Right now, apparently basically all that matters is how big the creature is, and its combat skills (and raid skills of the leaders, if applicable).
But this leads to things like steel blob titans with necrosis-inducing deadly dust being beatable by random large animals like elephants, and megabeasts in general dying out very quickly; it makes them more underwhelming than they should be. It would be good if the worldgen/off-map combat calculations took into account more things, like:
- Body materials (eg, if you mod dragon scales to be as hard as steel, or turn all their tissues into frail pudge, this should affect their viability). Compare materials/sizes of attacking body parts (eg large mouths with teeth) against the material of the body parts that would be getting attacked.
- Weapons/equipment used, as well as their materials vs the materials of the opponent (a band of dwarves with steel armor and weapons ought to stand a good chance against a bronze titan, an entire forest full of elves with wooden weapons should be basically doomed).
- Attributes, like strength, agility, and stamina.
- Sheer numbers; I'm told that worldgen battles are a series of 1v1s, which means you mostly just want smaller groups of skilled/large fighters, since adding others as well just gets them killed or captured with no benefit. A single very highly-skilled human may realistically be able to defeat 50 trolls in a row, but they surely couldn't beat even 7 trolls at the same time, because they can only defend against one at a time or so. Being able to beat 1 troll at a time does not translate to 50 at once in a battle (or heck, even 50 fellow humans of lesser skill!), unless the reason you can beat that 1 troll is "they are incapable of harming you noticeably even if you're not paying attention to them" or "you can destroy them utterly in one blow".
- Special abilities like dragonfire or other interactions like fire in general (note that this AoE stuff might negate "sheer numbers" a bit), deadly dust, spells that turn the opponent blind, contagious husk curses, etc.
- Bodily properties like whether or not they have a convenient "thought center" to destroy, or arteries to cut...
- Immunities to things like stunning, or paralysis (when up against opponents who can use it), or to spells/abilities of others (the advantage of fire from fire imps would be totally nullified by a fireproof opponent, for example, and EXTRAVISION would render blinding spells useless).
- "Terrain advantage" from location effects; if every severed limb or new dead person keeps coming back to un-life, evil locations should cause a problem with "every time one of your soliders dies, it turns into a new zombie combatant" (problems for both sides maybe, if two armies make the mistake of fighting on evil terrain).
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Topic: Take more factors into account for worldgen/off-site battle winners (Read 444 times)