Night Ninja said:
As you've said, that's only really useful against completely incapacitated opponents.
The grip change is rarely seen in period manuals regarding the use of the pollaxe. It leaves you with minimal ability to manipulate the weapon against resistance when you bind against another weapon. re: shifting weight, addressed below.
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In that case, drop steps and passing steps would also be "like a jump". Both of them exploit body mass and weight transference to generate power. I'm not seeing what you're trying to get at here. The schtick of the jump attack is done better by practically any other mechanic and with far less telegraphing and commitment.
Yes, by the terms I've been using, such things would be "like a jump".
I went into that talk about about how an axe is swung because you asked. The point I was trying to make with that post was that you don't need to bring up some sort of proof of historically accurate comparisons of martial arts through the ages to discuss such things. I did this, again, because you asked me to prove that what I had said in the last post had validity. You shouldn't try to read a point into my posts that isn't there.
I also responded negatively to the accusation that I get all my knowledge from Prince of Persia moves because this is what you said:
Night Ninja said:
Wraith_Magus said:
I don't see why we would need to crack out the history books on this one, it's classic Newtonian physics. Basic Newtonian physics have pretty well stood the test of time, quantum physics notwithstanding.
Classic Newtonian physics, but bloody horrible biomechanics. Also, the historical treatises on combat tend to be written by people who knew what they were on about when it came to surviving an earnest encounter with someone bent on ending your life, so you'll forgive me if I take them far more seriously than some tween who's overdosed on Prince of Persia.
You said that the part about Prince of Persia was "directed at the OP," but you were clearly addressing me in that sentence, and gave no indication whatsoever in a change of subject. Especially since this was written as a response to a quote of what I had previously said, to say that you had suddenly changed the subject to an entirely different person and their entirely different argument is a bit of a stretch, to say the least.
Simply because I have argued some points against you does not strictly mean I am agreeing with anyone else who has argued anything else against you. Confusing one argument someone else has made for another person's argument, and attacking them all equally because of it, only tends to make your own argument weaker, as you start making personal attacks against the same people you should theoretically be trying to convince.
In such arguments, I am generally more interested in the Devil's Advocate argument than anything else. If we are to agree that we are looking for "the most realistic" combat simulation is, then I want to try to logically explore what those mechanics would be.
Yes, of course people would be unlikely to perform a full-body axe swing the way that someone merely splitting a log would do, unless they were trying to perform a coup de grace strike upon a downed opponent. Such a thing isn't what you would likely see in combat the way that it works currently in Mount and Blade, but in real historical battles, plate mail was typically thick enough that knocking a guy down and either aiming for the weak points, or going for the strongest blow, even if slow and likely to leave you vulnerable, would be necessary. (Of course, making some way to specifically tell the game "finish off an opponent that has been knocked prone before he can get up," whether by just adding another button or some more complex context-sensitive function to an existing button would make for a decent suggestion of its own, but that would be for another thread to handle.)
Of course, even in such situations, maneuvers like drop steps are more useful than a jump-attack. As a few people have said, when you let yourself fly airborne and strike a target, then, in the terms of physics, not all of your attack is going to be a "plastic collision", but will be partially an "elastic collision", meaning that you will bounce off of a target because your feet are not planted on the ground, and you can't get good leverage, especially if the target has hard armor.
As I was saying a few posts ago, the power of gravity you can get on your side in a jump attack is only as great as the power of your legs when you jump up into the air, but an attack where you make a thrust upwards from a low position, or make an uppercut-like swing will also use the exact same power of your legs, where the only difference would come from the power you can generate in a downward swing from additional assistance from gravity.
In this upwards thrust attack, however, you are placing yourself between the target and the ground, and can keep pushing upward from the ground to follow through on your attack. Conversely, in a jump attack, the target has the ground on the other side of them, and they can push off the ground to help push you away if their shield or armor is hard enough to make for a partially elastic collision.
The point of this elastic collision talk being that, instead of applying all that force that you have generated into the attack, you are going to be having a portion of that force reflected back into your own body, like when two pool balls collide into one another, and the pool ball that was moving forward when it hit a pool ball at rest starts to roll backwards from the collision - that is energy that was not transferred into the target, which in turn, would lead to lesser damage.
The degree of how plastic or elastic a collision is, however, depends quite a lot upon the materials in the collision in question. A steel shield is going to be much more elastic than just flesh or furs.
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Generally speaking otherwise, I do not posses specific fencing expertise, so I lack the ability to critique what rapier17 has said, but nothing he has said seems misinformed based upon what I do know of tangential subjects.
I would say, however, that unless jumping were removed from the game entirely, odds are people are going to make jump attacks, regardless of how stupid they are, and as such, their stupidity should be accurately reflected in the game if our objective is "realism".
Therefore, again, unless your argument is "this is why there should be no jumping at all", and we somehow also remove the ability to fall off of castle walls onto people, simply arguing against jump attacks entirely is not a good argument. The proper argument would be to model the reason why jump attacking is a bad idea.
This doesn't even have to be terribly complex - you can just have someone who jump attacks fall over after hitting something, whether they were hit midair (and probably take extra damage for it) or land the blow perfectly, just because they cannot maintain their balance.
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