Hi guys,



Talking about this new combat system, here are some enlightenments:

• We have 4 types of hit:
  
  
  • Critical Fail: you’ll do 0 damages
  • “Fumble”: you’ll do 50% of your damages
  • Normal hit: you’ll do 100% of your damages
  • Critical hit: you’ll do 150% of your damages
    
    
• Each time a unit tries to hit another one, a dice is rolled between 0 and Attack (of the attacker) and Defence (of the target). Depending on the result, it will select the appropriate type of hit. With a defense equal to the attack, the attacker has as much chance to do a critical hit as a critical defense, as much chances to do a fumble as a normal attack.
• When the attack is twice the defense, you have 80% to do a normal attack and 20 % to do a critical. having half the attack, will give the opposite result.
• being on a higher ground will give you a 30% attack bonus, 60% in winter.
• being in a forest gives you a 30% defense bonus.
• each morale point adds +15 % to both attack and defense. to gain morale have friendly troops close to you (+1 per unit); or be in a friendly city tile (center or district) to get +3 morale
• Weapons have damage bonuses against specific unit types: bows against flying, swords against infantry, spears against cavalry etc...
  
  

Thanks again for your support and feedback!



Cheers,

So, according to ST's explanation of having symmetric chances to miss and crit, as well as symmetric chances to hit and scratch, for A=D, as well as the chance for critting/missing being lower than the chance to hit/scratch, I can assume:



x*miss+y*scratch+y*hit+x*crit [atattack=defense] = average damage

miss=0

scratch=0.5

hit=1

crit=2

y>x

2x+2y=1



The chance to hit/scratch, y, can then be in the range ]0.25,0.5], the chance to miss/crit is simply x=0,5-y.

Calculating the average damage yields then, in the given range, a value in between 75%, on average, to 87%, on average. Which just means damage is worth less than displayed.

Otherwise said, in terms of inflation, we need from 33% more damage-attribute than displayed to actually get to that damage-improvement (on average), to 15%, in case the crit chance almost equals the hit chance.



Just tell me, which one, so I can account for it when I buy equipment.

Nosferatiel wrote:
Just tell me, which one, so I can account for it when I buy equipment.

Don't feed the math troll!

Word. Good luck devs!

Propbuddha wrote:
Don't feed the math troll!

I disagree with you. Nos is absolutely right. These hard numbers will make the game better in the long run. Most times the results should be predictable, but there always needs to be room for surprise outcomes.

Nasarog wrote:
I disagree with you. Nos is absolutely right. These hard numbers will make the game better in the long run. Most times the results should be predictable, but there always needs to be room for surprise outcomes.

I too would also like to see at least just one stat that says: Normal hit chance: 75% (hoverable which says why and what affects it?)

Well, if we must keep the 0/.5/1/2 damage levels, can we increase the rate at which increasing your attack/defense ratio improves damage? As previously suggested, rolling to D^2 + A^2 would help make these changes more noticeable. Otherwise, this may fix the major balance issues (super high damage / life on neutrals), while failing to make building attack and defense worthwhile.

Just an UI thing or two:

• The symbols for the hits & misses aren't super obvious. In fact, there's a lot of symbols in combat which needs explanation somewhere...
• The "targeting" round should really, really read "targeting & movement", since it's actually not obvious that you can directly move your units.
  
  

I'm disappointed in the increase to 6-turn combat, btw, because combat now lasts longer for multiplayer games. Short and sweet, yet still tactical, was really great before, but perhaps that's just me.



Also, is it by design that a unit with only movement orders still attacks, and that unit with no orders both moves and attacks? I guess it's fine but it takes some getting used to... this lingering between hands on and hands off combat is slightly confusing...

eobet wrote:




I'm disappointed in the increase to 6-turn combat, btw, because combat now lasts longer for multiplayer games. Short and sweet, yet still tactical, was really great before, but perhaps that's just me.

You can switch back to 3 order/6 round combat in the advanced settings

Double crits STILL feel completely wrong in a game like this.



Losing a key unit in a battle to a crit doesn't feel fun, or tactical, or feels like you just got cheated.

hashinshin wrote:
Double crits STILL feel completely wrong in a game like this.



Losing a key unit in a battle to a crit doesn't feel fun, or tactical, or feels like you just got cheated.

Completely agree with this, especially because well-equipped units are so expensive and take so long to build.



I'll wait and see how things look with the changes, but big hits on the order of half or more of a unit's health are not fun in either attacking or defending.

I'm actually not fond of misses. I'm not sure they're really necessary in this game and just drag out combat. I think "fumbles" and critical hits are enough incentives to encourage players to invest in attack if the formulas are worked out well. We don't need misses.

I love the Critical Hits and Misses. I see it as an extra incentive to build up your Attack or Defense stat vs just boosting Damage. As much as it stinks to be on the losing end of a Critical, they encourage risk taking add a lot of drama to the combat.

