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[PvK]

Sorry if this is redundant old news, but:

Thrown weapons are way too deadly, and there is no way to correct this by modding.

Examples:

My human with no throwing skill decides to throw some spare boots at a frogman:

The spinning whale leather boots strikes the frogman in the lower body!
It is mangled!
The frogman looks sick!
The frogman's pancreas has been badly bruised!
The frogman's spleen has been mangled!
The frogman's right kidney has been bruised!
The frogman's lower spine has been badly bruised!
The frogman is propelled away by the force of the blow!
The frogman gives into pain.

I lose nearly a dozen characters to a giant. Even with him greatly outnumbered, very few weapon blows manage to harm him at all. He has two swords stuck in his body, including mine, so I pick up a discarded spear and throw it at him, even though I have no skill at all in throwing, and I'm just a starting human. The spear "pokes out" both eyes and his throat, and he collapses unconscious. Even in that state, it takes quite a lot of effort for four of us to pound him to death without throwing anything at him.

[PNB]

ranged attacks are just that awesome, learn ta deaal wif et.

[PvK]

No, it makes no sense. Throwing boots should almost always do very little if any injury. If anything, hitting someone with a spear while still holding onto it should do more damage than throwing it at someone.

Having no skill in throwing should also make it likely to miss, throw it wrong so it does little or no damage, and/or hit your friends who are grappling with the target, etc.

[Aquillion]

Balance is coming later.

I do have to say, though, that I sort of like throwing being awesome; in most games, it's too weak.  There's something gratifying about throwing a spinning coin at someone, knocking them back fifteen feet and causing their torso to explode in a fine spray of gore.

Eventually, that sort of thing should probably be reserved for legendary throwers, though.

[PNB]

Let me put it simple... ranged crap is overpowered right now.

[Aquillion]

Well, throwing is one thing...  for bows, though, it actually fairly realistic.  In the real world, most of the other swords-and-armor junk available in the game was virtually obsolete once the longbow was invented.

Just look at it as re-enacting Agincourt over and over and over again.

[ September 09, 2006: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[Somagu]

One thing I love though, is how everything you throw is "spinning"

Haha, spinning copper spears...

[Captain_Action]

So it's a buzz-saw effect that causes the multiple organ damage.   :eek:

[Abyssal Squid]

Somebody should leave uninstalled serrated <metal> discs lying around in abandoned fortresses for adventurers to play with.

As for bows being realistic, I won't dispute that, but at the same time it makes the game a lot less fun, at least in adventurer mode.  Because of how powerful missiles are, it's virtually impossible to survive in a goblin or kobold fortress without taking a ton of meatshields and sneaking everywhere.  I appreciate that they're supposed to be dangerous, but "whoops you just got a mortal wound from an enemy you can't reach" isn't the way way to do it, at least with the current system.

[Somagu]

I completely agree, as fun as insta-deaths are, it's annoying when a near-masterful player gets obliterated by a single kobold bowman!

[Aquillion]

That's the thing that I like about it, though!

In most games, kobolds and goblins are worthless fodder.  In Dwarf Fortress, a bunch of them in a group with bows can be more dangerous than a giant.  It feels like they're actually being sneaky, even though they aren't yet...  your big strong adventurer can be easily defeated by a handful of tiny kobolds as long as they stand back and shoot at you from a distance.

...and really, "whoops you just got a moral wound" is the Dwarf Fortress combat system all over the place.  Any time you're in reach of any remotely dangerous opponent you've got a decent chance of taking a mortal wound.  Adventurers in Dwarf Fortress are supposed to die; the deck is stacked against them from the start.  That's why we have a hugely detailed legends screen that describes all the convoluted webs of deaths and murders: Because dying is fun.

