom right and go up diagonally up to the left.
Are new keys needed to perform this animation?
No.
Basically in game, you just hit the attack button after selecting the direction you want the attack to come from (right in our case).
While holding the key, the attack is "charged" and when the key is released the attack animation starts.
Before releasing the button, you can rotate the camera up or down, changing the angle of the attack (which will go towards the enemy's head if you are looking up or towards the enemy's legs if you are looking up). look below).
So how do we perform a diagonal attack starting from a horizontal one?
loading the attack, looking down, RELEASING THE BUTTON and starting the attack and, DURING THE ATTACK ANIMATION, the camera rises.
In this way the "right to left" slash, starting "from the bottom and ending up", will execute a diagonal slash from the bottom up.
Any other combination of blows (therefore as many angles as you wish) can be obtained by making a similar pattern but using blows coming from other directions.
Rather, what should be done would be to make weapon hitboxes and hurtboxes very precise, so that there are no improper collisions that would break the dive.

I want a change in armor.. but lets not get carried away with complex system.
If it were complicated, I wouldn't insist.
Instead it is simple, but requires work, SIMPLE, but still work.
And for those who ask: what would the TW gain?
The immortality in the Olympus of video games and the solidity of a community of players who appreciate the depth of gameplay, a community that will finance the expansions for the game, which deserves to be kept alive, or future projects of the same company (which has earned the respect and trust).
 
Didn't say that buddy, just that it's unnecesarilly complicated :smile: . Warband's damage calculations worked just fine and were simple enough.

In the long run, I couldn't care less about how accurate it is to real life models, or how detailed it is, or whatever. I just want an armor system that makes the game fun. It sure as hell wouldn't be fun to have the game thrown into another early access year to develop some overly complicated model that would require rebalancing every single armor piece in the entire game :smile: . The current hitbox system isn't bad, just the damage formula used to calculate damage :smile:

Just making blunt and ouch-rain ignore less armor would go long ways, no need to re-do all the hitboxes in the game for that, right? :smile:

Also yeah, quit derailing the thread with your model, you already have an entire thread dedicated to that :smile:
I'll give you a practical example of why the "warband" formula is not enough to make the game fun but only "like the others".

Take an archer against a warrior with plate armor and a two-handed sword.
Then take the same warrior against one similar to him but with a shield and sword.

1A)the archer can hit him (2 handet sword without shield) with arrows ANYWHERE and deal damage to him that is similar at any point he hits.
result: the archer does not have to AIM WELL, he just needs to catch it at any point.
2A)In the case of the warrior with the shield: the archer must avoid shooting arrows on the shield and therefore will aim where he can hit it, AT THE LEGS.
In the leg the warrior wears an heavy armor plate, but as we saw earlier, the damage he takes is still enough to knock him down after 4-5 arrows.
result: the archer must aim at the legs, which, although protected, still suffer considerable damage.

3A)warrior without shield vs warrior with shield: generally the one without a shield ends badly if both are of equal combat ability.

now let's put the same protagonists in the system that I propose:
1B)archer vs warrior with 2-handed sword and plate armor:
the archer shoots his arrows, but since he is distant, he ends up hitting the parts of the armor that mostly cover the warrior's body. The damage is so small that if he kept hitting it, it would take 40 arrows to take him down (they always hit in covered areas).
The warrior approaches, so the archer can AIM BETTER.
If he aims well, he catches him in an open area, which is probably equal to 10% of the total area offered to the enemy (suppose the face, the joints of the arms, or the armpits).
If he catches it there, he deals a lot of damage to him (2-3 arrows there and knocks him down).
Obviously the enemy is close by now and from a distance he was not lucky enough to hit him, so he can shoot him 1 arrow and from there on we will continue melee.
If the target is hit in an open area because the archer is aiming well, then in close combat the archer will still have some chance of overwhelming his opponent (assuming they are of equal combat skill and their defensive equipment is at favor of the 2-handed sword warrior).
If instead he hasn't hit it from afar or close range, the two-handed sword and plate armor warrior will likely have a heavy advantage in hand-to-hand combat against an archer wearing not-so-protective armor.
Result: the archer has to AIM WELL from near and from a distance he has to rely partly on luck, as well as on aiming.

