Question/Suggestion regarding Stun and Charge

[lfish]

So one of the more opaque elements right now is just how likely an orc’s charge is to succeed, and what factors into that chance. My understanding is that high armor and a raised shield both will lower the chance of being stunned, and I think this is good; it should be a little more clear exactly what the calculations are though.

I would suggest that for any stunning attack, including the orc’s charge, stamina should also play a rather large factor, giving another incentive to keep fatigue levels low.

For instance, if an attacker’s standard stunning attack started with a value of %90, the defender’s remaining unused fatigue could reduce this % by half it’s value (just as an example, a more complex formula might need to be used), meaning if a defender had 60/90 fatigue, they would have 30 pts of stamina remaining, reducing the stun chance by %15 for a %75 chance to stun. Other factors like armor and shield walls should affect the chance as well. perhaps for every 10 pts of remaining armor stun chance is reduced by %1. So if the defender in the example had been wearing 120 pts of armor the stun percentage would be reduced by %12 to %63. A shield wall could reduce it by another %10-$30.

I also think there could be value in more stunning attacks, given to a wider variety of weapons. This would make the press the advantage ability more useful as well. For instance, swords could have a pommel or ‘murder-strike’ with a low stun chance, that would be unlikely to work unless fatigue was high.

This could also help solve the problem of improving the shield bash ability, adding a stun chance of %60 or so, which would be too low to be particularly useful at the beginning of battle, but could be very helpful later on when armor is low and fatigue is high. This would all add up to making stunning a more widespread battlefield technique, while giving multiple avenues to resist it.

[Jaysen]

Hmm pretty interesting approach tying the stun chance to other factors like fatigue. I have to think about that a little more but it is definitely an mechanic worth exploring. Not so sure about the armor though.
Right now the chance of the orc charge to stun is just reduced by the shield and shieldwall bonus.

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[GOD]

My worry with this is that you run the risk of making fatigue an even more important stat than it already is. In addition to facilitating the using of moves and determining how much armour the merc can practically wear, it would now be the determining factor in the merc resisting a very powerful effect. Furthermore, armour also reducing stunning would mean that you get double the value out of a single stat increase, since by increasing one stat you affect two different ways of lowering the chance to stun. Add to this that stunning would be more prevalent and it becomes a necessity to have that stat maxed out as soon as possible. After all, you’d never want to be stunned if you can avoid it. This would also make backgrounds that boost fatigue even better, while making backgrounds that reduce it even worse. At the moment, fatigue is already pretty much superior to a stat like hitpoints or initiative and this change would make this even more apparent.

Another result of increasing stunning would be the need for the rebalancing of a weapon like the club, since it’s current ‘thing’ is that it stuns. Stunning would also become ubiquitous, which is a fundamental change to how the combat currently plays out. You’d switch to fishing for the stun so that you can reduce the number of attackers, while constantly minimising your own chances of being stunned.

[lfish]

These concerns are all legitimate, but with a little tweaking I don’t think they have to be as significant as you make them out to be. Having stun unaffected directly by armor would be fine for me; and the change to stun chance could be a spread calculated as a percentage of remaining stamina rather than directly related to the stamina number (say -10% at full fatigue, to +20% at 0 fatigue for a maximum 30% spread), so more stamina would still be better, but it would be a much less significant difference, and armor would actually increase your stun chance slightly.

There are also some different ideas for how stunning should work that have been talked about in other threads, including switching it to AP damage. These could give more granular control over how debilitating a stun is, possibly with different levels of stunning depending on the force of the blow. I’d be interested in whether there was a way of making stuns affect your initiative, and if it lowered your initiative enough, you would be dropped off of the turn order into the next one. This would make initiative more important in determining whether a stun was effective or not, but I’m not sure if there’s a way to make that work without creating a lot of initiative exceptions for stunned units.

