Kobold armour penetration shouldn't be a problem

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Hi everyone.

I just watched yesterday’s stream Stephanie did a wonderful job with the balancing. The 100 undead horde was AMAZING!! :smiley:
Anyway near the end of the video Stephanie ran into an issue with the kobold bows.
I believe that it’s actually not an issue.

Classic combat triangle is Melee beats Ranged, Ranged beats Magic, Magic beats Melee.
This is because of multiple reasons, the armour types and attack types come into play

Melee always has enough armour to deal with ranged.
Ranged is always able to reach the mage and is much more resistant to their attacks (debuffs like slows or roots) also the mage has virtually no armour.
While the mage’s slows and roots are very effective against melee, furthermore magic attacks normally ignore armour completely (it’s logical, like fire and electricity isn’t going to be hindered by plate armour).

Adding the perk of armour penetration on the kobolds will serve the purpose of making them more of a threat which is good, but shouldn’t be the reasoning behind the current combat triangle in my opinion.

Thanks for reading, and i hope the unpacking went by swiftly and without any unexpected enemy spawns :stuck_out_tongue:

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Is it classic though? Is familiarity with that something the developers can take for granted about their audience?

Say you presented those three options to someone who wasn’t familiar with fantasy videogames and asked them “what beats what?” they would just say “magic beats all of them I guess?” and maybe “ranged beats melee” if they remember being told to “Never bring a knife to a gun fight”. It takes a lot of gaming know how to realize that each one would have to have both a good and a bad match up. That is to say, there are people who won’t even consider that there might be a reason to keep footmen around once they can ‘upgrade’ to another class.

Here’s an interesting entry on Tactical Rock Paper Scissors at tvtropes.

You’ll see some of the most common examples up top. Maybe the warrior beats rogue beats mage beats warrior triangle is approximately what you were describing. However just as common is the trope of ranged beats fast beats siege beats ranged.

These conventions just don’t seem to be as well established as everyone thinks. In fact, I’ve closed the tab that says siege beats ranged and now I’m thinking its just as likely that ranged beats siege. :fearful:

This isn’t like fire beats plant beats water beats fire - it can emerge from a ruleset without anything being spelled out like that, see what I mean :

All units have 7 HP. All units begin 3 squares apart. Both attack at the same time and move at the same time

Unit A moves 1 square / round and deals 4 damage / round over a range of 1
Unit B moves 3 square / round and deals 3 damage / round over a range of 1
Unit C moves 0 square / round and deals 2 damage / round over a range of 3

A will beat B because A will deal damage faster
B will beat C because B will deal damage faster and C won’t deal it soon enough
C will beat A because C will deal damage sooner and A won’t deal it fast enough

The reason I’m guessing developers want to use things like armor penetration is so they can have more wiggle room. Like if I wanted the fights to sometimes start at range 2 or 4 then I could give B a +1 vs C attack and C gets a +1 vs A attack - but those special attacks aren’t the core of the dynamic.

I’m not even sure where I was going with this, its just that these are the things that go through my head when these sort of things are discussed, and since I haven’t read it anywhere I thought I’d share.

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That’s very insightful. Thank you for taking the time to write it up and share.
I see what you’re talking about now, i think the point you’re trying to make is the one you made earlier in your post. [quote=“Ludocrat, post:2, topic:21301”]
These conventions just don’t seem to be as well established as everyone thinks. In fact, I’ve closed the tab that says siege beats ranged and now I’m thinking its just as likely that ranged beats siege.
[/quote]

I agree with you, i guess we’ll have to see where it goes. The triangle i mentioned, and the ones you mentioned are only as viable as the game developers want them to be, as you explained at the end with your A vs B vs C examples. The triangle i suggested would really only work if 2 things got introduced into the game. A rooting/stunning mechanic and a “magic resistance” mechanic, which would explain why an archer or “fast” (rogue) beats a mage (siege); i know i just jumbled them all up, but that serves to further prove your point. :+1:

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:smile: I’m glad someone read this post. I wrote it while I was figuring it out for myself, like, I really did write that stuff because I didn’t want to reach for a mouse to check the TV Tropes page :laughing:

TV Tropes is such a great source for design ideas. I wonder if any indies have used it to understand the why of standard genre mechanics.

I agree that its going to take some of those ‘wiggle room’ type mechanics. Specifically because the example I listed wouldn’t work very well in Stonehearth. Combat is so slow (I think its because hearthlings are harder to replace than RTS units), which means the movement speed differences or ranges for the archers would have to be off the charts. There’s all ready some rooting / stunning in the first tier of special arrows, so you’re probably on the same page as the developers there.

The coolest thing about all these combat features being suggested is that the modding potential is so deep that most all of them can be implemented. I’m seriously amazed at how flexible and elegant all the scripts/assets are. I’m coming here from the Starbound community and did a lot of modding there (also lua and jsons), so that’s my closest point of reference. Starbound is also very mod friendly, but Stonehearth’s object oriented (I think that’s the right terminology) design creates much greater potential for really ‘out-there’ mods.

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That’s awesome!! I bet you’re gonna make some great mods then :slight_smile:

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