The current mechanics of the game encourage fighting in a spinning style - that is to go past your opponent and strike while spinning. People do this to shorten the swing time by hitting right when the animation begins and to bypass the defender's defenses. The swing has an arc, roughly from 90 deg to the side to 0 at the front, that will hit the first thing in its way. When fighting more than one person I VERY frequently kill the one other then that I am facing and aiming for. The problem is that you hit with the same force 90 to the side, as you do after a full swing to the front. Since hitting to the side is faster, this is the origin of the spinning fights.
Solution:
Scale the damage according to the aspect of the target. If you hit a target 90 to your right, your swing is weaker than if you hit something in front, after a full swing. So lets say that a 90 aspect does 50% and scale up to 100% infront - that is 75% at 45 degres. The numbers are just for illustration. You can still do the spinning attacks, but they will not be as effective as a full front blow. I think this is especially important if manual parry is used and defending while spinning is very tricky.
The current mechanics of the game encourage fighting in a spinning style - that is to go past your opponent and strike while spinning. People do this to shorten the swing time by hitting right when the animation begins and to bypass the defender's defenses. The swing has an arc, roughly from 90 deg to the side to 0 at the front, that will hit the first thing in its way. When fighting more than one person I VERY frequently kill the one other then that I am facing and aiming for. The problem is that you hit with the same force 90 to the side, as you do after a full swing to the front. Since hitting to the side is faster, this is the origin of the spinning fights.
Solution:
Scale the damage according to the aspect of the target. If you hit a target 90 to your right, your swing is weaker than if you hit something in front, after a full swing. So lets say that a 90 aspect does 50% and scale up to 100% infront - that is 75% at 45 degres. The numbers are just for illustration. You can still do the spinning attacks, but they will not be as effective as a full front blow. I think this is especially important if manual parry is used and defending while spinning is very tricky.
I'm glad someone's already posted about this, because last night I found myself on the receiving end of this effect so frequently that I could only laugh at it.
I'm not a baseball fan, but this situation calls for a baseball metaphor. When you swing a bat, there's a specific point in your swing at which you want to make contact with the ball for maximum power. It looks like this:
Here's a more detailed example:
When you go to swing the bat, you want to make sure the ball passes through ideal zone for striking it, otherwise you'll get no power behind your swing. When you're hitting something so early in your swing (such as, when it's behind you) you're not only minimizing your control over where the ball is going, but you're not going to hit it very hard either.
Here's another example that's a little closer to the game. If you're one of those axe-flailing Nords (or as below, a Vaegir Horseman, since there were no Nords on any free servers when I went to take these screenshots), imagine that between battles you'd like to chop down a tree. Say, for making a shrine to Odin, or whatever it is that Nords do with wood:
Swinging an axe like a ball bat (as is the case in Warband) would cause Whispy Woods to be in a world of hurt in the top picture. In a realistic scenario, there'd be no power behind the swing that impacts him in the second image. But in Warband, standing behind someone while they're swinging one of these things can take you out in one shot.
On top of that, there were two things in original M&B Native that prevented these freak phenomena from occurring. Firstly, as long as you were playing in 3rd person (why this changes in 1st person, I'm not sure), there was a physical limit to how fast you could turn. Hence there was never any case of effective spinning axe-flailing in Native. The other preventative measure that kept things in order was the animations:
The top picture is the two-handed swing animation from Native. The lower is from Warband. Note how much easier it is to accidentally strike somebody behind you these days. On top of that, maybe you'd swing an axe like that if you were chopping wood, but in the real world these sorts of dramatic swings have always been more at home in Hollywood than on the battlefield.
So swinging a two-hander in Warband gives you a nearly 360 degree perimeter in which you can actually deal damage, and this only tapers off late in the swing and doesn't seem to exhibit any noticeable need for acceleration. And it's impossible to find out for sure that there's any difference in the beginning at all, since all damage reports are off, but mouthnhoof has already effectively demonstrated that the beginning of a swing can still deal very substantial damage.
My examples were with two-handers, but I've noticed the same effect, to a slightly lesser degree, with one-handed swings as well. No one in history who knew what they were doing swung a weapon like this, so the first step would be to take the animations back to the point at which they made sense. The second step would be to make sure there's a a definite ideal point midway through the swing that will deal the maximum damage. Lastly, eliminate the ability to spin around madly while swinging - this is not only woefully unrealistic, but it also spoils the game for players who actually fight tactically, and it looks completely ridiculous.
Actually I spin to get more speed into attack and doing this while moving diagonal allows me less chance of getting hit myself.Is this what your talking about?
Actually I spin to get more speed into attack and doing this while moving diagonal allows me less chance of getting hit myself.Is this what your talking about?
The moving part isn't the issue at all, but the spinning part is a real part of the problem. I doubt highly (though again, since we can't get any damage reports there's no clear way to confirm this) that the spinning actually increases your damage at all, just based on my observations of the game's mechanics. The moving should be adding a speed bonus - note how much more damage colliding horsemen with lances can do to each other, for an extreme case.
Meanwhile, while spinning may not actually add any speed bonus to your attack, in moving your mouse quickly to the side you can assure that you're going to hit anything that's around you at the strongest point of the swing (which, evidently, is everything from the very start til about the time the tip of the weapon is in front of you) much more quickly than what's possible under a realistic set of rules. People have been abusing this in numerous ways, the most annoying of which is when one of your enemies decides to run away from you with their two-hander or spear ready to be swung sideways, and then just when you're within striking range they spin around in a tenth of a second and nail you. It's even more annoying when a similar trick is done with archery.