2B)warrior with shield vs archer:
the archer will not shoot the arrows on the shield, so he will aim for the legs.
But the legs have very high protection (plates), so the warrior with sword, shield and plate armor will not take much damage.
Both will go into melee and the shield warrior will likely win.
You will say: so the archer becomes useless against guys like this?
If something is not done, their options are very limited, so a suggestion would be to "make the shield heavier and bulky for every darso or arrow that sticks to it" (the pilum would clutter it a lot or could even damage it a lot in addition) .
So if we suppose that the same situation starts from a greater distance where our archer has the opportunity to shoot 10 arrows at the target's shield and that shield has already accumulated some, the encumbrance of the shield will make him slow in transport and defense.
Therefore the warrior with the shield will have to throw the shield in order not to be cluttered and slowed down and to be able to reach the archer.
So now we have an archer with a sword and a warrior with a sword, no shield and plate armor.
If there is still a little distance between them, the archer will be able to shoot some arrows and find himself in the same situation as the warrior with the 2-handed sword and without a shield, only the sword is now 1-handed.
The results will therefore be similar, but in this case the archer must face a shorter and less overbearing sword.

3B)Warrior with two-handed sword and warrior with sword and shield.
The two-handed sword warrior can always parry and deflect blows, but in addition he has to worry less about being hit, as not all enemy blows will hit open areas, but those protected by armor, which will greatly reduce the damage. damage.
So while he "survives longer" he has the opportunity to break the enemy shield or hit him when he lowers it.
His opponent has the same certainties about defense as he does, but he has to hurry to hit him before his shield falls apart.
If this happened, the clash would be between a warrior with a 2-handed sword and a warrior with a 1-handed sword and no shield.
So the clash will depend, with the same skill, on how long the warrior with the two-handed sword remains alive when he breaks the enemy shield.

the three (archer and the two warriors) will have to aim well in the weak points because the spam of the attacks will end up making him hit the armor and not the covered puntis.
In the specific case, the warriors against the archer may be less precise, since the archer does not have an excellent coverage of his hurtboxes, instead both the archer and the two warriors, when they are against a warrior with plate armor, will have to To be precise.
I deal with blunt damage in the thread and generally help against those with such heavy armor by giving you the chance to be less accurate in hitting them, although hitting them accurately also helps.
 
Such a system with hitboxes and coverage would be nice as raising the armor values does not make the game much better, except for twohanded users trying to murder in the rear of the enemies but in front of their archers. The problem of strong armor is a shift in balance which is not good, as player and player-led parties get even stronger than now.

If the game were set in the era of hardened plate and in the fantasy scenario of lots of soldiers wearing such complete plate, strong armor might be ok. But in the early medieval setting any system bothers me in which maces become the king of weapons. That's so unrealistic that I prefer to suffer the weak armor instead.
 
I don't think we're "conservative" so much as realistic.

Taleworlds has no obligation to redo the entire combat system from the ground up. We already paid our 60 dollars for the combat system they already promised, and did not indicate to us they would do anything like Darksoulshin's system. Can you agree this is true?

They probably have little to no interest in it either. It would be a lot of work for them, for no extra benefit to them, in a game which already has a lot of problems that need fixing more urgently. Can you agree this is true?

Even if they *did* have an interest in doing so, adding so many complicated computations to combat in 500v500 battles would seriously hurt performance in a game which is trying to optimize itself already. Can you agree this is true?

On top of all this, most players don't even care about the entire combat system being reworked from the ground up and would be happy enough with an abstraction.

All we want is for the game to be decently balanced and vaguely realistic. It does NOT have to be a 100% perfect true-to-life simulation. Such a thing would make a marginal difference to how fun the game is. In fact, Taleworlds trying to achieve a super deep simulation is the main reason why development has already stretched into 10 years now.