Larcent wrote:
I'm actually not fond of misses. I'm not sure they're really necessary in this game and just drag out combat. I think "fumbles" and critical hits are enough incentives to encourage players to invest in attack if the formulas are worked out well. We don't need misses.

I think if the three situations were:



50%, 100%, 150%.



I think the game would roll a lot better. No random double damage, no random 1 damage.

I have a question(/suggestion if i missed the info somewhere) concerning combat.



Some skills like the "sweep strike back" or that discharge from the vaulters' titan are interesting ones in tactical combat.

Sometimes i'm just ok with the position of the unit and would like it to remain "idle" to benefit from its skill when it receives a hit.



The issue is that when you give the "steady" order, it says clearly that if there's an enemy within range it's going to attack it.

With the "defensive" order, if you don't give any action to the unit, it's going to move away from combat to another position to avoid being hit.

I don't want to make that unit with low initiative on purpose, as it loose the opportunity to pick a tactical position (well maybe that's intentional to impose that choice, i don't know).



Is there some keyboard shortcut that i don't know that tells the unit to just stay there and wait for the hit?



Same thing when you have a unit with a heal ability, it will heal itself only if it considers that it is the priority, when sometimes you want to put that priority.

hashinshin wrote:
I think if the three situations were:



50%, 100%, 150%.



I think the game would roll a lot better. No random double damage, no random 1 damage.

This sounds like a very good middle ground suggestion.



Firstly because this is a strategy game, not a game of dice, and secondly, because the units actually represents whole armies... to have ALL of them miss would be pretty spectacular.

Thank you for your feedback! Here are some answers to your comments / questions.

• As Propbuddha said, you can select the Advanced mode in the Advanced option to go back to the 3 phases battle.
• We chose to add the critical fail, which provokes a 0 damage, in order to reinforce the incentive of all the stats. Without this case, it will push a no-brain focus on building units with high damages, ignoring their attack stat.
• If you want to keep a unit to a specific position, you can choose to "hold position" (3rd strategy). Once the strategy is set, you can still order a movement, and if you do so, the unit will move and then stay in position.
• A unit always attacks if there is an opponent within its attack range, but with a hold position, it won't move to attack. It's a tough decision to force the unit to not attack when it has the opportunity as it could create frustration if the opponent's units ignore it; its turn will be wasted.
  
  

Cheers

I understand the last point, but surely giving the player a choice is not a bad thing? If the player wants the unit to standby and wait for a counter, yet the unit is ignored, then that was the risk of the choice the player made. If the player doesn't want the risk, he won't choose the option. If the unit will always attack regardless of the player's input then that's going to be frustrating to players that wanted it to standby. I mean, it's like "overwatch" in XCOM and similar games. Potentially it's a wasted turn but it's an extra layer of choice and strategy for the player.



I also think the 1 damage thing is way over the top. Think about it this way - if the enemy has 100HP and you're meant to do 25 damage, it'll take 4 normal attacks. If you build the hero or unit incorrectly and it's inaccurate, it will miss and only do 1 damage - therefore it would take 100 of those attacks. You've gone from needing 4 attacks to needing 100 (assuming they're all equally successful). However, if it merely halved the damage, it would take 8 attacks. That's still twice as many attacks, meaning you'll potentially take twice as much damage while you try to bring the enemy down or need twice as many units for the same results (meaning twice as many turns/resources went on your army). Equally, a critical would only add on another 12 damage (rounding down) so 37 per hit, or 3 attacks to kill. It would feel good for the player to take an enemy that should need a couple more hits out with a single critical, yet you won't get the jaw-dropping shock of seeing your hero take double damage on a random chance and die.



I think completely missing or only doing 1 damage, or being obliterated in a single hit, is okay in a roguelike - but this kind of feels like chess if they made it so getting a checkmate isn't good enough, you also have to roll a 6 on a D6 or it won't count. That said, I totally understand not wanting to let players just ignore Attack. My personal feeling is that the "punishment" for not raising Attack enough should be a strong inefficiency in combat potential, not your units effectively becoming completely useless or killed in the blink of an eye.

You could easily make it so even if you wanted to punish people harshly you could go with a 33/66/100/133/166% damage system. If someone is ignoring attack and is constantly hitting 33-66% damage then he's going to suffer immensely for it. Even then though, how do you ignore attack? Attack is pretty much decided by the unit template since everyone just uses the best weapons anyway.

I am not exactly sure about that but at the end game I think like all the weapons / armor created by the materials end up equal. Meaning tier 3 glassteel / titanium with the tier 2 of 5th era tech of the Adamantian / Palladian and tier 1 of the Hyperium / Mithrite actually give the same amount of stats as far as I noticed. They just give them on different stats in either flat values or percentages. So you can actually skip attack for other stats largely if you decide, especially damage. So if you have a unit lets say with 100 damage and 70 attack it would be quite propable to have an enemy with 140 defense making you miss or fumble most of the time making your damage useless.