I said earlier that in the current installations I had not perceived a flanking of the bots equal or similar to those of 2015 (see previous comment). After testing the recent updates I take it back, the bots do wrap the player up in a "circle of death".
Higher tier units are already able to win (depends on numbers of course) when they are outnumbered by lower tier units. On the other hand, it has mostly to do with equipment and who hits harder (high weapon skill also means more damage).
Higher tier units being able to defend better also sounds good but I personally think that not in the way combat system works now. You have the shield wall example, it is actually worse in melee for infantry units and they underperform when playing more defensively.
The problem is that units in this game are not afraid to die at all, and they just attack, attack and attack. If all units would try to play more defensively, would be nice that Elite units would be able to block and attack much better than Low tier units in terms of timing.
So yes, I would also like to see a lower phase of battle where units would be afraid to die and elite units would be more skilled but this means a whole rebalancing for combat. I for sure support this if possible.
you can't have good AI and big numbers at the same time. I think they dumbed down the AI from a few months ago because it would cause too many performance issues. I might be wrong but that's what I remember
It's no secret that there is some sort of disconnect between what the community expects and what TW delivers when it comes to updates. I do believe that a good chunk of it is due to differences in vision and to technical/organizational priorities that are difficult to fully understand when you're an outsider.
But there definitely is one point at least where I really don't even understand TW's rhyme or reason, and it's armours.
Armours being far too inefficient and blunt tearing through anything in a weird fashion are two of the most ancient and recurring complaints. They are absolutely central to the core and gameplay loop of the game (as they affect fighting and gearing), so it's not like if they were of secondary importance or rarely used. And yet, it's been months without any significant change, despite both being completely broken.
More puzzling, though, is that TW did a big pass over most units armour rating lately. Seemingly trying to balance units between factions on this point. And this is really something I can't get : how can you balance armour on units when the armour mechanics themselves aren't working ? The whole balance pass has no meaning if the working of armour change later.
So logic would dictate that you FIRST makes armour formula work, and THEN you balance armour ratings.
Help us understand, TW, please, because it's certainly not making sense from here.
Why has something so crucial as armours not being looked at for so long ?
Why is there balance passes made when the mechanics on which the balance relies aren't yet working ? @Callum@mexxico@armagan ? Could we get some light on what is the method here ? And possibly what are the plans about it ?
You definitely can, all it takes is for the scripts to be coded well, and sometimes not even that. CPUs are so fast nowadays that you can get away with extremely sloppy code for something like AI and not have it impact performance much. C# (which the game's systems are coded in) is fast enough that it often takes way longer to read the information from memory than to actually perform the calculations.
I can't think of any modern games where the AI calculations are a bottleneck. It's usually pathfinding or collision detection which are orders of magnitude slower.
Realistic based on what? If they were to increased realism, then you would have plenty of chain mail equipped troops dying from a single hit to the chest by a crossbow or longbow.
You definitely can, all it takes is for the scripts to be coded well, and sometimes not even that. CPUs are so fast nowadays that you can get away with extremely sloppy code for something like AI and not have it impact performance much. C# (which the game's systems are coded in) is fast enough that it often takes way longer to read the information from memory than to actually perform the calculations.
I can't think of any modern games where the AI calculations are a bottleneck. It's usually pathfinding or collision detection which are orders of magnitude slower.
Even when coded well, sometimes there are just no more optimizations to be made and in game settings would have to be reduced. I personally have no problem with this, my system is high end, but people that were close to the minimum requirements and bought the game based on those would have every right to complain if they could no longer run or had to make big reductions in their settings.
They would have to set templates for complexity so people with older processors wouldn't be so impacted, but we already have something like that with combat AI "difficulty". Amount of entities in the battle could also be reduced anyways if people start to have problems.
The thing is, they weren't even practically useless against a fully mail-armored opponent. You couldn't cut right through mail, but you could still inflict blunt trauma, or with a very good thrust, pierce directly through it.
Realistic based on what? If they were to increased realism, then you would have plenty of chain mail equipped troops dying from a single hit to the chest by a crossbow or longbow.
Well that just isn't true. A single hit to the chest with a crossbow or longbow won't even necessarily kill an unarmored opponent in real life; Joan of Arc, for example, took at least two wounds from bolts/arrows during her life and survived, and she was a teenage waif! You'd need a very powerful archer with a very powerful bow (or very high powered, high quality materials crossbow) to kill a man instantly with one arrow.