Armour just needs to have better damage values against arrows and maybe some small changes against blunt damage, that's it.

Not without precedent tho -games like Arma recalibrated and totally did an overhaul on their tank and armor systems adding all new hitbox and penetration values after first release. They also can feature hundreds of if not thousands of AI in battle. They too could have said "whats the point, our simplified armor damage values are good enough. Why risk further hurting things like FPS performance..".. but they chose to rebuild a robust system after the fact regardless simply for the fact that its a better more fulfilling system.

Sure we could all agree that the game needs help in so many other departments but we could also agree that nothing new and robust would be addressed then -just a whole lotta mediocre systems at play with greatness nowhere -can we also agree on that?
 
I'll give you a practical example of why the "warband" formula is not enough to make the game fun but only "like the others".

Take an archer against a warrior with plate armor and a two-handed sword.
Then take the same warrior against one similar to him but with a shield and sword.

1A)the archer can hit him (2 handet sword without shield) with arrows ANYWHERE and deal damage to him that is similar at any point he hits.
result: the archer does not have to AIM WELL, he just needs to catch it at any point.
2A)In the case of the warrior with the shield: the archer must avoid shooting arrows on the shield and therefore will aim where he can hit it, AT THE LEGS.
In the leg the warrior wears an heavy armor plate, but as we saw earlier, the damage he takes is still enough to knock him down after 4-5 arrows.
result: the archer must aim at the legs, which, although protected, still suffer considerable damage.

3A)warrior without shield vs warrior with shield: generally the one without a shield ends badly if both are of equal combat ability.

now let's put the same protagonists in the system that I propose:
1B)archer vs warrior with 2-handed sword and plate armor:
the archer shoots his arrows, but since he is distant, he ends up hitting the parts of the armor that mostly cover the warrior's body. The damage is so small that if he kept hitting it, it would take 40 arrows to take him down (they always hit in covered areas).
The warrior approaches, so the archer can AIM BETTER.
If he aims well, he catches him in an open area, which is probably equal to 10% of the total area offered to the enemy (suppose the face, the joints of the arms, or the armpits).
If he catches it there, he deals a lot of damage to him (2-3 arrows there and knocks him down).
Obviously the enemy is close by now and from a distance he was not lucky enough to hit him, so he can shoot him 1 arrow and from there on we will continue melee.
If the target is hit in an open area because the archer is aiming well, then in close combat the archer will still have some chance of overwhelming his opponent (assuming they are of equal combat skill and their defensive equipment is at favor of the 2-handed sword warrior).
If instead he hasn't hit it from afar or close range, the two-handed sword and plate armor warrior will likely have a heavy advantage in hand-to-hand combat against an archer wearing not-so-protective armor.
Result: the archer has to AIM WELL from near and from a distance he has to rely partly on luck, as well as on aiming.

2B)warrior with shield vs archer:
the archer will not shoot the arrows on the shield, so he will aim for the legs.
But the legs have very high protection (plates), so the warrior with sword, shield and plate armor will not take much damage.
Both will go into melee and the shield warrior will likely win.
You will say: so the archer becomes useless against guys like this?
If something is not done, their options are very limited, so a suggestion would be to "make the shield heavier and bulky for every darso or arrow that sticks to it" (the pilum would clutter it a lot or could even damage it a lot in addition) .
So if we suppose that the same situation starts from a greater distance where our archer has the opportunity to shoot 10 arrows at the target's shield and that shield has already accumulated some, the encumbrance of the shield will make him slow in transport and defense.
Therefore the warrior with the shield will have to throw the shield in order not to be cluttered and slowed down and to be able to reach the archer.
So now we have an archer with a sword and a warrior with a sword, no shield and plate armor.
If there is still a little distance between them, the archer will be able to shoot some arrows and find himself in the same situation as the warrior with the 2-handed sword and without a shield, only the sword is now 1-handed.
The results will therefore be similar, but in this case the archer must face a shorter and less overbearing sword.

