Wargasm

[Wargasm]

It’s what you suggested above, and the “base ranged defence” doesn’t include any bonuses from shields, Dodge, confident morale or the Short trait. At least that’s what I understand/assume. Unfortunately, many of the perk bonuses aren’t very tangible in-game, so that it’s difficult to judge their worth. With Dodge you get a nice icon displaying how much bonus is currently in operation. Obviously, with Anticipation, the bonus is specific to the enemy attacking you and the position from which the attack takes place, so that there’s no static bonus that can be displayed when it’s the character’s turn.

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GlyphGryph wrote:

Hmm… are you sure about that?

If you had a weapon with 50% ignores armor, that dealt 60 damage, and the opponent had 60 armor – how much damage would you deal?

It would depend on how effective it was against armour, of course. If it was 100% then the armour would be destroyed and the 50% of damage (30) would be fully applied to hit points, since no armour remains.

[Wargasm]

I approve of the shifts to make initiative, morale/resolve and hit-points more important, and I never wanted to have to create one-dimensional characters with a few exaggerated hyper-abilities and several glaring/unrealistic weaknesses that were negated by scale armour and other one-dimensional characters, but I have to say that I also have experienced mostly negative emotions from the new build thus far. On older builds, it seemed that Expert/Deadly mode forced you to spend too much time enduring tedious/puritanical resource management and taking recourse to “ignoble” tactics (avoiding uncertain fights, retreating, aborting contracts, intervening at the eleventh hour in caravan battles to scavenge loot etc.), whereas Easy/Normal/Beginner mode allowed you to more readily get to an unassailable economic position but with less pervasive and less numerous enemies to fight (so that battles became boringly easy and you had to artificially increase the difficulty by using less armour and keeping extra guys in reserve etc.). For the game to be enjoyable, you WANT there to be hordes of deadly enemies to fight, and you want your strategic and tactical decisions to have a bearing on the outcome against them, but you don’t want to be forced into fighting them when you can’t afford to buy/repair equipment and/or to heal injuries. You want to be able to take your time to build up for each challenge, tweaking your tactics as you go. You want room for experimentation and exploration. You want to focus on the aspects of the game that you find most enjoyable, instead of being persistently forced to forsake them (or to endure more tedious aspects) for economic reasons. You want to be able (or to reliably become able) to afford at least some decent/high-level resources, but you want this luxury to be necessary to build for the grand challenges ahead. You want the grand challenges to be exactly that, but you don’t want set-backs along the way to leave you in a ruinous position from which you can’t gradually rebuild and have another go. The game is very immersive and it’s immensely frustrating and irritating when hours/days/weeks of preparation are ruined by one or two random accidents/mistakes when you were tired or in a rush etc. And sometimes, at random, whatever the difficulty level and through no fault of your own, you just happen to get swarmed by deadly enemies chasing you from all directions early on in the game, and there’s no quick/reliable way to escape from the predicament. On the new beta release, these drawbacks seem to be more pervasive on all difficulty levels.

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GlyphGryph wrote:

So what you’re saying is that the damage is actually applied twice, once to armor and THEN once to health? So if a weapon said it does 60 damage (no armor pen, 100% effective vs. armor), it actually does (potentially) 120 damage total? 60 to armor and then, if the armor is destroyed, 60 more to health?

Not exactly as above, because, if a weapon did ZERO damage ignoring armour, it wouldn’t get applied a second time and so would still just do 60 damage. If 10% of its 60 damage ignored armour, and the target hit had 60 armour, then the armour would be destroyed and 6 hit points would be taken.

You’d actually be surprised by how well bandit/brigand bandanas (20 armour) sometimes protect them against the first headshot with a flail.

[Wargasm]

It’s always seemed worthless to me. The toughest enemies have a lot of head and body armour to protect their hit points, and the head armour gets hit less often and remains intact for longer, so that this “bonus” will probably make it take longer to kill them off …

How many times have you painstakingly reduced an orc warrior, bandit leader, fallen hero etc. to zero body armour and minimal hit points, and then hit them again and clenched your fists victoriously, only for the “finishing blow” to strike the massive slab of metal on their head and actually fail to do any damage to hit points?

