SP - General Armour. Why it doesn't work and how to make it work

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Tended to be the case in Warband? Allowed weapons and armor to have differing interactions so not one weapon was best against every armor? Granted following the rest of your post two wrongs don't make a right, but that's one answer.

Seems like a possibility, but also like a fast and cheap solution.
In history there were no weapons best against every armour, and if it was it would be a sword, which was an extremely expensive and hard to get weapon (which it should be in bannerlord as well). I think it shouldn't be that hard to balance the weapon types while maintaining a logical damage model as proposed by the OP.
 
TW think that they are done with the combat mechanics. I do not think they will bother with redesigning all these stuff. Say they removed ignore armour effect from blunt weapons, this would require an entire troop items overhaul. Sronger armours would make archers less effective, because melee troops would get close to them without dying. Same goes for skirmishers. So if the are willing to preserve archer domination on the field as right now they would have to change all bow and arrow values too. All lead to destabilization of combat balancing which I highly doubt that they will bother with.
 
All lead to destabilization of combat balancing

Absolutely not! Right now the typical battle lasts 2 minutes - I mean seriously i barely can enjoy it because it ends so fast
(trust me i know this, since my GF constantly tells me the same thing)

So we have a situation where our troops can sprint like energizer bunnys with even the heaviest armor because of how fked up athletics progression is (it basically negates armor burden defuff after you get to 100+) and top tier troops all have 130 athletics.

How hard would it be to change it so we have working armor but slower troops? Then yes, archers deal less per shot, but can shoot more before meele reach them. At the same time you balance horse archers this way.

And this is nothing huge it just requires basic number tweaking most mods did months ago.
 
The other is a method for attacks to to give an extra element of randomness. If every long once in a while an attack got a "lucky!" modifier or something and bypassed more armor then you can have things like a knight slugging of peasant blows but still fall to a hoard of them as a lucky stone just manages to do damage, or a lucky hit to a joint, etc
please no
 
BTW, why blunt damage ignores armor? Do they even know physics?
Right now we have "blunt weapons deals little damage but ignore armor" and this logic is just completly wrong.

Blunt damage is the WORST possible way to deal with armor, becouse strike has a huge sufrace of contact. You need to bend a lot more steel to wound enemy. (thats why maces were not just steel balls and hammers heads was so small compare to fantasy crap)

All anti armor weapons was UNBALANCED at first. Center of mass was closer to end, so with the same weight and strenght you can deliver a lot more energy to the strike. Becouse center of mass with travel a lot more and E=F*L
Crowbill was best example of anti armor weapon. A lot of energy + very thin point. BUT weapons like this has one HUGE issue. Just watch any "crowbill test" video and you will see it. After strike it can stuck in armor very very hard. Even without any damage to the enemy.
And thats why you want to use hammers - it provides a lot of energy and it cant stuck.

So blunt weapons should not ignore armor, they should deal tons of damage, that can overcome the armor value, but this weapons should be slow with bad handling.

Don't forget great big forking twohanders. Those things were designed to cleave through armour and keep the wielder safe(r) due to their striking range.

The paper rock scissors thing of blunt, piercing and slashing doesn't make a lot of sense historically, but it's a popular videogame trope that attempts to create balance among damage types.
 
The paper rock scissors thing of blunt, piercing and slashing doesn't make a lot of sense historically, but it's a popular videogame trope that attempts to create balance among damage types.
Of course, but i guess balance is kinda ok:

Hammers\maces - slow, bad handling, low reach, but huge damage against any enemy
Cut - very fast, versatile, good handling,doesnt affected by distance, but useless against heavy armor
Pierce - fast, armor penetration, average damage, but affected by a distance a lot.
 
BTW, why axes cleave through enemies, but swords do more\same damage? Axes should do more damage, and swords should cleave.
 
How the Damage Model can be made better

A good armour damage model needs to achieve several things:

-Armour needs to feel like armour and not cardboard. High quality historical armour provided a huge amount of protection from most strikes and the gameplay needs to reflect that.

-Incidental, weak blows should do zero damage.

-A lone armoured combatant should be brought down by dozens of peasants/looters. In real life, a lone knight would be wrestled to the ground by the peasantry and knifed through eyeslits/armpits or had their armour undone before being killed. We don't have that in M&B, so it's important that such attacks from low-tier fighters still do ~1-2 damage so that lone knights who lose their horse amongst peasants can eventually be killed.

-It's important that the armour doesn't absorb too much damage from super heavy attacks - like trebuchet rocks or a lance to the face from maximum velocity.

-There should be a meaningful gameplay distinction between using Cutting, Piercing and Blunt weapons. The player should find themselves in situations where they have to weigh up the pros and cons of which item type to equip. There sort of already is a distinction between cutting and the other damage types, but ideally there should be a distinction between piercing and blunt too.