When it comes to high quality, double-linked mail with padding underneath, it was incredibly resistant to arrows. Here is a good and enlightening read on the subject from someone who knows what they're talking about. http://myarmoury.com/feature_mail.html
I think that a top tier archer and bow should be able to kill someone wearing bottom tier armor in 2 hits. But a mid tier archer shooting at mid tier armor should take around 10, and a bottom tier archer and bow should take 100 hits to kill someone wearing top tier armor. That's pretty much how it was in Warband.
A don't think it's unreasonable or even that opinion based to hope that battles last more than 20 seconds. 2 hits or 3 hits per soldier is too fast for tactics.
It depends on the effectiveness of the armor and the precise placement of the hit, every hit would not do damage, some would glance off or else armor would be ineffective and useless. Battles lasted entire afternoons, Bannerlord is not set up to be a historically correct simulation of medieval battles, I just want something similar to Viking Conquest where battles are not over in 20 seconds and the difference between a low tier unit and a high tier unit is not 1 or 2 hits. These battles are like swarms of ants with little cohesion, it's not quite what I expected. It's tactically bereft. A game like like Rome 2 TW (DEI MOD) is much more realistic than a game like Bannerlord, this is an arcade game, it draws the closet historians though.
I think Armor values are just one thing that needs to be adressed. But something that bothers me quite a bit aswell is, how plain and boring the battle maps are in general.
You got plain land, plain land with a river, plan land with a river and some hills, a forest, a forest with a river, a forest with a river and some hills. And so on.
There is little to no real strategic value in those battle maps as far as i have seen and played.
Most special map i have seen is one that has a bridge in it. But what does a Bridge on a map serves when the troops can still cross the river by just walking through it? Might aswell leave the bridge out of it.
The Hills are rarely steep enough to make any strategic difference, The AI always know where your troops are, which makes a surprise attack absolutely impossible. And so on.
So even when Armor values are fixed, it would make battles longer, but not much more enjoyable if you ask me.
The shallowness of Bannerlord also effects battles, and they are by far the most enjoyable and most worked out part of Bannerlord (as if that would be an achievment)
And the most saddening part is, seeing how long it takes to fix the most simple things like just some values, i hardly doubt that we will ever see anything that is gonna put more depth into the game.
No real Tactics needed, the tactic perks rn are just mere +% in simulations (so even the one thing that is somewhat fun gets boring), no ambushes, no surprise attacks. It will never go beyond F1+F3. And Siege battles are just a pure "interactive" movie.
I think Armor values are just one thing that needs to be adressed. But something that bothers me quite a bit aswell is, how plain and boring the battle maps are in general.
You got plain land, plain land with a river, plan land with a river and some hills, a forest, a forest with a river, a forest with a river and some hills. And so on.
There is little to no real strategic value in those battle maps as far as i have seen and played.
Most special map i have seen is one that has a bridge in it. But what does a Bridge on a map serves when the troops can still cross the river by just walking through it? Might aswell leave the bridge out of it.
The Hills are rarely steep enough to make any strategic difference, The AI always know where your troops are, which makes a surprise attack absolutely impossible. And so on.
So even when Armor values are fixed, it would make battles longer, but not much more enjoyable if you ask me.
The shallowness of Bannerlord also effects battles, and they are by far the most enjoyable and most worked out part of Bannerlord (as if that would be an achievment)
And the most saddening part is, seeing how long it takes to fix the most simple things like just some values, i hardly doubt that we will ever see anything that is gonna put more depth into the game.
No real Tactics needed, the tactic perks rn are just mere +% in simulations (so even the one thing that is somewhat fun gets boring), no ambushes, no surprise attacks. It will never go beyond F1+F3. And Siege battles are just a pure "interactive" movie.
I feel that even with all that there needs to be a difference in combat effectiveness between higher tier and lower tier. What we have now is that a couple of lower tier guys can take out a top tier guy. Imo that shouldn't happen unless they outnumber him more than 3-1 or unless he's already wounded.
