These videos say it all.. archers ftw !
you want to make feudal simulator, not a feudal playable game.
Let me stop you right there, because that isn't true. If I wanted a simulator I'd also suggest sleeping being required, meals taking 30 minutes, basic houses be made out of shit (literally) and having to drink water constantly. Though some more "simulation" features would, I believe, make this game better, a full, lame simulation is not what I wish. We're on the same side here
: we want to make the game playable, and I also want it to be as close to realism as possible. So let me say this for the LAST time (I've said it a lot on these forums). Game is NOT something in which realism is always bad and fun killing. It is not always lame, and what it does is that it increases immersion a great deal, which is HUGELY important for the kind of the game this is trying to be.
Now that I've justified myself for the 13th time..
There's nothing really wrong with the archer archetype.
How can you say that ? It's the only "archetype" that allows you to kill potentially 5 to 10 people without taking any damage if you're good enough. The skill ceiling is extremely high, yet it is not balanced around that. You can still do HUGE damage and be VERY cost effective if you're a bad archer.
On the contrary, you get rekt if you're bad in melee as an infantry of any kind, and no matter how good you are, you'll never get out of a 1 v more than 2 - 3 fight if the ones you're up against know at least a bit what they are doing and are not using weapons that do nothing to you through your armor (which is rarely the case).
That's something I really don't understand about their design
: they don't want to push the skill ceiling up for melee nearly as high as Mount & Blade does, blaming potential lag and technology, but they make archer the ultimate class you want to play if you want every ounce of skill you have to matter a LOT in ANY combat situation.
So, yes, there IS something wrong with that archetype.
the problem is that armor is paper-thin in this game. Plate armor is supposed to scoff arrows.
That's what I am saying. It would be easy to make it historical (kindof)
: Leather (this didn't exist as an armor) < Padded < Mail < Scale < Plate with Plate defending extremely well against slashing and piercing and pretty well against blunt.
But then we have a problem. Why would people use any other armors than plate ? Historically (once again), they didn't because until the end of the middle ages and beginning of the Renaissance, plate was expensive so most lower soldiers could not afford anything more than a "plate helmet". Now, how do you replicate that in the game ? In the real world, the warrior population size was HUGE compared to the population and location of plate makers, so yes it was scarce.. for a time. Plate became cheap not only because means of production greatly increased, but also because people had spent hundreds of years giving the armor to their descendant or looting it from their victim if they had one, so the number of them in circulation automatically increase, while the population didn't increase nearly as much (speaking of factors here, not absolute value).
So unless we find a way, the same thing will happen within the game world, and MUCH faster as everyone, virtually, will be able to be plate makers.
I posted many ideas about how that could be solved, but that's not the subject here
: how would that solve the problem of archers being too powerful ? Most people would still have to deal with arrows the same way.
Even leather and chainmail should convert some of this crap piercing and slashing damage to blunt
Now that's a good idea ! I did write a document about how damage should work so that you don't actually die from thousands of small scratches (which doesn't make sense). It's not been updated for a while so here's my current idea, in a nutshell
:Base damage = Damage that would be dealt with the current system WITHOUT counting the hit location factor (so no bonus for hitting the head), as it needs to be applied to the REAL damage amount.
Basically, if Base Damage is under 10 - 15, it is multiplied by 0.8 if it is piercing and then applied as blunt. The blow "glances of" the armor.
If Base Damage is higher than that, then the amount remains the same, except that piercing damage will now only have 130% of it converted to blunt. Slashing remains at 100%. The blow "dents" the armor.
If Base Damage goes higher than say, 40, then the armor is "penetrated". Here what happens
:All damage above a certain variable number we'll call "Threshold" (let's say 40 as an example) does NOT get converted to blunt. It is applied as normal, AND "converts" one point of damage that's under 40, to slash / pierce.
So if I take 50 slashing / piercing damage, in reality I'll take 30 blunt and 20 slashing / piercing.
If I take 60 slashing / piercing damage I'll take 20 blunt and 40 slashing /piercing.
So that means, WITHOUT the hit location factor in (remember the "Base Damage" definition) then the maximum amount of damage you can take on an individual body part is 80 slashing / piercing (with a Base Damage of 80 for both.. which is almost impossible to achieve when hitting someone in any kind of armor,
especially for piercing).
"Hit location" being the damage multiplier from hitting a certain body part (above 1 for head, under 1 for arms and legs I think), so it will still be very much possible to one - shot someone that isn't wearing any kind of armor.
To compensate for general lower base damage you can squeeze out of piercing weapons (maybe it could be lowered even further in this design), the hit location factor could be multiplied by like 1.8 or something like that, so that the damage you get out of an arrow or a spear is very reliant on where you hit with it (huge damage is taken if you make an arrow penetrate through someone's head, very low if it is in his leg or arms).
Threshold should definitely be lower than that if you ask me, but I hope you guys get the idea.
About blunt damage
: Firstly to compensate for all of the extra blunt damage that everyone is gonna take, make it so that it affects hard HP only if it breaks a bone or hits you in the head.
Also, weapons that do blunt by default would never penetrate armor obviously, but they would gain a 1.5 multiplier to the damage if the armor is dented.
On the topic of archers, that would make arrows either very deadly or near to inoffensive if you're wearing heavy armor, without making those armors too strong against melee weapons which have higher base damage. Archers would still be in a dominant position in terms of surviving an encounter (they could still as easily run away) but at least they'd have very little chances of shooting down someone using full plate / scale, and would see their effectiveness against mail whittled down, so they would either have to risk going into melee (for once !) and allow the opposing player to have a chance at using his skills, at the expense of some stamina because of the heavier armor, or they'd have to flee.
*Looks at preview* gotta love them walls of text !