Massacres

[rklenseth]

Give me a good sturdy bow, with a quiver of arrow, a sword and a strong shield. Start with 12 unarmed and armored people at 100 yards, and they would all be dead with nary a scratch on the armed person. Either that or a few would be dead, and the rest fleeing which is a far more likely option because people tend to loose their aggressivness when chances are high that they will die.

Unless you're damn good at shooting archery, and damn accurate, chances are this isn't going to happen. Even if your damn good then chances are this won't happen.

It also depends on the mentality of the person(s). Are they trained warriors? Or simple farmers? Why are you attacking them? Did you steal their wheat? Or kill and rape their wives and children?

So it depends on why they are attacking you as whether they will consider it worth dying over.

[TatteredShoeLace]

I can cover 100 m in less than 10 seconds, so I'm giving you....one shot maybe if you've pre-knocked an arrow. Figure you're lucky enough to hit me, you'd best hope it drops me because I'm still coming for you. Figure 3 guys like that could take you out no sweat, you can't swing a longsword fast enough. And can't fight on your back.

12 fairly athletic raging folk....you're toast my friend.

[Talapus]

At 100 yards you would expect a decent archer to take out of combat a good three or four people (either dead or in a state where they can't fight, like a shot just about anywhere on the body). That leaves you with say 8 people. If the now swordsman backs up against a tree or wall, and has a bladed sword (swinging sharp pieces of metal usually discourage all but the most foolhardy or desperate, so thus your comment about what drives them to this is very much applicable) should be able to wound enough of them while keeping the rest off of him that the battle will be won. If however he becomes surrounded, all is pretty much lost if the people attacking him have any real drive. So yes, it depends alot on the circumstances, but it is not beyond question that one well armed and prepared man would be taken by 12 unarmed men (even those that might be more then peasants) because you need enough men to get close to the person in question to strip him or his arms or somehowdeprive him of all movement (through pining the person such that they cannot attack with sword or dagger). I do however agree that 12 strong milatary minded men if sufficiently driven would be a match for an armed soldier in most circumstances.

[McManus]

Okay I just had to say this....TatteredShoeLace- unless you are the fastes man to ever live you cant run the 100m in less then 10 seconds. The world record is 9.77 seconds. I dont think must people on the forums could run it in 15 seconds. Then again I dont know any of you so....yeah

[Cookie]

Tattered shoe lace can run ten meters in one second... ...and so can my gran!

[rklenseth]

Doesn't matter. I'm sure tattershoedlace could get there in about less than a minute. That gives Talapus probably one good shot, maybe two if he is good. I run an archery range during the summer so I know a thing or two about this. Plus he would be shooting at 12 people that are moving. I don't know many archers who could kill two of them before they were on top of him.

[wichita]

A search for "combat" turns up 123 threads in the General Discussion forum alone. I think this was one of the better discussions of the combat system. It will take a little weeding through to pick the good suggestions out of the fodder, but for what it's worth....

*bump*

[N-Aldwitch]

No tiredness, no skill, no randomness of damage, no chance of missing, shields always blocked. So back in the day if you got four sabre armed and iron shielded people and put them up against 50 people with no iron or steel weapons and protection than those four guys would kill the town in less than ten minutes without ever losing any sweat or taking any damage. Now that is quite impossible.

Awww that'd be cool as!!

[formerly known as hf]

I'm not sure when the descision was made and by whom, but the current state of combat is awful.

It revolves around dragging. Because that's the only option left if you want to neutralise someone.

Currentl, yhis might play into the hands of those that complained they were loosing characters unfairly. But people should be prepared to loose characters at random, if it means a bit more excitement in the game.

5 well-armed people should be able to take out a town if the town is unarmed.
A mad person with an axe should be able to do some damage, maybe pop-off a few injured people before they get taken down.

As it is combat is just not combat. It's dragging and docking.


Was it done to foster cooperation? If so, the current state means that you need about 20 people cooperating to make even a dent. Even then, it is diffcult. Cooperation, in Cantr, is good when it means 5 people working together...


Offensive combat should be easier. That a descision was made to take the fight to TBR on Burgeo amazed me. The concept of offensive action of that kind, given the state of docking and combat systems seem ludicrous. What made it work, eventually, was a lot of dogged to-the-second tactics. Not fun.


Adding tiredness to dragging would only nerf it even more. It would make combat of any kind virtually pointless.




My suggestions:
1) Reduce the level of tiredness fighting creates. Make natural recovery faster.

2) Make weapons more powerful, but introduce penalties for carrying the more powerful weapons. Characters shouldn't be able to walk around decked-out in iron shields and claymores/crossbows and still carry many kilos. Carrying hefty weapons should heavily reduce carrying capacity and possibly also production speed. - Wepaons should be cached for as-and-when needed.

3) Make the difference between novice fighters and expert fighters much greater. An expert fighter should be able to do up to 80% damage to an unshielded character. A novice character should hardly be able to make a dent, maybe even not be able to wield heftier weapons. But also make the 'levelling up' for the fighting skill faster

[SekoETC]

How about this, make blocking raise your tiredness. Thus if several people attack one person, even if the person didn't fight back, they would still get tired from trying to protect themself and the subsequent attacks would have a higher chance of going past the shield.

[Schme]

I personally think the entire operation is perfectly fine.

There's absolutly no problem with it.

So you can't massacre whole towns without having worked hard enough for enough years to get proper weaponry, vehicles, tools and buildings to enable you to be a real killer, well, deal with it.

Leave it the way it is.

[Phalynx]

I personally think the entire operation is perfectly fine.

There's absolutly no problem with it.

So you can't massacre whole towns without having worked hard enough for enough years to get proper weaponry, vehicles, tools and buildings to enable you to be a real killer, well, deal with it.

Leave it the way it is.

I assume this is ironic!