expansion.

I think attack is fine, and I think magic damage will be fine once the spells come in. the problem is defense. High dex and high armor are shoehorned together.

Borrowing f rom a MUD I play and an RPG system we used to use in school, I'd suggest the following rework.

You have two defenses.

Passive defense- means you dodge/parry/avoid blow completely. This is based off DEX mostly, with some modifications from spells, plate armor, abilitiies (like shield block, parry, etc)

Buily armor reduces dex percentage wise. This means that high dex chars are actually better off not wearing bulky armor potentially. Plate mail might be +6 PD, but -50% dex. Veteran troops might get a feat of platemail familiarity which would give +25% dex while wearing platemail. (to halve the penalty)

Damage resistance. This is determined by the armor+ skin toughness. This reduces damage of attacks linearally. 5 DR to an 8 attack will equal 3 damage, unless critical hit occurs. Critical hits ignore DR (but not PD). A peasant with a pointy stick might be able to poke a knight in the eye after all.

You could split DR up into crushing/slashing/piercing/magic. I don't think this is necessary though, and unsure if AI could handle this.

elemental

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bebraw
NDYag

Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

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Yeah, I think that makes more sense. I'd also like to see how action points work redone, though we've been on that around here pretty much since the system was introduced.

The goal of any change to the system should be to reduce some of the unpredictability you get when the numbers get big. Units with 100 ATT and 100 DEF attacking each other might do anywhere from 0 to 100 damage in a hit depending on the RNG, and unless they have very large HP pools you can see fights turn into fast killshot oriented affairs.

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I'm somewhat shocked that this kind of combat model isn't already implemented. It seems like it ought to be an obvious thing to separate the "to hit" roll, and the "damage" roll, especially when you have a computer to do all the computation and rolling. It adds a great deal of depth to the model, and increases the choices available to the player.

Great post. I hope one of the developers sees it.

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Quoting NDYag,

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Indeed. Though the combat model from GalCiv was seemingly what they based the model for elemental off of. Now the system in GalCiv worked for that game, though it wasn't very satisfying, but without tac battles the argument that it should be kept simple was much stronger.

Elemental is a different kettle of fish all together, and it appears that the designer(s) of the combat model didn't really look around to see what other systems existed, and would be a better fit for this kind of game. Often there is nothing wrong with simple, such as when you have 3 attack types and 3 defense types. However... Elemental was (or does) to have several different attack types, unit types, magic, ... So the trivially simple mechanics for combat just don't feel right. They may work well enough for autoresolve, but when you get into the unit design, magic selection, and then finally the tac battles, people legitimately are expecting a bit more detail... And dare I even say 'realism'? I know, it's a dirty word to some.

Splitting dodge and armor is a good first start. Splitting 'to hit' and 'damage' is another. As is adding some kind of fatigue and encumbrance stats. Though from the way stats are pooled in groups of soldiers some of those splits may have unintended consequences without some additional balance to that mechanic.

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