A lot of the early attacking perks are useful only against weaker enemies (e.g. Head Hunter, Crippling Strikes, Executioner). What’s really needed is a perk to increase the chances of hitting whichever part of the body is most vulnerable on the current target.

[Wargasm]

I’m pretty sure your calculations aren’t correct. The war-bow typically does ~40 damage to the armour of metal-coated orcs.

How it goes, I think, is:

Shot One:
– 60 raw damage against 250 armour value
– 65% effective vs armour = ~39 armour damage (~211 armour remains)
– 35% of raw damage ignores armour = ~21 damage potentially done to hit points, but 10% of ~211 = ~21 and so no/miniscule damage is done to hit points

Shot Two:
– 60 raw damage against ~211 armour value
– 65% effective vs armour = ~39 armour damage (~172 armour remains)
– 35% of raw damage ignores armour = ~21 damage potentially done to hit points, but 10% of ~172 = ~17 and so only ~4 damage is done to hit points

Shot Three:
– 60 raw damage against ~172 armour value
– 65% effective vs armour = ~39 armour damage (~133 armour remains)
– 35% of raw damage ignores armour = ~21 damage potentially done to hit points, but 10% of ~133 = ~13 and so only ~8 damage is done to hit points

Shot Four:
– 60 raw damage against ~133 armour value
– 65% effective vs armour = ~39 armour damage (~94 armour remains)
– 35% of raw damage ignores armour = ~21 damage potentially done to hit points, but 10% of ~94 = ~9 and so only ~12 damage is done to hit points

Etc. etc. and on shot five you’d actually manage to trigger a morale check.

But it has to be said that there’s nothing in-game to indicate that 10% of the remaining armour value will be deducted from the amount that supposedly “ignores” armour. So, when you’re first playing the game, you see that 50% of 60 damage ignores armour and think “hey, I can do 30 damage to flesh with one shot that has a +15% chance to hit, and trigger a morale check to make this orc warrior run away”.

I think the only info about the 10% deduction anywhere is on some ancient dev blog from before I discovered and started following the game.

[Wargasm]

Another thing I forgot to add about changes to ranged fighting is that the penalties imposed at night have been reduced. It used to be -50% ranged skill; now it’s just -30% (which, with the general increase in ranged abilities, means that it’s much more viable/bothersome at night).

Oh, and I see that the bonus to max fatigue from the Strong trait is now just +10.

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RusBear wrote:

2Wargasm

Good RNG in single battle – not a balance…

The point is: a full-strength ancient dead force still seems less formidable than an equivalent orc or goblin one. I’m pretty sure the orc and goblin scenarios are unwinnable. I’ve tried many, many times with each, without success, but I won the ones against the ancient dead and necro-savants (“Walk in the Woods”) at the first attempt. Necro-savants are basically exactly the same as vampires but with different graphics and with a weapon that wrecks more havoc against armour but without a +10 hit-chance.

As for “balance”, it’s so difficult to judge, because different campaigns (regardless of difficulty settings) can seem so different. There are some (even on “normal” level) when you need to travel to a far-away fortification just to fulfil the terms of the opening contract, and the only way is along a narrow coast/swamp path or through woods/hills/mountains, and your half-naked trio keeps getting chased from all directions by bandits (sorry: brigands), direwolves or occasionally even goblins, and all of them seem far too powerful for that point in the game. But then on other campaigns (even on “expert”) the roads and woods seem largely free of hostile forces for a long time, and you start close to towns that have cheap tools, cheap wildmen and prizefighters, and cheap damaged padded leather that you can repair with your tools, and everything seems so much simpler.