These goals can't be achieved by either an integer damage reduction or percentage absorption system.

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Instead I propose a piecewise function - something that absorbs all damage from small attacks, lets some damage through for medium attacks, and allows lots of damage to get through from heavy attacks.

One way of doing this is with three joined linear functions - a flat damage reduction up to some value (let's say armour/2), a small amount of damage leakage (say ~25%) up to the armour value and full damage for higher values.

Another way is to join a curved function (such as a parabola) with a line. You just match the two up where the curve's slope becomes 1. A more aggressively curved function like a cubic or exponential could be used to further reduce the damage at low levels.

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This gives more room for mixing and matching models to make pierce and blunt damage a bit more distinct. For instance, armour could be more effective at absorbing very low damage pierce attacks vs blunt attacks, but less effective at moderate damage levels.

Alternatively, blunt damage could be more effective at interrupting attacks. Currently all damage types will interrupt an attack if the damage dealt is over 5. If the threshold for blunt damage is lower, it allows blunt weapons to be more threatening to armoured opponents without necessarily having to be completely armour piercing.

Great post. Linear functions are almost always the bane of games but simplify things for developers immensely.

That's an awesome analysis and some good proposals.

However, I cannot totally agree with the enthusiasm to make armor so much better. The reason is that the game lacks almost any negatives which come along with armor. Making armor too good leads to big imbalance therefore.

You know the story of the death of the Earl of Shrewsbury in 1098? When the fleet of Magnus Barefoot (or Bareleg, as others call him) was near his lands, the earl rode to the shore with his force, and two archers from the ships shot at him, one arrow hit the nasal of the helmet and deflected, the other hit through the eye and killed the heavily armored knight immediately. Such total failure of armor was not extremely seldom, because most armor had gaps.

So we needed a percentage for when armor was applied and for when it was of no use at all (like in Kenshi). If we had closed helmets we needed, for example, negatives to Athletics (cause breathing is strongly affected by closed helmets), perhaps restricted vision. We needed exhaustion from the weight and heat (or cold) coupled with the wearing of armor. We have nothing of this, no negatives (except weight on foot), armor protects all the time, so it must not protect as much as it would in reality if hit.

Yes- OP's post plus the addition of stamina in a 'soft' way would make this game much more fun and interesting. Soft implementation of stamina would be something like a meter where above 80% stamina movement speed, jumping height, and hit strength + resistance to interruption would be 100% as stamina falls below 80% all those things start to decrease to where stamina meter at 0 movement, hits, jumping, interruption etc is 50% vs normal. Stamina recovery should be 1% per second so you can do 20 seconds of sustained activity and stay above 80% but if you do 60 seconds your are at 40% stamina and moving at 75% speed, hitting at 75% strength etc. Still a lot of leeway but also something everyone would have to pay attention to.

Heavier armour would simply start with stamina meter at 90% rather than 100% and slow stamina recovery by 50% (1 stamina recovered per 1.5 seconds) giving 10 seconds less time before strength/speed start to decrease- this would give light armour an actual advantage and for certain weapons/playstyles be meaningful. Heavy armour in a chokepoint where footwork isn't that useful would be quite powerful but in open spaces or sustained engagements armour is only an advantage for the first 20-30 seconds of a fight- still a pretty long time but with shields 1 v 1 duels often last close to that already.

I think more people would gravitate to medium armour where stamina is 'normal' as described above while certain archers/javelin throwers might want to wear light armour to outrun/skirmish from lower weight equipment loads with the caveat they have limited ammunition and have to start scavenging ammo fairly quickly as if heavy armour worked as the OP describes, it might take 2-3 decent javelin throws for 1 kill vs heavy armour while the character in heavy armour might also have a javelin that can kill in a single throw vs moving target and still be able to wade in with melee weapon and ignore a good portion of non-lethal force enemy hits but could not ignore all hits- high damage hits would still hit with near full force. Just the dancing 'glancing' blows of opponents trying to skirmish would be ignored.
 
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Of course, but i guess balance is kinda ok:

Hammers\maces - slow, bad handling, low reach, but huge damage against any enemy
Cut - very fast, versatile, good handling,doesnt affected by distance, but useless against heavy armor
Pierce - fast, armor penetration, average damage, but affected by a distance a lot.

Cut becomes pretty much useless with that model, because blunt and pierce work fine against all armour types, you'll never want a weapon like a sword that has a penalty against an armour type. That leads you down a rabbit hole of making each damagetype specialize against an armour type. So blunt > plate, slash > leather, pierce > chain. That's the real rock paper scissors trope I was talking about earlier. It makes things really fiddly and min maxy, where you look at the most popular type of armour in a game, and choose to use the weapon that's useful in most common scenarios.

