Attacking & Tiredness

[Piscator]

According to the wiki the tiredness generated from attacking is only dependent on the amount of force you use. I would like to see if it would also depend on the base damage (and skill weighting), so that weapons with a higher base damage (and lower skill weighting) generate more tiredness.

The idea behind this is to make lower damage weapons, which are largely ignored at the moment, more attractive.

[joo]

That doesn't make a lot of sense physically... you can hit someone with a blunt sword and a sharp sword with the same amount of force, thus using the same amount of energy, but the sharp sword will do more damage.

Edit: however, now that I think of it, the increase in tiredness should also be affected by the weapon's skill weighting.

[Piscator]

I was thinking about dagger vs. battle axe. Smaller and lighter weapons usually do less damage so I thought we could just use the damage stat to calculate tiredness, but now that I think about it, weapons do have a weight already so maybe we should use that instead.

edit: Seems like weapon weight wasn't designed to be used that way. A battle axe weighs 750g, and a claymore 275g. Either we'd have to use a complicated formula or we would get huge differences. Damage might be the better alternative after all

[SekoETC]

It could be based on the weight of an item, at least if the weights were reasonable. It doesn't make much sense if battle axes are that heavy while claymores are that light.

[Piscator]

It would be a huge effort to change the masses though. Either we had to ignore the conservation of mass (I believe that principle was applied for manufacturing processes so far) or we had to change all manufacturing processes. I don't think that would be worth it.

edit: Basing tiredness generation on weapon damage wouldn't be perfect. It is very clearly only be an approximation, but it would be a better approximation than the current system.

[joo]

How about:

Increase-in-tiredness ∝ (weight × maximum-damage × force-used ÷ skill-weighting)

[Piscator]

Well, using the weight as it is now would mess things up seriously, so I would leave it out of the equation for now. I thought more about:

increase in tiredness = force used x max damage x strength weighting (100 - skill weighting)

(max damage could be replaced with a more accurate weight related factor)


It should be taken into consideration that the inclusion of the skill weighing would give an advantage to skilled characters (as opposed to strong characters) since their weapons are favoured by this system. I think the strength of a character would have to be taken into account, too. It seems logical that strong characters would grow tired more slowly than weak characters.

[*Wiro]

Skilled fighters would know how to use their weapon in a way that would not make them tired. While awkward fighters that are strong would probably use brute force, causing more tiredness.

[Piscator]

Well, weapons with high skill weighting would cause hardly any tiredness anyway. (A crossbow only about half as much as a battle axe.) I don't think skilled fighters would need any more help.

[joo]

Hmm... *strokes his chin*

[Drael]

Disagree with skill weighting. Something like a crossbow for example takes a massive effort to load and use. Perhaps all bows could have slightly less than say swords.

Lower damage is better. Basically all light weapons are lower in damage.

What would be better is to simply give some weapons less tiredness, based on a few broad groups, and simply one level of "ease".. Perhaps Light Bows , light swords (like rapier, short sword) and knives and any other groups you can think of would get a flat saving to tiredness?

Theres no need for mega complexity here, if you could give a decent enough benefit to some of those it would add to the cause of using them.

[Piscator]

Well, using existing parameters in the formula takes less effort than introducing completely new parameters. At least with melee weapons the skill weighting depends on how "light" a weapon is. It is already a measure for how dependend a weapon is on the strength of its user, so I don't see why a new category would be necessary.

I'm not quite sure how it is with ranged weapons. Of course I know that cocking a crossbow takes some strength, but I'm not sure if it is comparable to hitting someone (repeatedly?) with a battle axe. I'd like to hear other peoples opinions.

[Drael]

It takes a fair bit of strength to pull back a composite longbow. And alot of strength and effort to wind back a heavy crossbow. Id say the longbow would still be less tiring, but the crossbow really should be the same as heavy swords. IMO...

Personally i dont see the benefit to reducing tiredness based on the skill rating alone....If composite bows and crossbows were made better than claymores and battleaxes everyone would just swap. The point is to make lighter weapons, such as short swords, rapiers, light bows and generally much lighter weapons create less tiredness isnt it?

Unless these lighter weapons have higher skill ratings than composite bows/crossbows? Im not really sure on the game stats element.

[Piscator]

Well, the original suggestion was to base the generation of tiredness on the base damage of a weapon. After all, if you use a battle axe with 50% force, you get only 50% damage, but only 50% tiredness, too. My idea was that it would be nice if you could use e.g. an iron shod billy club for the same investment of tiredness instead (which does about as much damage as half a battleaxe). That way people would have an incentive to use weaker weapons in combat to retain more of their defensive capabilities.

On an afterthought I added the idea of tiredness being dependend on skill weighting, too. It feels right that a war hammer should generate more tiredness when used than a steel rapier. Since light, elegant weapons usually have high skill weightings and heavy, me-crush-you-dead weapons have low ones, I thought that might be used for calculation. (Admittedly, ranged weapons may pose as problem, as well as, for example, whips.)

This consideration is purely based on a feeling of realism though and would probably unbalance the game since it favours weapons with high skill ratings/ people with good fighting skills.
If the current balace between skill-based and strength-based combat were to be kept, a bonus for strong characters would have to be introduced, e.g. slower tiredness generation for strong characters.

This all feels more or less right, but it would probably not help the game very much so I assume everything after the first part of this suggestion could/should be dropped. It would require serious tweaking at the least.

Oh, and sorry for repeating myself.