3B)Warrior with two-handed sword and warrior with sword and shield.
The two-handed sword warrior can always parry and deflect blows, but in addition he has to worry less about being hit, as not all enemy blows will hit open areas, but those protected by armor, which will greatly reduce the damage. damage.
So while he "survives longer" he has the opportunity to break the enemy shield or hit him when he lowers it.
His opponent has the same certainties about defense as he does, but he has to hurry to hit him before his shield falls apart.
If this happened, the clash would be between a warrior with a 2-handed sword and a warrior with a 1-handed sword and no shield.
So the clash will depend, with the same skill, on how long the warrior with the two-handed sword remains alive when he breaks the enemy shield.

the three (archer and the two warriors) will have to aim well in the weak points because the spam of the attacks will end up making him hit the armor and not the covered puntis.
In the specific case, the warriors against the archer may be less precise, since the archer does not have an excellent coverage of his hurtboxes, instead both the archer and the two warriors, when they are against a warrior with plate armor, will have to To be precise.
I deal with blunt damage in the thread and generally help against those with such heavy armor by giving you the chance to be less accurate in hitting them, although hitting them accurately also helps.
How do you suppose TW is to input all these variations and coding into the combat? That part isn't simple at all, nor feasible with the thousands on thousands of computations required.
Tangential example, it's relatively 'simple' for me to toss a basketball into a hoop in RL from various angles; but not for a robotic arm. It can be done but the amount of calculations needed to do that (ie trajectory, weight, distance, environment, etc...) isn't so 'simple'. Now do that, but with 500 robotic arms shooting from evermoving positions, shooting into 500 evermoving and changing baskets, shooting different types of baskets, and accounting for all the possible collisions in the same room.
 
Result: the archer has to AIM WELL from near and from a distance he has to rely partly on luck, as well as on aiming.
So not only you want to revamp all the hitbox system but also the aiming AI for archers, and also rely on it to work properly.
If something is not done, their options are very limited, so a suggestion would be to "make the shield heavier and bulky for every darso or arrow that sticks to it"
And you want to overhaul the movement system to take into account ouch-rain stuck into targets.

the three (archer and the two warriors) will have to aim well in the weak points because the spam of the attacks will end up making him hit the armor and not the covered puntis.
So the AI needs a much more sophisticated approach for attacking to take into account hitting the less armored parts of their opponents, while in the middle of a jiggly moshpit when two lines of infantry collide.
I deal with blunt damage in the thread and generally help against those with such heavy armor by giving you the chance to be less accurate in hitting them, although hitting them accurately also helps.
So your entire rework is just "be more accurate to deal damage, be less accurate and deal less damage". This works, in theory, fine for the player in combat with less soldiers. But are you aware that the AI can't land stabbing attacks to save their own lives, and in the front lines attacks can be interrupted by hitting other troops? You really want them to be, or believe they can be, more accurate in a 300 vs 300 fight that currently is just a mess? Except for blunt of course, that you propose to be strong regardless of aiming at strong points, which means stones would still be as strong as they are now and maces will dominate since the AI can't aim properly :iamamoron:

If they suck at being accurate, which is very likely to happen given the jiggly moshpits that infantry fights are, or with cavalry knocking everyone around, or archers that prefer to aim at cavalry circling around them instead of a mass of infantry approaching, all you're doing is reducing the damage everyone will do, except for the lucky few hits that end up hitting a good target.

Essentially all you did was reduce damage dealt by everyone in a very convoluted way that the AI will rarely, if ever, benefit from, because the AI simply doesn't have the same skill level a player does. And if you also want to overhaul the combat AI so that they learn to aim better and make the system work as you intend it to, there's a ton of other things you'll need to fix too, like the AI deciding to aim at circling cavalry, or the jiggly moshpits, or commands like advance/fall back working like ass, and shields soaking way too many hits, etc.

