After playing for a little while in adventure mode and arena, I think I have some idea of how combat tends to work.
Pain seems to have a much lesser effect than in 40d. I have witness countless creatures who had extreme pain, and yet continue to attack as if it was nothing, I have yet to see a creature faint because of pain, yet I still do not know if pain has any other effect on combat.
Bleeding seems to happen turn by turn and has a more delayed effect in the newer version. Shattering bones, cutting flesh, and severing limbs all cause bleeding. The more wounds you have the faster you seem to bleed and bleeding to much will cause your character to become faint and then eventually die of blood lost. Bleeding will eventually stop over a certain amount of time depending on the wound.
Shattering bones seems to have only a little effect on creatures. Shattering happens more from the blunt force of attacks rather than the piercing effect of the creature. The only real effect I have observed from shattering a bone is pain a blood lost although I am guessing that shattering the hand (not the arms) will cause the creature to drop a weapon. The most effective bone to shatter is the spine which pretty much cripples your target. Upper spine seems to effect the entire body and the lower spine seems to effect only the legs.
Fighting, in general, seems to last much longer in DF2010 then in 40d. Very rarely do creatures end up collapsing in a fight and gone are the days where it usually only took one strike to kill an enemy. Most creatures will likely die from bleeding or suffocation rather then been struck down. From what I have observe, the only moves that can instantly kill from pure force alone is a direct piercing of the head a severing of either the head or the lower body the later of which seeming harder to sever then in 40d, or knocking your opponent into a wall and having them splatter. Please take in note, this has yet to been tested with extremely high stats/skills/size.
Armor effectiveness in DF2010 has improved by a lot. Gone are the days where no matter how much legendary adamantine armor you have, a single arrow could pierce through and kill you in one shot. The difference between having armor or not is now a difference between life or death. Standard armor given out to NPCs and adventurers now give a huge advantage allowing them to take hundreds of blows. Armor's effectiveness lies in ability to resist large amounts of piercing damage and some blunt damage. While testing out attacking by destroying an entire town adventure mode, I had not once seen a weapon pierce armor. With a sword, all the damage I was doing was not piercing damage but blunt damage from the attack that managed to travel through the armor. Most of the time this resulted in bruises which would rarely even affect the target, but I found that through blunt damage alone you can shatter bones through armor which causes bleeding and will often be how most of the damage is caused. Also organs and be bruised through armor and with constant attacks will often cause enough damage to the organs to affect the creature. On most armored humanoid targets, their seems to be a few unarmored spots that can be cut or severed, this includes: the mouth, fingers, toes, and either the upper or lower arms. From this I conclude that the best weapon against armored targets are hammers and maces.
I have yet to test much weapons besides a sword, but from what I have seen, bows and crossbows are no longer the ultimate weapon. Doing mostly piercing damage they seem to rely on lucky shots to disable their opponent. I have tested out battles between legendary archers and other creatures and it seems that the creature will take the arrows but will be able to ignore that damage and get close enough to attack the archer and it is very rare for an archer to fire off an instantly fatal arrow. Swords have been changed slightly from before but they still act similar to 40d. When attacking with swords their are three possible attacks, a stab which tends to do a lot of piercing damage and is very effective when it can pierce through the head and instantly kill someone, a slash which from what I am guessing does "slashing" damage which tends to cut limbs off, and a attack with the flat-side of the blade which seems to do blunt damage that bruises and shatters bones.
Unarmed combat with humans, dwarves, or elves is a battle of attrition. Seeing has the only damage that can be done is blunt damage it resembles battles against armored targets but without the stray blow to unarmored spot that can slice off limbs. Most of the damage comes from bleeding caused by shattering bones and damage to organs. Unlike 40d, creatures are more likely to punch a target rather then the old grab and release wrestling games.
Take in note this is all observations made from only 2 days of testing so inaccuracies may exist.
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Topic: Observations on Combat (Read 426 times)