Stunning is obviously irritating when it happens to your brothers, and overall slows battles down a bit, but currently it is only really a factor when facing orcs. It is one of the things that most quickly feels ‘unfair’ for new players if they don’t understand it. I would want it to remain fairly rare, but occurring in a wider variety of circumstances.

[Jago]

GOD wrote:

My worry with this is that you run the risk of making fatigue an even more important stat than it already is.

Isn’t making the max. hitpoints reduce to chance to be stunned an option? High hitpoints could represent the resistance of a brother against status effects (stunned, posioned), thus making hitpoints a little more viable, once a medical system has be implemented. Or that’s at least how it works in many RPGs.

Anyway, having the stun chance decreased by shield and shieldwall bonus doesn’t seem enough to me. Have any stat influence the chance as well, so you can directly develop certain brothers to become more robust against stunning.

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[Sky]

Jago wrote:

Isn’t making the max. hitpoints reduce to chance to be stunned an option? High hitpoints could represent the resistance of a brother against status effects (stunned, posioned), thus making hitpoints a little more viable, once a medical system has be implemented. Or that’s at least how it works in many RPGs.

Anyway, having the stun chance decreased by shield and shieldwall bonus doesn’t seem enough to me. Have any stat influence the chance as well, so you can directly develop certain brothers to become more robust against stunning.

Perhaps to add more significance not only to armor but perhaps to initiative aswell, it could be the bound stat for stuns. The faster you are compared to the enemy, the more chance you got that he can not react in time.

The hp aspect is a very fine one aswell. As stated more times already, I’d love to see more stat bound skills, and if instead there are game mechanics well even better. The current stat trinity must be broken, and diversity has to dominate giving the player even higher character management options or even so to say manual specializations.

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[GOD]

lfish wrote:

These concerns are all legitimate, but with a little tweaking I don’t think they have to be as significant as you make them out to be. Having stun unaffected directly by armor would be fine for me; and the change to stun chance could be a spread calculated as a percentage of remaining stamina rather than directly related to the stamina number (say -10% at full fatigue, to +20% at 0 fatigue for a maximum 30% spread), so more stamina would still be better, but it would be a much less significant difference, and armor would actually increase your stun chance slightly.
There are also some different ideas for how stunning should work that have been talked about in other threads, including switching it to AP damage. These could give more granular control over how debilitating a stun is, possibly with different levels of stunning depending on the force of the blow. I’d be interested in whether there was a way of making stuns affect your initiative, and if it lowered your initiative enough, you would be dropped off of the turn order into the next one. This would make initiative more important in determining whether a stun was effective or not, but I’m not sure if there’s a way to make that work without creating a lot of initiative exceptions for stunned units.
Stunning is obviously irritating when it happens to your brothers, and overall slows battles down a bit, but currently it is only really a factor when facing orcs. It is one of the things that most quickly feels ‘unfair’ for new players if they don’t understand it. I would want it to remain fairly rare, but occurring in a wider variety of circumstances.

It’s true that there’d be room for tweaking, but the fundamental problem would remain that the amount of remaining stamina would still be determined by the fatigue stat, even when stun chance isn’t directly based on fatigue. To use an extreme example: If you have 100 fatigue and spend 20, then you filled up 1/5 of your total fatigue. As a result, 4/5 of your fatigue is filled up. If you have 200 fatigue and spend 20, then you used 1/10 of your total fatigue. As a result, 9/10 of your fatigue has been filled up. Having the stun chance be based on a percentage of the remaining amount of stamina would therefore still rely on the amount of fatigue provided by stats and backgrounds.

Also, when you try to more broadly apply my suggestion on switching to AP damage to make it more widely used, you run into the problem of the amount of AP damage either being too small or so large that it results in an effective stun – as in, characters effectively being neutralised because they can no longer take action. My shieldbash suggestion gets around this, but that’s too specific to be widely applicable. You’d need a retooling of the way AP is distributed if you want to achieve a change like that, which could break other parts of the design.
As for initiative, an ability that pushes someone further down the initiative order might be interesting – not as a replacement of the current stun, but as a new weapon ability. It would only be as useful as the stun when it pushes someone down to the next turn, in which case it’s just a stun equivalent and not a meaningful change.

