SP - General Weapon Penetration Mechanic

[Ldsantana]

Edit: As mentioned by @Lusitani 5th Empire i mixed up x and y in the description. They have been corrected now.

Hello, long time Warband player here, i'd like to make a suggestion on a penetration mechanic for weapons that will essentially change the way armor behaves and damage is calculated. One of my pet peeves with Warband is how the armor system works and how there is little difference between how a chainmail absorbs damage and how plate armor absorbs damage, so taking a little inspiration from another game, Pillars of Eternity Deadfire, i came up with an idea that will blend well into the game and possibly combine with another mechanic already being utilized.

In order to bring said system to Bannerlord all armors would have their protection values altered for balance (we'll call this stat y in the formulas bellow), and all weapons will receive a penetration stat (we'll call it x) so the damage of an attack will be calculated based on the following formulas:

Case 1: If x < y, base damage is reduced by 50% plus an extra 10% for every number that separates x from y (so if x is 3 and y is 5 it will be 50% + 20% damage reduction).

Case 2: If x = y, base damage is reduced by 30%.

Case 3: If x > y, a flat 20% increase in damage to reward "overpenetration".

This will help make armor more useful and further differentiate between types (i.e gambesons, chanimail, briagandine, plate etc) and allow weapons to serve different purposes (swords with higher overall damage but low penetration will outperform maces vs low armored troops, while the latter will outperform swords against heavily armored opponents). Note that other factors present in damage calculation (speed, angle of the attack, body part hit) should remain unchanged as this mechanic will be enhancing the current formula used in Bannerlord, and also the % used in formula (should this mechanic be implemented) will suffer tweaks in order to better balance the game.

Armors will have different protection values against different types of damage (i.e chainmail is great vs cutting and not so good vs blunt and pierce damage, while plate armors only weakness would be blunt damage), and weapons with multiple damage types will have a unique penetration stat for each (a sword might have a 10 penetration for its swing attacks and a 15 penetration for its thrust, note that these values were chosen at random).

I mentioned earlier this mechanic would blend well with another already in game, and that is the % chance to kill or wound an enemy in combat. This is how the these two aspects would blend together:


In a case 1 (if x < y) scenario the downed npc would have a high chance of just being wounded.

In a case 2 (If x = y) we'd have a slightly higher chance of a kill.

In a case 3 (if x > y) the npc will likely die.

Please give me your thoughts on this proposed mechanic and let's hope one of the devs sees this thread.

 

[Dr-Shinobi]

 

[Lusitani 5th Empire]

@Ldsantana I think you mixed up x and y. Aside from that I don't know how the damage system works, but I can say the way it is coded is not that simple, so a simple approach like you propose might not be possible.

In general, I like the idea of having a npc dying depending on the "survivability" the armor gives them and the "lethality" of the weapon/strikes they are hit with, and not just having troops survive or die at random.
In a system like this we would see high tier troops likely survive (good armor = less lethality) and low tier troops dying more often, and all based on real world interactions, not just an arbitrary probability.

 

[Ldsantana]

@Ldsantana I think you mixed up x and y. Aside from that I don't know how the damage system works, but I can say the way it is coded is not that simple, so a simple approach like you propose might not be possible.

In general, I like the idea of having a npc dying depending on the "survivability" the armor gives them and the "lethality" of the weapon/strikes they are hit with, and not just having troops survive or die at random.
In a system like this we would see high tier troops likely survive (good armor = less lethality) and low tier troops dying more often, and all based on real world interactions, not just an arbitrary probability.

Thanks for the reply! can't say i know how the damage is calculated either, but they seem to have improved on the Warband formula instead of creating a new one from scratch (I say this because the way armor absorbs damage feels similar, which is why I created this thread).
The devs did mention in one of the older devblogs that things like: relative speed, angle of attack and body part hit are involved in the damage calculation, these things were present to some degree in Warband aswell, hence why I said the formula seems to be an improved version.

Having elite troops survive battles more often is a good consequence of having a mechanic like this implemented, thanks for pointing it out. And yeah I did mix up x and y initially, it's been corrected now .