Possibly shields and parrying could be improved a bit, to let experts block arrows with unnatural grace or something like that...  but I do think that if the PC has multiple enemy bowmen aiming at them, or even a single skilled bowman that they can't reach or escape from into cover, then they should, most of the time, die painfully.  It simply wouldn't make sense for a combat system that is so brutally realistic in all other situations to suddenly give the player a break in a case like that.

Raiding a goblin or kobold fortress with just a handful of men should be hard, and you should have to move carefully and sneak everywhere.  They outnumber you by, like, a hundred or so to about five, and you know that your dwarves back in Dwarf mode could handle such a small group of humans no sweat.  Sure, kobolds are a little frailer, but what they lack in strength they make up for in cunning and viciousness.

What's the fun in cleaning out a whole kobold fort on your first try?  Crawling over the bodies of six or seven prior adventurers to finally avenge them is what makes the game really shine.

[Somagu]

Oh no no, I'm not saying that a hand full of kobolds with bows shouldn't be able to annihilate a rag-tag group of adventurers, even 7 waves of them, I'm saying a single bowman shouldn't be able to take down a man with platemail with an expertly crafted and very well used shield.

Besides the power of a SINGLE REGULAR bowman, I'm fine with archers.

[ September 09, 2006: Message edited by: Somagu ]

[Abyssal Squid]

I guess I didn't put enough emphasis on "with the current system."  The current system is having a single player character who must survive at all costs, and a huge supply of meatshields.  That plus instadeath isn't too much fun.  Fortunately, there's already plans for a better system where you control the whole group or at least a core group, and the death of any one of them, while hardly inconsequential (as the loss of companions currently is), doesn't also end the game.  Even then there has to be some sort of endgame, and raiding kobold/goblin fortresses sounds like a good idea for that.  There needs to be a midgame before that, though.

So basically I'm just complaining about it being unfinished.  Give a skilled and/or heavily-armored character the ability to parry, block, and dodge lots of arrows from the front (making sneaky gang attacks still be very powerful), and also reduce the importance of a single given character, and missiles should be fine.

[PvK]

I love the deadly combat too. I'm also quite used to similar gameplay from decades of playing games like The Fantasy Trip, GURPS, and Dominions, where death can come at any time, and gameplay is about tactics and, if you want a good chance to survive, minimizing risk.

It's also spoiled me for the majority of fantasy games, which follow D&D conventions where combat is about having ten times the hit points of your opponent, trading blows which have no effect, no tactics involved, etc. I certainly wouldn't want to nerf arrows to that degree here.

I'd just like the blows to be more like they are for other attacks in the game - plenty dangerous and potentially deadly, but not deadly almost all the time, with no chance of evasion. Just like it's good that you can get killed unexpectedly by a lucky enemy blow, it's also good that there are a reasonable number of misses and successful evasions and defenses, so that the action is unpredictable.

But as in my examples in my original post, thrown and missile attacks are just currently extemely out of line. As I illustrated, a totally untrained human throwing random soft non-weapon crap, is more deadly than a trained warrior in your face with a serious melee weapon. That's just wrong.

Also, a goblin with a shortbow is not an English longbowman, and even an English longbowman would not always wipe someone out with each arrow. An arrow that hits a shield is almost surely not going to fly through it and the targets armor, etc.

I do like the idea that a super-duper-skilled thrower, and/or someone very strong, could get some good results with random thrown junk, but it should be only for characters with exceptional extreme abilities. And practice throwing rocks at nothing should only advance skill up to a certain low level, like maybe 8. And it shouldn't be "the cloth gloves poke out both his eyes and his throat". Even arrows should almost always only hit at most one organ at a time.

[bremac]

quote:Originally posted by PvK:
<STRONG>
Also, a goblin with a shortbow is not an English longbowman, and even an English longbowman would not always wipe someone out with each arrow.</STRONG>

And the English longbowmen were all strong (you had to be to get any pressure on the bow), and well-practiced, the equivalent of a DF skilled marksman at least. It would be a massive kobold to be able to do that much damage with a bow without being at point-blank range.