Look, don't get me wrong, like everyone else I want a smarter AI, and it would be really cool to have different skill level of AIs depending on troop tier, and stuff working properly as they should in general. But at this stage of development I doubt they can (or care) to fix any of these things or start implementing new, bigger, more complex systems, given that they've already scrapped lots of much simpler systems that were going to be in the game.

All they have to do is make armor prevent more damage, that's it. They aren't going to re-do all the AIs to work better in a more complex hitbox system, which yes, it'd be fancy and cool and whatever, but would require changing and fixing lots of stuff about combat that they haven't even bothered going at yet. It simply isn't realistic, TW can barely keep a 3 month update going without introducing more bugs and fixing important things, and you want them to implement this huge overhaul? Are we looking at the development of the same game?
 
If it were complicated, I wouldn't insist.
Instead it is simple, but requires work, SIMPLE, but still work.
And for those who ask: what would the TW gain?
The immortality in the Olympus of video games and the solidity of a community of players who appreciate the depth of gameplay, a community that will finance the expansions for the game, which deserves to be kept alive, or future projects of the same company (which has earned the respect and trust).
It is indeed needlessly complicated. Circular logic - "if I was wrong I wouldn't be doing this, but I can't possibly be wrong, therefore it is right to do this."

The existing combat system which models locational damage, different armour values for different body regions, relative speed, and weapon handling is already far more sophisticated than just about anything else in this genre. The level of detail is fine, only the outputs are the issue.

I don't know if I should waste any more digital ink trying to convince you. If the poll you made which shows a majority of players against your suggestion isn't enough, it is probably impossible to ever convince you of the basic facts of reality.
The problem of strong armor is a shift in balance which is not good, as player and player-led parties get even stronger than now.
Realistically strong armour will not be a balance problem at all if done correctly. Instead it will make balance and difficulty scaling exactly how they should be. Literally just look at Warband. It's a clear example of armour working and gameplay being good as a result.
If the game were set in the era of hardened plate and in the fantasy scenario of lots of soldiers wearing such complete plate, strong armor might be ok. But in the early medieval setting any system bothers me in which maces become the king of weapons. That's so unrealistic that I prefer to suffer the weak armor instead.
Early mediaeval armour was not trivial. Compared to the weapons of its day it could be very very good at protecting. It gave fantastic protection against axes and swords, and good protection against arrows and spears.




Anna Comnena wrote that during the Battle of Duazzo (1108 AD), the Byzantines resorted to shooting the Frankish horses because their arrows were ineffective against Frankish mail.67 Joinville describes his servants donning him in his jousting hauberk as he lay ill on the deck of a ship to protect him from incoming Saracen arrows.68 Joinville later recounts an incident involving Walter of Châtillon in which Saracen missiles were ineffective:

...and whilst the Turks were fleeing before him, they (who shoot as well backwards as forwards) would cover him with darts. When he had driven them out of the village, he would pick out the darts that were sticking all over him; and put on his coat-of-arms again... Then, turning round, and seeing that the Turks had come in at the other end of the street, he would charge them again, sword in hand, and drive them out. And this he did about three times in the manner I have described.69

Odo of Deuil wrote about King Louis VII in an engagement during the 2nd Crusade. After losing his bodyguard he was forced to flee the enemy by scaling a rock face:

The enemy climbed after, in order to capture him, and the more distant rabble shot arrows at him. But by the will of God his armour70 protected him from the arrows.71

During the 3rd Crusade, Bahā'al-Dīn, Saladin's biographer, wrote that the Norman crusaders were:

...drawn up in front of the cavalry, stood firm as a wall, and every foot-soldier wore a vest of thick felt and a coat of mail so dense and strong that our arrows made no impression on them... I saw some with from one to ten arrows sticking in them, and still advancing at their ordinary pace without leaving the ranks.72



Of course, mail was not impenetrable. But it provided great protection against most bows, most arrows and most archers.

Lamellar was even more protective still. Not as near-immune to arrows as a good set of plate, but pretty close.

