grumble
GDB Superstar
toxic shithead
Destroyer of Worlds
Posts: 1,619
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Post by grumble on Mar 26, 2018 16:00:01 GMT -5
I can't stand being around twink dwarves myself, but you do have a point, Sirra, expendable is useful. The guy you can be like, "Go check that cave.", you hear unintelligible screaming inside, and feel very little beyond a strong urge to leave, is pretty damned handy to have. Imagine if that were someone you cared about, you might be like, "Well, let's, steer clear of this cave for a bit because I worry about Amos's mother's illness and it would be terrible not to have Amos around to bake those tasty pastries I'm so fond of", you'd never find out it was the secret spot for the defiler orgies that half the playerbase is seemingly caught up in instead of being in the Gaj.
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drunkendwarf
Displaced Tuluki
SUCK IT, NYR AND ADHIRA
Posts: 211 
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Post by drunkendwarf on Apr 6, 2018 13:44:13 GMT -5
the super dwarf/breed duo in the north. I forget their name at the moment. They were a husband wife (ooc) duo and were like the unofficial mage hunters of the north. I think? I'd need to poke my logs. Dargan and Mae. Yup, husband/wife duo - though I'm certainly curious how you'd know a detail like that. Yup, they killed a lot of magick bishes - it may have been unofficial for awhile, but late in both their careers they joined the Legions and killed them magick bishes for Utep. Dargan eventually even made Sergeant, which was apparently next to unheard of for a dwarf. Dargan was then promptly stored, as the age code was decimating him at that point anyway - he'd lived around 4 RL years and was already middle aged when first made. Source: I played Dargan. Meso, for sure, was a lot of fun. Kicked the shit out of poor old Dargan at the Kuraci Pit Fights (one hit KO, in fact), but we had a great grudging respect for each other and spoke often over the Way, especially after Dargan's defeat. |
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jjhardy
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 288
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Post by jjhardy on Apr 19, 2018 12:54:19 GMT -5
I don't remember the name, but there was a Tulukki guard Dwarf that I personally saw take 4 Bahamet charges with his shield and fight it off solo while the group escaped, I wish I remember his name. Fairly nice fellow, but scary to see that shit.
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drunkendwarf
Displaced Tuluki
SUCK IT, NYR AND ADHIRA
Posts: 211
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Post by drunkendwarf on Apr 19, 2018 14:15:56 GMT -5
I don't remember the name, but there was a Tulukki guard Dwarf that I personally saw take 4 Bahamet charges with his shield and fight it off solo while the group escaped, I wish I remember his name. Fairly nice fellow, but scary to see that shit. Not sure. If we got 'met rushed, standing orders in Dargan's group while I was leading patrol was everyone else flee and regroup while I stood my ground to cover their escape. Never once lost someone on one of my patrols. Good times. |
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tedium
Clueless newb
Posts: 164 
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Post by tedium on Apr 22, 2018 10:53:22 GMT -5
Something's fishy with the damage calculations, too. Looking at the strength table in the code, 18 strength is supposed to give only +3 damage. We all know it's more like +10 or something. When a fresh human warrior with exceptional strength can routinely do grievous hits with a storebought weapon, the +3 is a lie. Or, more specifically, it probably counts the strength bonus before location multipliers instead of after, which would be more reasonable. The result is this broken situation where someone with middling strength will hit in the 1-15 range while someone with high strength does like 5-40 using the same weapon. And the margin is even wider with bludgeoning weapons. For sure. After peeking at the backstab code, I saw that it was coded so that strength would add twice as much as it was supposed to because it was applied twice. Sap does the same thing, but someone caught it and commented it out. I wouldn't be surprised if regular attacks apply strength multiple times due to spaghetti code and inconsistent variable names, then multiply it by various modifiers. They do use multipliers in a lot of places. All hit-locs have a multiplier, but only hands and feet are 1x. Wrists are 2x. It would not surprise me if weapons have internal multipliers too. +3 on a 5 damage weapon roll should be 8 damage. Assuming a neck hit (3x modifier) and -4 from armor (unsure if it's applied before or after), that could be anywhere between 12-24 damage in total. But if you accidentally add strength two or three times -- maybe damage is calculated by str + offence roll - defence roll, and then that total is added to a weapon skill or style which is also modified by strength -- then you're looking at +6 to +9 on a 5 damage weapon. Assuming it applies only twice, your base hand-hit becomes 11 damage, and your neck hit becomes 21-33, depending on whether armor is applied before or after multipliers. That's much more in line with what happens in game. I would not be surprised if weapons have internal modifiers, too. Stun damage has a HUGE variance in location multipliers, ranging from 20% to 400%, and bludgeon weapons also have a built-in 180% stun damage but 90% phys damage modifier. That probably explains why you can hit for 2 damage to the wrist and no damage physically, then reel someone for 40 damage with a head-shot on your offhand swing with the same weapon. The location multipliers also align with the places people tell you to armor up the most: Get wrists, neck, head first, body second, waist third. And those are the places you see the most grievous wounds (waist more than body, but waist seems to have a tiny hit-chance). TLDR; Location modifiers multiplying duplicate strength applications appear to cause the huge discrepancy in damage between high and low str characters. It explains why some low-str people can't get through armor at all, why high-str characters go through it like butter, and why wrist armor is almost as important as neck and head armor. |
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
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Post by OT on Apr 22, 2018 13:45:19 GMT -5
Yeah, that's essentially the conclusion I came to. Certain hit locations have damage multipliers, and strength is applied before these. I don't think armor counts until the end of the calculation so your -2 gorget will only shave 2 damage off any hit to the neck. Meanwhile, if neck hits are x3, someone with +3 damage from strength and a weapon damage roll of 5 will hit your neck for 24 damage. Without that strength bonus, it would have been 15 damage. That's the difference between 'very hard' and 'brutally' or something like that. That's a gigantic gulf in damage, and it only grows bigger if you start to take dwarves into the equation.