What is the use in having top tier guys that go down so fast? To me it's the one difference in combat between WB and BL, in WB I would actually try to avoid the top tier guys unless I was pretty high level and good gear or I had a lot of help. In BL top tier opponents mean nothing, they present almost no more of a threat than lower tier warriors, they're just another opponent. I remember the first battle I had in WB I had like 25+ T1 guys and I saw a party of 6 guys I'm thinking to myself wow we outnumber them easily let's get 'em. To make a long story short we got rekt and it wasn't until after the battle I realized I was battling 6 Nord Huscarl deserters.
Well that just isn't true. A single hit to the chest with a crossbow or longbow won't even necessarily kill an unarmored opponent in real life; Joan of Arc, for example, took at least two wounds from bolts/arrows during her life and survived, and she was a teenage waif! You'd need a very powerful archer with a very powerful bow (or very high powered, high quality materials crossbow) to kill a man instantly with one arrow.
When it comes to high quality, double-linked mail with padding underneath, it was incredibly resistant to arrows. Here is a good and enlightening read on the subject from someone who knows what they're talking about. http://myarmoury.com/feature_mail.html
I think that a top tier archer and bow should be able to kill someone wearing bottom tier armor in 2 hits. But a mid tier archer shooting at mid tier armor should take around 10, and a bottom tier archer and bow should take 100 hits to kill someone wearing top tier armor. That's pretty much how it was in Warband.
I don't believe you've fully read the article you've linked, and I believe you skipped the previous posts, one of which I linked at least three videos of armorers, fletchers and archers testing armor effectiveness.
The accounts referenced in the article saying that mail was impervious do not state the range, the force produced by the bows/crossbow nor if they were shot from a straight angle or if the arrows were shot in the air, like a volley. There are also accounts referenced in the same article that contradict the idea of mail being impervious to arrows, and those same accounts would suggest that the arrows were shot in a straight angle ("During the 1st Crusade, Girard of Quiercy was killed by a Moslem arrow that punched through both his shield and his armour" and "During the Battle of Acre (1291), William de Beaujeu, Master of the Temple, was accused of cowardice when he retreated from the fighting. He lifted up his arm and replied, 'Seigneurs, I can do no more, for I am dead; see the wound.' An arrow had pierced him through the mail beneath his armpit—only the fletches were visible") , the same way arrows are shot in Bannerlord.
I feel that even with all that there needs to be a difference in combat effectiveness between higher tier and lower tier. What we have now is that a couple of lower tier guys can take out a top tier guy. Imo that shouldn't happen unless they outnumber him more than 3-1 or unless he's already wounded.
What is the use in having top tier guys that go down so fast? To me it's the one difference in combat between WB and BL, in WB I would actually try to avoid the top tier guys unless I was pretty high level and good gear or I had a lot of help. In BL top tier opponents mean nothing, they present almost no more of a threat than lower tier warriors, they're just another opponent. I remember the first battle I had in WB I had like 25+ T1 guys and I saw a party of 6 guys I'm thinking to myself wow we outnumber them easily let's get 'em. To make a long story short we got rekt and it wasn't until after the battle I realized I was battling 6 Nord Huscarl deserters.
I would say it is the opposite, center hits are more likely to hit a flat area, reducing the chance of deflection with minor damage, which is also a reason that plate armor was rounded. There is also human bone structure, your sternum and ribs would receive the most out of the impact.
Plate and lamellar armor were designed specifically to deflect arrows. Look at the video you posted. Hits in the middle deflected with just a tiny dent.
Look at what you linked - it contradicts what you said:
Hits in the weak spot (in this case the chain mail area that was not covered by plate) penetrated the armor but hits in the middle just bounced right off. The middle of the chestpiece is not a flat spot. It's the spot where armor was the strongest. Armor was designed specifically with this deflection in mind. Hence, my assertion that hits to the middle of the chest by enemy arrows should not do that much damage. Hits to the weak spots are where the player should take more damage.
Because blunt based weapons are not meant to pierce the armor, they are meant to transfer force through the armor into the person wearing in. What would help negate the effects of blunt weapons to a degree would be flexible armor (chainmail, for example) with increased padding, like wool, leather or a gambeson underneath.
Blunt damage doesn't kill by penetrating. It kills by transferring blunt trauma - which is damage to the target anyways. Penetrating armor is only the means to the end in the case of cut and pierce damage - to kill the target. Blunt bypasses this whole process.
Cut was pretty much useless against armor if it hit in the strong spot and especially later medieval armor was highly resistant.
