Bash & Crush vs. Cut & Slash

[Novi]

It occurred while playing MA Ulm - why don't heavy blunt weapons such as maces, morningstars, flails, mauls etc. have some armour-piercing bonuses?

In late middle ages, with the rise of plate armour, the use of swords dwindled and blunt weapons became prevalent. Cutting weapons were practically useless against steel-clad soldiers, but blunt weapons, despite their clumsiness, proved to deal with the obstacle quite efficiently - a strike with a warhammer might not have punctured the steel plating but it DID do a sufficient amount of damage just through the force of the impact.

I realize that adding armour-piercing feat to these weapons might offset the game balance, but perhaps, for the sake of truth, some kind of change could be done?

[Saulot]

I've seen a few house mods which would alter weapons. An example of something I used changed the maul from 9 normal dmg to 3 ap damage. The balance of course is that while it's more effective against heavily armored opponents, it's far weaker against unarmored ones (This may not be desired by some people).

Is that what you hand in mind? And if so, are you suggesting that to be implemented in the vanilla game?

If not, then a mod which changed every blunt weapon would be a rather straightforward and simple affair to make for yourself.

[Kristoffer O]

A change is unlikley at this stage, although I kind of like the idea. It should not be too difficult to make a mod though. Reduce dmg on maces, hammers etc and give them AP.

If a mod was made, widely tested and percieved as nice it might be incorporated in tha game.

A quick test mod that doesn't take magical equipment in consideration will be quite quick to make.

Mace, Morningstar, Flail, Hammer, Maul. Some of them would probably need negative dmg values, or they would effectively have damage values way higher than now.
Perhaps mace -2 (6 lower than now). Evens out at prot 12. It bugs me a bit to have a negative dmg value though.

[MaxWilson]

Don't feel too bad about it. A fist already has a damage of -2; it's just not armor-piercing.

-Max

[TwoBits]

Well, I tell ya', generally being unarmored myself most of the time, I'd still rather get hit by fist than by a mace...

[MaxWilson]

Well, the damage on small weapons is too high generally. A normal str 10 person hitting a person with 10 hp with his fist, or a small knife, does not have a good chance of killing the other person in real life. However, I think Dominions makes a good tradeoff here between versimilitude and playability; you could plausibly reduce the damage of a fist to -5 or -7 (probably won't kill anyone with one blow unless it's a giant doing the punching) but I don't mind the way it is currently.

Edit: I also think that aiming for parity w/ Prot 12 is setting the bar a little too high, since that's the "well-protected" range that a mace is designed to get through. Maybe Prot 6 or 8, which would put the mace at dmg 1 or dmg 0 respectively. If that seems unbalancing it turn out that maces also affect your attack and defense values more than was previously thought.

On the other hand, it might also be that maces are no more effective than swords at *penetrating* heavy armor, but the extra moment of inertia helps deal a little bit of damage against moderate amounts of armor. The current system models this quite well, because hammers etc. have a high damage (7). Really heavy armors are not affected, of course, except that there is a marginally higher chance of rolling high enough to do some damage. On consideration, I like the fact that blunt weapons are not AP.

-Max

[Taqwus]

...if I were rambling about what might be funky for weapon-modding capabilities in a sequel, it might be fun to see

- a way to affect how much strength matters, ex. a giant's
sword perhaps having both a high-magnitude negative base
damage but a high strength multiplier, and more length --
right now, Hoburgs and Titans are a bit too similar here

- a way to make a really, really slow melee weapon (does the
rate of fire code work on 'em? Hm.)

- a way to specify arbitrary spells as secondaryeffects

Being a weirdo, I'd be severely tempted to play around with a "Heaven's Hammer" polearm that took one or two full turns to re-ready, and enormous strength to use, but also invoked the wonderfully imprecise 'Gifts from Heaven' on attacking. Just for kicks.

[Novi]

@Saulot:

Erm... I don't believe so. A good swing with a sledgehammer would, in reality, probably be more than enough to make you kick the bucket, even though you weren't wearing any armour... ><
So a negative damage base doesn't sound like a good idea (put into practice, though, it could represent a good approximation but... Nah, letting a hammer have the same dmg value as a fist doesn't sound too appealing ^^)

@MaxWilson:
True, the hammer has the dmg value of 7 but this is still only one more than the broadsword, whose value is 6... I think such a difference is negligible, especially when taking into consideration all the defence penalities the hammer offers to a unit...

[Saulot]

I can confirm that slower rates of fire do not work on melee weapons, I tried that for a shield bash type weapon in Urdheim.
It's a shame, because that polearm, amongst other examples is a nice idea.

Personally, I feel the main distinguishing factor between blunt weapons and swords is that blunt weapons should be far more common, and take far fewer resources.

[MaxWilson]

Well, vs. a unit with heavy armor (16), the mode for the hammer's damage (w/ a strength of 10) is 1 while the broadsword's mode is 0. Because of the random numbers the mean will work out to be more like 1.3 vs. 0.5, but the hammer is still more effective vs. armored opponents. The difference is IIRC more significant the more heavily armored the foe is. Of course, you could increase the difference by increasing the base damage of the hammer as well, but the thing is that there's no reason to think a hammer would be *good* against plate armor. It's just that it's better than a sword, because of the extra momentum. (And a broadsword is a pretty heavy sword, which you could think of as a club with an edge to it. The hammer is something like three times as effective as a shortsword in this scenario.)

Picks are a different story. I could imagine those as armor-piercing, because that's what they do.

-Max