Jago wrote:

Isn’t making the max. hitpoints reduce to chance to be stunned an option? High hitpoints could represent the resistance of a brother against status effects (stunned, posioned), thus making hitpoints a little more viable, once a medical system has be implemented. Or that’s at least how it works in many RPGs.
Anyway, having the stun chance decreased by shield and shieldwall bonus doesn’t seem enough to me. Have any stat influence the chance as well, so you can directly develop certain brothers to become more robust against stunning.

If stun chance needs to tied to a stat, then hitpoints would probably be a good pick. It would add a reason to pick it and make high hp enemies threatening in a way that differs from heavily armoured enemies. It does lack the dynamism that Ifish is getting at with his suggestion, since hitpoints tend to be more static than fatigue and only start to decrease when the unit is about to be killed – there would therefore be little variance in the chance of getting stunned over the course of the battle. That’s not bad in itself, but it would make it a different kind of solution.

Sky wrote:

Perhaps to add more significance not only to armor but perhaps to initiative aswell, it could be the bound stat for stuns. The faster you are compared to the enemy, the more chance you got that he can not react in time.
The hp aspect is a very fine one aswell. As stated more times already, I’d love to see more stat bound skills, and if instead there are game mechanics well even better. The current stat trinity must be broken, and diversity has to dominate giving the player even higher character management options or even so to say manual specializations.

Having initiative influence the chance of stunning seems a bit too arbitrary since your description more closely matches having stun chance be influenced by the melee or ranged skill. I’d also like the game to stay away from stats influencing the chance to stun, if possible. That is one of the things that serves as a differentiating factor between weapons and keeps stats from becoming too influential.

/

Isn’t this more of an issue regarding the UI not conveying that the shieldwall reduces the chance of getting stunned by the Orc-charge, though? When I first encountered Orcs, I instinctively had everyone put up their shields because they seemed particularly threatening and when I noticed the charge I kept looking for ways to ‘catch’ the Orcs before they could do it. This works well and I’ve never had that many stuns as a result, even when I was a complete novice at the game. Knowing that shields affect it is useful information that could be conveyed in some way, but I don’t neccesarily see how the stun chance itself is a problem.

[lfish]

Well obviously the amount of stamina you have would still affect the stun % formula in my second example. The point is that it’s a locked spread, so the difference between someone with a ton of stamina, and someone with very little is less extreme, while still maintaining the overall change in stun vulnerability over the course of a battle. Someone with particularly high fatigue would still be able to fight longer with less consequences, but they wouldn’t start out the battle comparatively invulnerable to stunning. I agree that fatigue is currently too much of a no-brainer for level-up and background/traits, but I don’t think that is enough cause to dismiss any further ideas that are tied favorably to that stat. New needs and uses for other stats have to be introduced for the fatigue + defense + attack dominance to actually change.

The suggestion for using HP is another possibility and makes sense, but wouldn’t really make for much battlefield variability. Usually if you’re at the point where you’ve lost any health, you’re just going to get killed on the next hit anyway, so why bother with stunning?

I guess stunning seems overly arbitrary right now, as one of the only battlefield events that can occur that isn’t tied to any stats on either side. Why does a club have a %75 chance to stun regardless of any of the attributes, skills or equipment of the person swinging or getting hit by the club? It seems as arbitrary as saying that arrows always have a %25 chance to hit. Why does stunning from a charge work so completely differently than with a club or 2-handed sword? The current stun system works okay enough I suppose, I just think it can and should be improved.