Plate armour was virtually invulnerable to sword slashes. It also protected the wearer well against spear or pike thrusts and provided decent defense against blunt trauma.
The evolution of plate armour also triggered developments in the design of offensive weapons. While this armour was effective against cuts or blows, their weak points could be exploited by long tapered swords or other weapons designed for the purpose, such as pollaxes and halberds. The effect of arrows and bolts is still a point of contention with regard to plate armour. The evolution of the 14th-century plate armour also triggered the development of various polearms. They were designed to deliver a strong impact and concentrate energy on a small area and cause damage through the plate. Maces, war hammers and the hammer-heads of pollaxes (poleaxes) were used to inflict blunt trauma through armour. Strong blows to the head might result in concussion even if the armor is not penetrated.
Damage in this game is damage that the human sustains.
So really, to fulfill the claims here:
Cut should be as is against low tier units, but almost useless against high tier armor (except of course if it hits somewhere unarmored). Not very go9d against chain mail and even less effective against top end scale or plate.
Pierce is somewhat of a compromise, although I think spears need a buff. So piece in real life would be arrows and long tapered swords. Best against chain mail and. Not as good as cut against low tier units. Not as goodas blunt against the top end armor.
Blunt is best against armor, not because it penetrates, but because it delivers blunt trama, but least effective against large numbers of enemy low tier units.
That's because blunt isn't any better against armored units and does a bit less damage overall.
Low tier plate (or what this game classifies as plate, which is really scale armor) will be very vulnerable to blunt weapons. The absolute best armor will still offer some blunt protection, but it's still by far the best way to take down a high tier enemy, as pierce and especially cut will not work well against an armored enemy (or at least they should not based on history).
You can reduce the damage your character receives, but then you are unbalanced when compared to other NPCs. It's not so much my character I am concerned about, but the fact that elite units will lose to looters when there is 3 against one. I one and two hit almost every NPC in the game, I can hardly tell any differences in them.
Yep - a lot of people seem to be missing this. We want the enemy's high tier units to also be able to withstand our low tier units. Armor works both ways.
I've given up hope that TW will actually do something about this. If I were to guess I'd say they think it's a non-issue. That's why we never get any kind of dev response about it even though there have been threads galore about it. Luckily there are mods out there that do a good job to help alleviate this problem.
I've given up hope that TW will actually do something about this. If I were to guess I'd say they think it's a non-issue. That's why we never get any kind of dev response about it even though there have been threads galore about it.
There was a dev response to the thread with analysis in it. I'm on my phone right now but it was called "Why armor doesn't work" or something like that.
There was a dev response to the thread with analysis in it. I'm on my phone right now but it was called "Why armor doesn't work" or something like that.
The inputs are: DamageType - cut, pierce or blunt Magnitude - how hard the weapon hits. The calculation for this one is fairly complicated and I may go over it at a later date. The damage stat on weapons in the inventory screen is a derived quantity relating to this magnitude. Basically consider it as the raw damage amount before armour comes into play. ArmorEffectiveness - the armor value protecting the specific body part that got hit AbsorbedDamageRatio - some kind of blanket damage reduction thing. Appears to be unused - the only entities that have it defined have it set to 1. FactorByDamageType - Some kind of formula - altering number to change the behaviour of weapon damage types. Blunt is 1, pierce is 0.25 and cut is 0.1. As I'll go into below, this thing mostly cancels itself out and is only actually important when calculating the integer damage reduction.
插入代码块:
public static void ComputeBlowDamage(
float armorAmountFloat,
WeaponComponentData shieldOnBack,
AgentFlag victimAgentFlag,
float victimAgentAbsorbedDamageRatio,
float damageMultiplierOfBone,
float combatDifficultyMultiplier,
DamageTypes damageType,
float magnitude,
Vec3 blowPosition,
ItemObject item,
bool blockedWithShield,
bool hitShieldOnBack,
int speedBonus,
bool cancelDamage,
bool isFallDamage,
out int inflictedDamage,
out int absorbedByArmor,
out int armorAmount)
{
if (!isFallDamage)
{
int num = (int) armorAmountFloat;
armorAmount = num;
}
else
armorAmount = 0;
float armorEffectiveness = (float) armorAmount;
if (hitShieldOnBack && shieldOnBack != null)
armorEffectiveness += 10f;
float absorbedDamageRatio = victimAgentAbsorbedDamageRatio;
float rawDamage = Game.Current.BasicModels.StrikeMagnitudeModel.ComputeRawDamage(damageType, magnitude, armorEffectiveness, absorbedDamageRatio);
float num1 = 1f;
if (!blockedWithShield && !isFallDamage)
num1 = num1 * damageMultiplierOfBone * combatDifficultyMultiplier;
float num2 = rawDamage * num1;
inflictedDamage = MBMath.ClampInt((int) num2, 0, 2000);
int num3 = MBMath.ClampInt((int) ((double) Game.Current.BasicModels.StrikeMagnitudeModel.ComputeRawDamage(damageType, magnitude, 0.0f, absorbedDamageRatio) * (double) num1), 0, 2000);
absorbedByArmor = num3 - inflictedDamage;
}
Points of interest: HitShieldOnBack - If you have a shield on your back, it adds +10 to armor if hit there.