I just ran a test on one of the servers, and I was able to swing an axe and spin around a full five times before getting to the point of the two-hander animation at which damage begins to taper off. This part of the problem could be solved simply as placing a physical limit to how fast your character (not your point of view) can turn, as it was in the single-player game.
The rest is in the animations, and especially in the way that the power of the strike is not dependent on having to realistically accelerate the swing out of the ready position.
No, no you don't. Speed bonus is greatly influenced by precisely when in the animation you strike. If you're hitting at the beginning, you'll be pulling a negative bonus. Go try it in native with damage reporting on and watch what happens.
No, no you don't. Speed bonus is greatly influenced by precisely when in the animation you strike. If you're hitting at the beginning, you'll be pulling a negative bonus. Go try it in native with damage reporting on and watch what happens.
Yes, but what you're talking about is Native. This seems to have been drastically changed in Warband. Notice that in Native that (unless you have insane proficiency of course) if your swing has no time to accelerate, then you'll simply nudge the enemy and do insignificant damage. If you try this online in Warband, you may do less damage (no way to tell, really), but you'll still always stagger your opponent, and from what I've seen, it still does significant damage.
It would be nice to have a multiplayer mode which takes place in a training arena with lots of dummies and such to hit and has all the damage reporting and shot info that you get from SP Native to settle things like this. If you put a server up like this it wouldn't get used much, but it would be valuable for that purpose in the beta alone.
I just wanted to jump in here about this. Again, I do not have beta, so I appologize if I do not fully understand everything. I just want to submit this video as a reference to what is being talked about:
If you watch a bit of a way in how he swings with the axe, all the killing chops are to the side in a rotating motion. Straight in front of you hits do not seem as effective as standing 45 degrees off center and rotating the mouse through the swing.
If this is the intended way then that is fine, but I just want to say really to watch the swinging mechanics very closely for the game. Mount and Blade Warband is really the only melee multiplayer game I can find out there at the moment, so getting this part fun and interesting is vital.
The closest game I can compare to it is jedi outcast. I recall them botching up melee fighting a whole bunch with a few bad patches and it just drove the community away. They had a similar style problem, where there was a rear attack, if you had an opponent close behind you, hit down and attack, and you did a sort of spinny back flourish. The problem was you could rotate while going through the animation, so if you swiveled while hitting with this move, you would basically strike them 3 times more then the one blow, resulting in instant death.
This led to what we all liked to call "Ass fighting". People would run around backwards into melee looking to start this blow for the instant kill. It made the game look ridiculous, and I think drove a lot of players out (myself included).
Thing is, people are going to do whatever strategy is going to win them the game, and if starting a swing and spinning the mouse all the hell over the place is going to get you kills, people are going to do it.
I think it will do wonders for this game if people can SEE the killing blows they land, rather then swiveling past them and hearing the death cry off to the side. I think the new animations look much better then native for sure, but there needs to be some sort of way to make sure odd tactics dont rule the day.
No, no you don't. Speed bonus is greatly influenced by precisely when in the animation you strike. If you're hitting at the beginning, you'll be pulling a negative bonus. Go try it in native with damage reporting on and watch what happens.
Perhaps, but you can kill just find by hitting targets outside your field of view. In addition, there is no swing - the attack hits instantly when you release the mouse button, so this is much faster and harder to defend. I always play with messages on (old game) and even if I get an occasional negative bonus, it is very small.
Just earlier today I got killed by a guy facing the complete opposite direction because the very tip of his weapon scratched my wrist. I can see the need for this
Just earlier today I got killed by a guy facing the complete opposite direction because the very tip of his weapon scratched my wrist. I can see the need for this
Yeah, there doesn't seem any indication for a need to allow your swing to accelerate your weapon to speed that can actually do damage in Warband - the speed of the weapon in your swing accelerates from zero to deadly as soon as you release your attack button.
I don't recall being able to get away with this in 1.011 unless I was already running past someone at a pretty decent speed. Getting accidentally killed by someone while you were approaching them from the opposite side of the swing was unheard of back then.
The animations just encourage this. Just today I got off my horse with the two-handed axe vaegirs get while running directly away from my horse. I took a swing and hit my horse even though it was 180 degrees behind me. Essentially if you rotate at all the right direction your weapon will hit 360 degrees around you. This is pretty silly I doubt anyone fights like that. Just imagine Braveheart if this was the most effective way to fight.
I agree with the man who start the topic. I think that the animations of swing was much better in Native than in Warband. It's strange for me, when somebody hit the person, which he didn't want to hit e.g. when someone stand behind this person.
I just wanted to jump in here about this. Again, I do not have beta, so I appologize if I do not fully understand everything. I just want to submit this video as a reference to what is being talked about:
Wow, check out the fight in that video, around the 2 minute mark for starters. Those guys are just moving their entire screen into their swing direction. They're constantly spinning...
And it clearly is an auto block server.. that can get annoying quite quickly.
Yes, but what you're talking about is Native. This seems to have been drastically changed in Warband. Notice that in Native that (unless you have insane proficiency of course) if your swing has no time to accelerate, then you'll simply nudge the enemy and do insignificant damage. If you try this online in Warband, you may do less damage (no way to tell, really), but you'll still always stagger your opponent, and from what I've seen, it still does significant damage.
I spin around a lot, but I've never noticed any effect on my strikes. I'll always be moving around because a) it makes me harder to hit, b) If I can get around behind you you can't block and c) I want to find team mates to assist me, and make sure none of yours are sneaking up behind me.