And once you count in the stun modifier of bludgeoning weapons, you get into a situation where a hit to the head with the same weapon can do either 18 or 40 damage depending entirely on your strength score. It's completely absurd and should have been looked into many years ago. If you want to kill somebody, knocking them out is as good as killing them; and when you consider the fact that there's a multitude of ways that a target's stun might be lowered when you attack them, bludgeoning weapons in the hands of a high-strength character almost become akin to the advanced weapon skills. It's simply broken.
It has always been this way, and it's really the biggest flaw of Armageddon's combat code. Strength has had its day - for two fucking decades - and something needs to change. The hits that actually kill you are the head and neck hits, and the damage modifier that strength gives to these is so enormous that it comes to outweigh all other stats by orders of magnitude. I'm not sure how it has remained like this for so long. Armageddon is a game foremost, and this is awful game design.
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Jeshin
GDB Superstar
Posts: 1,515
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Post by Jeshin on Apr 22, 2018 14:12:47 GMT -5
I've always been a proponent of bludgeoning being the most effective weapon type because it deals dual damage and the health damage it deals is not significantly worse than other types of weapons while the stun damage is priceless...
Listen
Scan
Waying people
Previous combat with a neck or head shot
All of these can reduce your total stun cap or lower your current stun total making it easier to knock you out.
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,695
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 25, 2018 10:32:18 GMT -5
Bludgeons do excellent stun damage and everyone should use them considering how consciousness works. Chopping weapons are also acceptable because they do high combined health+stun damage, so you are likely to finish off an opponent in fewer rounds. They're probably also going to be good with the hack skill. Piercing weapons are useless except for the stabbing sub-set which you can backstab with. Slashing weapons are useless. All the advanced weapon skills are useless, despite all the rumors about them they are no different from the weapon types they branch from and come at the added cost of having to retrain a weapon skill.
The strength bonus applies before the bonus given to you for hit location, which is determined completely at random and is not skill or stat based.
TL;DR Combat in Armageddon is shite
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
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Post by OT on Apr 25, 2018 14:51:11 GMT -5
I don't know if all of those things are true.
Chopping weapons don't do noteworthy stun damage. Piercing/stabbing is the one that does, dealing about as much stun damage as health. That's only really useful on the occasions where you attack someone who has been using psionics recently. Since piercing weapons don't usually have high damage, it doesn't amount to a whole lot. Chopping has the advantage of a number of really powerful and easily accessible weapons, and the fact that it's an uncommon weapon skill so you don't often fight someone who gets the defensive bonus from having a high chopping skill. But it doesn't do so much stun damage that you can expect to knock people unconscious before actually killing them.
I'd like to hear why you think the special weapon skills are useless. They have advantages that make them powerful, it's just that the mechanics involved in branching a weapon skill late in your fighting career make them awkward to raise, and very rarely does a warrior get them high enough to be better than the parent skill. If that's what you mean by useless, I agree in principle because offense will fuck you over and force you into extreme twinking to take your special weapons to a useful level. But if you can get one to advanced, you're a powerhouse. I'd say razors probably aren't that great since their main thing is shredding armor, which is somewhat shrugworthy, and many razor weapons are absurdly fragile. The others are strong. But with high strength, it might be worth sticking with bludgeoning instead of trying to take up pikes.
Armageddon combat is definitely primitive. It has changed very little in over 15 years. The only serious change was the defense nerf of 2006 or whenever it was, and since then it has pretty much been this way the whole time. Still, there's a certain satisfaction in testing its limits and loopholes. The code is so ancient and spaghettified that it's like playing an opaque strategy game that can, after a long enough time, reward you with a powerful character that people will talk about.
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