Making armour work as it did in real life should not make maces the king of weapons because they were not the king of weapons in real life either. Swing speed, their short length, and the Handling stat exist to keep maces balanced relative to other options. And as I have said, blunt damage needs adjustment. Right now it ignores 100% of armour which is also unrealistic (real life armour was padded). Fixing that would mean that even after buffing armour, maces would not be much stronger than they are now.
 
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So not only you want to revamp all the hitbox system but also the aiming AI for archers, and also rely on it to work properly.
Actually I was referring to player archers, no to AIs.
In the case of AI there are two approaches:
-from a distance (therefore beyond a given distance that will be chosen by the developer): they just need to aim at the entire enemy model. It will be luck to decide whether the combination of the arrow's trajectory to the path chosen by the target will result in an arrow stuck in an uncovered hurtbox or in a protected one.
- up close: the AI must target one of the discovered hurtboxes. The approach is no different than how the AI chooses to attack a target, of course it has to do so by choosing from multiple hurtboxes.
And you want to overhaul the movement system to take into account ouch-rain stuck into targets
no, there is already the mechanics in play, but apparently no one notices it and it is not exploited at all times.
It is called ENCUMBRANCE.
You can see this in your inventory and it varies when you equip or unequip pieces of armor.
I simply suggest using it more and specifically I have already written a thread on how to use it to balance the relationship between archers and foot units with shields.
Let's say that the various threads that I write are intertwined with each other and each of them solves one or more aspects that I consider problematic in the game, with the balance, the depth of gameplay and the realism in the gameplay at the center.
[POLL] SHIELD + STUCKED PROJECTILE = ENCUMBRANCE

And you want to overhaul the movement system
I have already suggested doing this to greatly increase the player's degrees of freedom without losing realism and without risking having people jumping everywhere, but not in relation to this thread.
The suggestion of expanding movement skills was just to get more combat skills (squatting, step-dodge, high jump (the one in the game) and low jump, then crawl)) .
I could have included the ability to cling and climb edges (can be useful in some cases) and the ability to climb ladders and ropes.
You will say: why these things? what are they for?
In singleplayer there is the skill roguery which practically does not reflect what it would like to suggest.
Do you want to be a killer of kings while you're at war? Go into enemy territory, to the edges of the walls, see if the guards are watching you or not, throw the rope with the hook, climb the walls, go to the castle, infiltrate somewhere by crawling into some hole or crouching down to pass somewhere. window and, if no one has discovered you, you come to the lord.
In short: without the above mechanics, many of these approaches are not feasible.
And I'm not even the type to use these approaches, so I don't suggest them for myself, but unlike many others, I make suggestions for having a game that is as close to expectations as possible.
ADD NEW MOVEMENT MECHANICS(dodge/dash,low jump/jump,fast crouch/crouch & combinations)
So the AI needs a much more sophisticated approach for attacking to take into account hitting the less armored parts of their opponents, while in the middle of a jiggly moshpit when two lines of infantry collide
It depends on the type of situation, but generally yes.
In the case of infantry lines, the approach is that of the lunge (stab).
They simply need to aim at one of the target's hurtboxes in front of them. The lunge is an attack that allows both the player and the AI to accurately target everything in front (head, shoulders, armpits, arms, torso, legs and even the feet).
More complicated would be in the case of cuts of the horizontal, vertical or diagonal type.
But in these cases I don't think we need to act very differently than what is already done now.
If I had to consider what more needs to be done, in the case of the horizontal and vertical ones, it is to act on the rotation axis to ensure that the trajectory of the weapon and therefore its hitbox meets that of the target's hitbox.
But I think these factors are already taken into account by the game as it is now, otherwise the AI might not have the combat "tactic" it has now.
So your entire rework is just "be more accurate to deal damage, be less accurate and deal less damage". This works, in theory, fine for the player in combat with less soldiers. But are you aware that the AI can't land stabbing attacks to save their own lives, and in the front lines attacks can be interrupted by hitting other troops? You really want them to be, or believe they can be, more accurate in a 300 vs 300 fight that currently is just a mess? Except for blunt of course, that you propose to be strong regardless of aiming at strong points, which means stones would still be as strong as they are now and maces will dominate since the AI can't aim properly :iamamoron:

If they suck at being accurate, which is very likely to happen given the jiggly moshpits that infantry fights are, or with cavalry knocking everyone around, or archers that prefer to aim at cavalry circling around them instead of a mass of infantry approaching, all you're doing is reducing the damage everyone will do, except for the lucky few hits that end up hitting a good target.
Let's say that the principle is the one you explained but the results you draw from it are very pessimistic.
I'm not an optimistic type, but not a pessimist like you XD.
In general it is not a question of "luck", but of "probability".
in a match 300 vs 300, the AIs still have an aim which depends on the difficulty of the game. If the developer wants the AI to have good aim, he can already give it to him.
With archers and hand-to-hand fighters, it was quite noticeable in the first months of early access.
With each patch that came out, the AI skill level related to melee or aiming was adjusted and we went from having snipers to having blinds and from having sword masters to incompetent totals.
So "how good are they at hitting each other" is a controllable variable.
Setting that variable, for a large number of soldiers and lunges performed, how many of them will hit?
Clearly the probability will depend on how much the target is covered by his own armor (and on the type of armor etc ..).
The first few minutes of confrontation between two lines of soldiers will not be too short and will allow the player or the AI (if able) to perform tactical maneuvers with other units.
Fights are currently so fast that you don't have time to do anything tactically relevant.
In general, if seen as 1 vs 1 clashes, there will be a lot of precision, but if you move away and look at the 300 VS 300 from the outside, it is simply US who can no longer grasp that precision and therefore it will seem like the classic clash in where two infantry meet and hit each other hoping to score.
But it is only the effect of the change of perspective.
Which in reality occurs.
Essentially all you did was reduce damage dealt by everyone in a very convoluted way that the AI will rarely, if ever, benefit from, because the AI simply doesn't have the same skill level a player does
AI capability is a developer's choice.
In the "game difficulty" options you can choose between having a fast AI, quick in the execution of attacks and that knows where to inflict them, or a complete incompetent.
I've already written it above, since early access started there have been patches that changed the AI capabilities and challenge difficulty.
I'm talking about the only combat in melee 1 vs 1 or in any case with low numbers.
And if you also want to overhaul the combat AI so that they learn to aim better and make the system work as you intend it to, there's a ton of other things you'll need to fix too, like the AI deciding to aim at circling cavalry, or the jiggly moshpits, or commands like advance/fall back working like ass, and shields soaking way too many hits, etc
I repeat. Not only is AI aiming not a problem, it has gotten a lot worse because it was too good.
If anything, it is the choice of TACTICS that the AI performs that is not good.
To which is added the inability of the player to be able to select a target to aim and order a unit to perform certain actions against that target.
There are problems that must be solved, not passively accepted.
Here is a TW problem.
Creating a game where there should be tactics and having an AI that doesn't know how to execute classic tactics is a serious problem that should be solved.
Players should complain about the lack, not simplify the game down to catch up with an AI that doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
Look, don't get me wrong, like everyone else I want a smarter AI, and it would be really cool to have different skill level of AIs depending on troop tier, and stuff working properly as they should in general. But at this stage of development I doubt they can (or care) to fix any of these things or start implementing new, bigger, more complex systems, given that they've already scrapped lots of much simpler systems that were going to be in the game.

All they have to do is make armor prevent more damage, that's it. They aren't going to re-do all the AIs to work better in a more complex hitbox system, which yes, it'd be fancy and cool and whatever, but would require changing and fixing lots of stuff about combat that they haven't even bothered going at yet. It simply isn't realistic, TW can barely keep a 3 month update going without introducing more bugs and fixing important things, and you want them to implement this huge overhaul? Are we looking at the development of the same game?
And I've been reading the same complaint threads for years.
I see them appear periodically because the problem is not solved.
The problem is not solved because there are no levers to solve it.
we do not have the levers to solve it because we continue to act on a parameter that ALONE is not a lever for solving the problem.
There are no levers because there are no mechanics that ACT AS AN INDEPENDENT LEVERAGE or with a dependence on the others that is CALCULATED AND WANTED.
I am suggesting mechanics (which deepen the gameplay) that they are LEVERS, independent or not.