DamageMultiplierOfBone - The damage bonus from getting in the head vs getting hit in the arm. The damage bonuses are as follows:
Head and neck: 2x pierce damage, 1.2x cut and blunt damage
Legs: 0.8x damage for all damage types.
Horse legs: 1.2 x damage for all damage types
I also found a curious bit of code that I can't understand the purpose of. It appears to make all blunt melee attacks ~ 50% stronger.
For Cut damage: magnitude* 100/(100 + armour) - 0.45* armour
For Pierce damage: magnitude* 100/(100 + armour) - 0.25* armour
For Blunt damage: magnitude* 100/(100 + armour)
The formula can be divided cleanly into two parts. The first part (100/(100+armour)) is essentially a percentage reduction, and a weak one at that. With 50 armour ( a decent amount to have by the late mid game), this is a 33% reduction. With 60 armour (close to being the best you can get), it's 37.5% reduction. These figures are very low when you compare them to other games. Early ID software games, for instance, had armour ranging from 50% to 80% protection, and even then, they didn't make you feel invulnerable.
The second part is integer damage reduction. This is the main thing that protects you from cut and pierce damage. However, for blunt damage it's completely absent! This means that no matter how much armour you've cheated onto your character, you'll never be fully protected from people flinging 3 damage pebbles.
This is the core reason why armour feels ineffectual. The damage reduction for attacks in general and blunt in particular is so low as to basically not be worth having heavy armour.
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.
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.
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.
If following TW and several posters in this thread, we can only conclude that our ancestors were absolutely dump. When we look around to the times of plate armor for example (1250 to 1650 AD, or so), we mostly see sticks with sharp edges and pointy tips in use but rather seldomly pure blunt weapons. Mostly pure blunt weapons were used by unprofessional militias, to good effect sometimes, and sometimes not.
The idea that blunt energy magically goes though a rigid defense, nullifying it's use, has always interested and bothered me. It makes it, for example, very difficult to understand why maces and clubs greatly disappeared as weapons of war after the introduction of helmets in the Bronze Age. Anyway, our ancestors were dump, that's the explanation.
I think that blunt weapons had a very special niche in anti-armor warfare. Short maces (mostly flanged) for example were used by armored men-at-arms on horse for close quarter melee, because there was nothing better available, not because the mace was extremely effective. On foot, with more mobility in the fight, attacking unarmored parts of the body, stunning a totally armored person with heavy hits by several opponents and wrestling them down to put a dagger through armor gaps, or penetrating the armor with pointy tips, was the preferred combat method.
Anyway, mostly deaths in ancient battles occured during the disordered phase, after one formation was broken, when the chasers could use their weapons with ease. It is very different if you give a fast hit during combat, quite often not with full force, to not open yourself for other's weapons, or if you are hacking onto fleeing persons from a horse without any danger. This real life mechanic is quite absent in M+B. Some units flee and are free fodder but only after heavy losses on the battlefield itself. Quite unrealistic.
In the end for me armor cannot be seen isolated. A sword thrust could never penetrate a breastplate (lamellar or rigid) but it could penetrate a gap in the armor. Armor cannot be as good as in penetration tests because the game does not simulate gaps in the armor. Armor should be better (I use Realistic Battle Mod, for example) but not too good, and I would appreciate more than an armor buff changes in the way the soldiers act on the battlefield, formations, moral. Less total annihilation combat, and so on. Of course that will not happen, I know.
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