Swords were extremely popular in medieval warfare, so they must've been pretty good, or heavy armour was a lot rarer than we think. They weren't perhaps the first weapon you'd use, but rather a backup weapon for if your spear broke. But since we don't have breaking spears or accidentally dropping your 2H mace, or maybe being disarmed, then swords would probably only ever be used in sieges for the overhead chop and general good handling in close quarters. Maybe that would be realistic, but realism should always be carefully balanced with choices and fun.

Again, this whole conversation comes up because people get frustrated when they take a javelin to the head, while they're riding directly into it at full speed, so they complain that armour doesn't work properly. Should the player survive that? I guess it depends on the difficulty. But as I said earlier, armour works just fine when you're trying to crack a noble's head open with a sword.
 
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Cut becomes pretty much useless with that model, because blunt and pierce work fine against all armour types, you'll never want a weapon like a sword that has a penalty against an armour type. That leads you down a rabbit hole of making each damagetype specialize against an armour type. So blunt > plate, slash > leather, pierce > chain. That's the real rock paper scissors trope I was talking about earlier. It makes things really fiddly and min maxy, where you look at the most popular type of armour in a game, and choose to use the weapon that's useful in most common scenarios.

Players already do this. It would end up like the existing meta of carrying a two-handed weapon (axe or polearm) for the reach and damage, while having a sword in case that reach becomes counterproductive as in a siege or close press.

Swords were extremely popular in medieval warfare, so they must've been pretty good, or heavy armour was a lot rarer than we think.

It wasn't that they were good but the swords were convenient. Mail, scale and lamellar weren't rare by any stretch of the imagination in 11th century but they didn't offer complete coverage in most cases. So swords were still functional because you could aim for the gaps in coverage. That isn't really possible in MnB unless you have someone with a fairly obvious lack of armor on their head, arms, or legs.

One possible solution, having a critical strike mechanic, is unpopular.
 
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Swords were extremely popular in medieval warfare, so they must've been pretty good, or heavy armour was a lot rarer than we think. They weren't perhaps the first weapon you'd use, but rather a backup weapon for if your spear broke.
You answered your own question, they were popular because they were easy to carry and draw when your main weapon was unavailable. Swords were, as a battlefield weapon, nothing more than a backup in the vast majority of cases, and they were only used when things went wrong in some way.
There are, as always, exceptions to that, but that's the general rule you see in history. It's not that swords were just so good that they were common, they were just easy to wear and handy for self defense.
 
You answered your own question, they were popular because they were easy to carry and draw when your main weapon was unavailable. Swords were, as a battlefield weapon, nothing more than a backup in the vast majority of cases, and they were only used when things went wrong in some way.
There are, as always, exceptions to that, but that's the general rule you see in history. It's not that swords were just so good that they were common, they were just easy to wear and handy for self defense.

Swords were extremely popular in medieval warfare, so they must've been pretty good, or heavy armour was a lot rarer than we think. They weren't perhaps the first weapon you'd use, but rather a backup weapon for if your spear broke. But since we don't have breaking spears or accidentally dropping your 2H mace, or maybe being disarmed, then swords would probably only ever be used in sieges for the overhead chop and general good handling in close quarters. Maybe that would be realistic, but realism should always be carefully balanced with choices and fun.

Swords were first of all very very expensive and thus a symbol of status and position. They were of course useful to some degree, especially against not so strongly armoured targets, mainly because of their good handling and balancing compared to the cheaper weapons of the normal soldier. For a plate armour you'd probably have chosen a war hammer with a piercing end, or a pointy spear for the weak spots.

For me there is no reason to depart from that in Bannerlord. If you give swords those advantages and make them expensive, you would introduce a balance that gets near to history without sacrificing the fun part. You could also introduce some kind of fame or renown for carrying an expensive sword, for example.
 
Swords were extremely popular in medieval warfare, so they must've been pretty good
But they werent. They were self defense weapon and side arms. Swords were not battlefield weapons. Polearms always were go to weapon for poopy pesants and noble warriors.
Spears, lances, poleaxes, polehammers, halberds, pikes

But i like the idea of swords to be really popular in game, becouse they look cool and very fun to play with and against. So i am totaly fine with popular swords in the game.


Cut becomes pretty much useless with that model, because blunt and pierce work fine against all armour types, you'll never want a weapon like a sword that has a penalty against an armour type.
Cuts can be good against lots of lightly armored opponents, becouse cuts can be much faster.


I dont like current system, becouse it makes any weapon exept swingeble polearm or swords kinda useless. Why do i need mace if i can oneshot everything with sword?
 
I dont like current system, becouse it makes any weapon exept swingeble polearm or swords kinda useless. Why do i need mace if i can oneshot everything with sword?
Slashing polearms in particular are massively overpowered. They have good speed, superior reach and they do massive damage with basically no disadvantage other than being awkward in siege battles.
 
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