Different Weapondamages in dom 3 ?

[Tuidjy]

Even historians cannot agree on whether horses have ever been trained to do this.
I am sure it can be done, but I do not see the point. Charging pikes from the
front is suicidal and probably inneffective. Going through the trouble and
taking the time to train a horse so that it is more afraid of its rider than from
a wall of spikes will result into a very expensive horse that is likely
unstable, twitchy, and not good for much but charging into pikes. Once.

Lets not confuse charging into a wall of pikes and a wall of thrusting spears.
A cavalry lance is a quite a bit shorter than the former, but significantly
longer than the latter. The horse may shy from the spears as well, but the
spearman would be a lot more likely to run much earlier.

Back to Dominions. In the perfect world, this could be modeled as combination
of defense and repelling damage. But I think that the effort necessary for
getting it right would be better spent elsewhere.

[Arralen]

.. there are times when I thoroughly hate these forums .. it just ate my lengthy post ..

Ok, I'll try again:

No, I'm pretty shure you can't train horse to do that. And as it would be suicidal, noone would even try.

That doesn't mean it couldn't happen by accident. Horse and rider may get confused and/or panicked, and just turn into the wrong direction. And most likely end up dead.

It may even happen that a whole "squad" of knights e.g. comes over a hill and runs into some foot soldiers at full speed. There wouldn't be enough room for the knights to stop or evade, and maybe the horses wouldn't realize fast enough what is happening, especially if they are pressed by their riders. But it would result in a bloody mess.

Especially, if the foot soldiers are prepared and realize that their only chance is to hold the line.

That's what 80% of ancient/mediaval combat is about: holding the formation. As long as the shield wall holds, the pikes/spears are kept straight, not much could happen. As soon as a formation is broken up, it's overrun by the enemy and slaughtered. (This could happen because of failing morale, a danger which is unexpected or comes from an unexpected direction, obstacles or exhaustion)
Example: Hastings

So the charge of heavy knights was directed at either A) disorganized troops or b) other cavallery, which couldn't hold a tight formation as inf does.

The longer couched lance (which wasn't available at Hastings, and for some hundred years afterwards) was a bigger thread to foot soldiers armed with the usual trusting spears. But the real danger came not from it being an ultimate weapon, but from it's psychological impact. If the very first line of soldiers in the shield wall believed the knights could charge them succesfully, turned and ran, the shield wall was actually broken and the knights could have their day.
It was only logical to give longer spears to the infantry as well, discard their shields as they had to handle the long poles 2-handed. To give them more offensive punch (you couldn't really trust with something 4-5m long), it developed into the pike etc. With those, the foot soldiers could counter-attack the knights if they pulled away from the hegde of spear points and had to move "alongside".

Often the knights dismounted to fight in the line on foot, simply because horses where too expensive and tatctical possibilites too small.

Something to read up you can find here http://www.dicksonc.act.edu.au/Showc...2/stirrup.html

[Chazar]

Boron said:

1) Sure . But if i use them as heros if i chose misfortune 2 e.g. i have to wait for ages until i get all 9 Mordor Heros

Good! The luck scale needed improvement anyway and a higher number of available heroes could do the job, even if not all were super-duper! I'd say there should be at least 10 available at the current chance. Maybe there should be templates for generating endlessly many pseudo-unique weak heros to intersperse the truly unique and formidable ones. I mean, everybody can declare himself to be a hero, at least until the next battle to prove...

[tinkthank]

Agree fully with Chazar.

If you hate the idea, Boron (you old stubborn misfortune-lover you), you could also, when we get full spell modding, mod a new spell with high level death to make summon 9 unique summons (nazgul).... And yes, the Witch King of Angmar was one of em (the chief).

I also like the paper-scissors-rock idea of damage type vs armor:
1. Blunt/Bludgeoning
2. Piercing
3. Slashing

Some weapons may do more than one type -- the best would be selected automatically.

3 Armor types (crappy names, but I'm in hurry):
- Heavy: Does very well vs. all, but has some weakness to piercing
- Medium: Does ok vs. all, but has some weakness to Blunt
- LIght: Is somewhat weakish in general, but protects well vs. Blunt

[FarAway Pretender]

While it might be interesting and realistic to do this sort of thing, at the end of the day, I'm not sure that you've really improved the playing experience, except for the detail nuts who want a game even more detail-oriented than Dom2 already is (I consider myself such a nut, but don't think most folks love that sort of thing). Given how chaotic the battles already are, it'd just be one more level of complexity/randomness that I could only exploit in a handful of situations, and would be utterly frustrating in others.

Technically, you'd only want a Pike to get an AP bonus against charging cavalry--the long L already makes your cavalry do a morale check when trying to attack, and unless I'm missing something, a pike isn't any more dangerous against a stationary knight than a spear would be.

[bone_daddy]

I wonder if it would be possible to add a Brace for Charge command that would only apply to pikemen?

[Kuritza_Dru]

First, wasn't the barding limiting mount's field of view so that the horse does not see the pikes ahead?
Second, are you sure heavy cavalry could stop all of a sudden? It wasn't very maneuverable, you know. It's possible when 3-4 riders are charging, but what if there are more coming from behind? You stop, and they just run into you.

[Arralen]

Kuritza, no, you can't limit a horses view in the direction it is supposed to walk, or it will not walk at all. And you woulnd't want it to, as it would stumble and fall over within very few meters. And that's something that you definitly do not want if you're atop on it in heavy armor ... .
Neither do you want to crash head on into a wall of pikes, as you (and horse) would be very very dead in short time.

The cavalry wouldn't stop all of a sudden. The horses would start to balk as soon as they see where the ride is going, they would slow down and turn away to the side.

Yes, if the front would stop those behind would be in trouble. Yes, all of them (infantry included) where in big trouble when they literally run into each other all of s sudden without any room for the horses to evade.

I wrote about all this here already ...

[FrankTrollman]

OK, I'm going to call shenanigans on Arralen. It is difficult to train a warhorse to charge a forest of spears. It is not impossible. Horsemen traditionally do extremly poorly against close pike formations, but not only because horse are unwilling to charge in - also because when they do charge in they have a tendency to get thrashed.

If horses couldn't be made to charge pikemen, how would the knights have been slaughtered at Laupen after having charged the pikemen?

Making blanket statements like "horses won't charge spear formations" or "horses will panic in the presence of elephants" is only true of the untrained horse, not of the warhorses that knight units presumably ride. While there are many many examples of armies which had not trained their mounts to stay firm in the presence of spears or elephants (heck, the Khmer never bothered to train their horses to not freak at the sight of their own elephants, and just kept them on different sides of the battle), there are many other examples of armies that did.

Sometimes that worked out. Sometimes it didn't.

But it is possible. You are short changing horses. A lot.

-Frank

[Edi]

There is a very interesting web site here that discusses various weapons and their applicability at length, and it also happens to focus on game design and game design principles in other sections. An invaluable read before people start spouting various alternative systems to implement how they think things should work. I heartily recommend taking a good, long look.

Edi