[GUI Improvement]Display information about armor and damage type

from Elemental Forums

I've just started reading the manual of the game and I noticed this section

The key word, however, is better: If a player is wearing plate armor with a defense value of 8 that provides protection against cutting weapons, and that unit is struck by a sword that does 12 damage (of type cutting), then the player will definitely roll an 8 on their defense. By contrast, if it was an iron spear that does 12 damage (of type piercing) then the player would roll a value between 1 and 8 for their defense.
End of quote

Now obviously this is quite important to know, especially when you try to get information about the unit composition of your opponent, or when building your own units. However this information is not only not presented when looking at the enemy units, but it's very hard to see when even looking at your own units.

What we really need to be able to see when looking at a unit, so that I know in tactical battles whom to send against my enemy is what kind of damage my weapons do, and what kind of armor I have. While the short display should stay displaying total damage and armor as it is, each unit detailed display should show something like this:

  • 9 DMG (Slashing)
  • 3 Armor (Anti-Bludgeon)
  • 5 Armor (Anti-Cutting)
  • 4 Armor (Anti-Arcane)

Perhaps these could have some simple icons that we could then learn to understand. Then similarly, I should be able to see what kind of weapons an invading army is using and send/build the correct counters to block them.

Furthermore, the game should provide a pop-up display on our screen showing us the kind of damage we will be doing to our opponent. For example, If I have a unit with a cutting weapon which does 12 damage in total and I'm hovering my attack cursor over a unit with 8 plate armor (which is good against cutting damage), a pop up window (or some kind of information window on the top right) should display the range of damage I'm about to do. In this case it would be displaying: 0-4 Damage. This is because in the background, it calculated that

1-12 (from my attack type) minus 8 (from the armor) = 0-4 Damage.

Then I know that this kind of attack is not going to be very effective.

However if I hover over a unit with 8 leather armor, which is not so effective against cutting damage, I would see: 0-11 Damage

1-12 (from my attack type) minus 1-8 (from the leather armor) = 0-11

This information will help a lot to make tactical battle actually tactical, rather than the exercise in randomness it is now :-/

 

6,261 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

The manual is out of sync in relation with the game. However the in-game Elementopedia mentions weapon and armor types, too. I think this feature has been removed or disabled at this moment. Maybe the AI can't handle it well or there are some other problems with this feature.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I checked the CoreArmor.xml and CoreWeapon.xml files. All GameModifier elements wich are related to weapon or defense type have no Value element.

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I think they just ran out of time. It would be good if they added damage types in later though.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Sigh, this means that there's even less tactical complexity in battle. This is sad. All that's left then is to link here