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– The MAIN difference I’ve noticed regarding ranged attacks with the current release is that EVERYONE (your starters, new recruits, and presumably your enemies as well) has HIGHER ranged skill and so gets in hits more often (hence more noticing of the insane potential damage they do)
– Another small change is that (without mastery) crossbows have been upped to 50% of damage potentially ignoring armour (up from 45%), but there was a time when it was 65-70% without needing the mastery perk (which didn’t exist at the time)
– The increased incidence of hitting non-intended targets (even ones in shieldwall with a kite) has existed ever since the injury+perk update when crossbows were made less powerful (i.e. armour-ignoring ability lessened without the new mastery perk, and no longer able to fire at enemies blocked by comrades without severe risk of hitting comrades)
– I think the idea behind it is that the shieldwall is formed with the intention of blocking blows in melee, not to stop a stray bolt/arrow from ricocheting off the edge of someone else’s shield/armour/weapon (nor to block a bolt/arrow unleashed from behind you by a comrade)
– I think that, without the Bullseye perk, the chance to hit the intended target is 50% of what it would be if not blocked, and then the other 50% of the unblocked chance is divided into a 20-25% chance to hit either of the two blocking tiles (or 40-50% if there’s one tile blocking in a straight line) and probably a tiny % chance to hit any of the other adjacent tiles
– My companion crossbowman had the Quick attribute that increases initiative, and I gave him the Dodge and Anticipation perks to protect against enemy fire, but then got killed in a crossbow duel when he had a height advantage and an unblocked target, and came back to life with partially collapsed lungs

[Wargasm]

That’s how it was working on 0.7.0.12, as well, and it seemed more logical and consistent than any of the previous behaviour (after it was initially introduced, it didn’t always operate in the first round of combat, but then came into effect for the second round). If it operated in every round of combat, it would be like having the Adrenaline perk for free with no fatigue cost.

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RusBear wrote:

Ancient dead.
It looks very interesting tactical , but T2 and higher – completely out of balance. As characteristics (no moral, no fatigue, resistance, good armor, very strong weapon) and also the time of occurrence, number of enemies , payment. About their mages I say nothing – this is nonsense anyway, I was against them as soon as they announced.

But I won the updated Ancient Dead scenario (still called “Undead – Line Battle” or something like that) at the first attempt. I even finished off the final one with a scavenged 2-hands cleaver. I’ve still never won the orc or goblin line-battle scenario …

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Lol, like the good old days:

[Wargasm]

I think this might also explain some of the weird things I’ve seen. For example, when doing a “defend against raiding parties” contract and there is more than one party to defend against, there is always a delay of a few seconds before your incessant clicking will result in engaging the second raiding party (even though you’re right next to them the whole time).

There are also several other weird things related to inappropriate fights before/after entering/exiting settlements or before/after attacks on caravans you’re guarding, which seem sometimes to result in settlements/houses reacting as if you’re attacked them (even though you didn’t use the controls that should be necessary to initiate an attack on them).

Plus there are occasions when you join fights between caravans and raiders but get shown only You-vs-Raiders on the pre-battle screen, only for the caravan et al to show up again in the battle (or vice versa: it might look like it’s you and the caravan versus the raiders, but then the caravan is gone and it’s just you outnumbered by raiders). Possibly this inconsistency around which party is/isn’t in the fight is the reason why settlements/houses sometimes think you’ve attacked them (i.e. if the raiders disappear once the battle begins, it’s just you and the caravan and you have to be the opposing sides, and so it gets registered as an attack initiated by you).

I think I’ll try playing in non-ironman mode to see if those problems disappear.

Actually, having re-read what you wrote about environment pausing before auto-saves before battles versus before/after entering/exiting settlements, I think maybe there are certain types of battles (i.e. sudden, complex ones involving more than two parties) for which the environment doesn’t get paused (or for which the environment dynamics are shifting too rapidly within the space of less than a second, so that different data about the battle composition gets saved at different times and/or in different places).

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It almost makes them a pointless recruit, since the only thing going for them before was that they might quickly accumulate levels and perks to compensate for their wholesale shittyness as soldiers.

[Wargasm]

Additional things I’ve noticed:

— Great-swords are now just 100% effective against armour (down from 125%) and Swing has -5% chance to hit
— Warbrands have been reduced to from 95% to 75% effectiveness against armour
— Ancient Honour Guards have 2-handed cleavers that are 170% effective against armour and can be used twice per turn (4 APs per use)
— Throwing Mastery increases damage by 40% (up from 30%) when the distance is 2 tiles

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