[GOD]

It is cause to dismiss it when there are alternatives to it or if the mechanic isn’t necessary. Hitpoints might be less dynamic than fatigue, as your chance of getting stunned would remain stable for most of the fight, but would make more sense thematically and would give a boost to the stat and Colossus perk. It would also remove the problem that undead pose for the fatigue approach, since they never get tired and thus would always get a boost regardless of how much they fight. In contrast, locked spread or not, making it fatigue based would only further cement the superiority of high fatigue characters over low fatigue ones, as for its effect to be dynamic the variation between stun chances at the different stages would have to make a noticeable difference, otherwise why bother, which would result in large differences between a high and low fatigue character. Fatigue simply does not need a buff like that, therefore I’d rather see the chance of being stunned depend on HP, if the decision is made to tie it to a stat.

That arbitrariness is just the way the system works, similar to how none of the stats increase the amount of damage you do with weapons. That’s arbitrary, as you’d expect individual strength and skill to be a huge factor, but it’s done that way so as to shift your attention towards the gear, rather than the stats. Same goes for stunning, which is part of why I’m against having stats influence the chance to stun – that should remain the territory of weapons. I’m inclined to think the same of the chance of getting stunned, since it’s not all that common and only really a factor when fighting Orcs, which is fine and something that makes them different from other factions, while still being manageable with the right preparations.

[Jago]

GOD wrote:

That arbitrariness is just the way the system works, similar to how none of the stats increase the amount of damage you do with weapons. That’s arbitrary, as you’d expect individual strength and skill to be a huge factor, but it’s done that way so as to shift your attention towards the gear, rather than the stats. Same goes for stunning, which is part of why I’m against having stats influence the chance to stun – that should remain the territory of weapons. I’m inclined to think the same of the chance of getting stunned, since it’s not all that common and only really a factor when fighting Orcs, which is fine and something that makes them different from other factions, while still being manageable with the right preparations.

I’m not sure I understand. Do you want hitpoints NOT to influence the chance to stun, the chance to be stunned, or both? Also if we tie the chance to CAUSE stun to the weapons, wouldn’t a mere peasant have the same chance to stun as an experienced knight if the carry the same type of mace? That doesn’t seem right.

GOD wrote:

It is cause to dismiss it when there are alternatives to it or if the mechanic isn’t necessary. Hitpoints might be less dynamic than fatigue, as your chance of getting stunned would remain stable for most of the fight, but would make more sense thematically and would give a boost to the stat and Colossus perk. It would also remove the problem that undead pose for the fatigue approach, since they never get tired and thus would always get a boost regardless of how much they fight. In contrast, locked spread or not, making it fatigue based would only further cement the superiority of high fatigue characters over low fatigue ones, as for its effect to be dynamic the variation between stun chances at the different stages would have to make a noticeable difference, otherwise why bother, which would result in large differences between a high and low fatigue character. Fatigue simply does not need a buff like that, therefore I’d rather see the chance of being stunned depend on HP, if the decision is made to tie it to a stat.

Yes, sounds all very good to me.

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[GOD]

Jago wrote:

I’m not sure I understand. Do you want hitpoints NOT to influence the chance to stun, the chance to be stunned, or both? Also if we tie the chance to CAUSE stun to the weapons, wouldn’t a mere peasant have the same chance to stun as an experienced knight if the carry the same type of mace? That doesn’t seem right.

Basically, I’m not convinced that the stunning needs to be changed (having it be affected by stats). However, if it was changed, I’d want the chance of getting stunned be based on hitpoints rather than fatigue. The stun chance of weapons would remain unaffected, similarly to how weapon damage is unaffected by stats. It’s like how in this system a peasant does the same amount of damage with a greatsword, if he hits, as a knight.

[lfish]

Well, like I said, I wouldn’t have a problem with HP being the tied skill; I just think it would be a little less interesting tactically. I’m willing to admit that with the fatigue issues in the current state of the game, it’s probably not worth the trouble to make any changes that further buff stamina. When more broad changes have affected the balance of the game I think it will be worth a look though.
Mostly I think players should have some access to character builds and decisions that can enhance a brother’s stun resistance. Indomitable perk seems a little too specific, and difficult to use effectively, and I don’t know if anyone actually takes it right now.

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