By independent or non-independent levers I mean those parameters or mechanisms on which you can act to obtain a result without other parameters varying beyond the threshold you set.

For years I have been saying that the armor value alone is not enough to solve the problem, because changing it would create others whose resolution would involve lowering it and returning to the previous problem, circularly.

In order not to do a new job 1 time that would solve several problems, the same operations and their inverse are performed 100 times on a single problem, which not only does not solve itself, but creates others.
In my opinion 2 years have already been lost and the problem (the various problems, this is only 1 of many) has not been solved.
But both the developers and the fan base insist on looking for quick solutions that don't work.
 
It is indeed needlessly complicated. Circular logic - "if I was wrong I wouldn't be doing this, but I can't possibly be wrong, therefore it is right to do this.
I am not saying that I am right by choice, in fact I am not even saying that I am right.
I say I'm not wrong because after 2 years the problem is not solved and if the developers do not change the armor value, you can see that by changing it many other parameters and balanced parts of the game get out of control.

What I am saying is, "there is another method of acting on armor to get what we want without the serious side effects of just raising the armor value."
You don't have to convince me and I don't have to convince you.
I'm just showing you a method by arguing what its strengths and weaknesses are.
For me the merits are worth the defects.

I know what raising the armor value on ARMOR means, but I also know what the consequences of changing it mean on EVERYTHING ELSE.
Someone ignores that EVERYTHING ELSE and thinks that raising the armor value will solve the problem without creating more.
It will create them and that's why the developers don't change it.
Because they would not know how to balance other situations that would arise.
I have already written how to do it, but it requires work, work that would have already been done in 2 years.
The existing combat system which models locational damage, different armour values for different body regions, relative speed, and weapon handling is already far more sophisticated than just about anything else in this genre. The level of detail is fine, only the outputs are the issue
And who denies it?
But as you wrote: the problem is the result.
And the result is that because if there are 9 mechanics in the game that lead to that result, the number 10 is missing.
That mechanical tithe is the lever that allows us to act on that result by bringing it where we want.
 
How do you suppose TW is to input all these variations and coding into the combat? That part isn't simple at all, nor feasible with the thousands on thousands of computations required.
Tangential example, it's relatively 'simple' for me to toss a basketball into a hoop in RL from various angles; but not for a robotic arm. It can be done but the amount of calculations needed to do that (ie trajectory, weight, distance, environment, etc...) isn't so 'simple'. Now do that, but with 500 robotic arms shooting from evermoving positions, shooting into 500 evermoving and changing baskets, shooting different types of baskets, and accounting for all the possible collisions in the same room.
Look, the situations I have exposed are situations that are already being taken into consideration.
The game "already takes into account 6 hurtboxes" for each model (including the hitboxes of bullets, weapons etc.).
Going from 6 hurtboxes to 10 is a cost issue like this:
1) computational.
solution: they can be done by choosing to have 500 vs 500 battles instead of 1000 vs 1000.

2) remodeling of the armor catalog.
There is work to be done, but not that it is "complicated", there is only work on what is changed.
In short, to give you an example: if the upper limb is divided into 3 parts "arm, elbow, forearm", then the equipment that will first protect the entire upper limb must be reformulated into:
arm protector and forearm protector (leaving the elbow uncovered).
Obviously you have to take the old model of equipment of the upper limb and separate the parts relating to the arm and forearm and make them SEPARATE MODELS. (Which on blender and I suppose also with their graphic engine is done in 2 seconds).
The various parameters must be assigned to these (armor value, weight .. etc .. and which hurtbox should be covered).
End of work.
Apply it on the various pieces of the armor catalog.
 
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