I totally agree. HP is the last thing I would want experience to affect... Being more experienced means being more efficient, able to pull off better attacks, find weak spots easier, and block/defend/parry better. It does not mean being able to be stabbed through the heart twice as many times before dying...

HP is and always has been an abstraction anyway. In Borderlands you gain HP when you level. You don't suddenly become more impervious to bullets, but your general combat skill has gone up and they use HP to express that. It's a pretty common thing. A direct hit from an axe will kill most people, but in D&D your character can get enough HP to survive it by gaining levels, because HP represents more then raw ability to take a hit. It's also your ability to move so the hit doesn't cripple you as much, how to even partially avoid the hit, and so on.

So for this purpose, boosting HP works fine. The unit will win more battles with more HP then it would with less HP, so its a better unit. It doesn't help it fight a dragon that it can't hit, but people are spending way too much attention on such a rare case. (The easiest solution is to drop the floor to 5% instead of 10%, then even a defense 19 unit can theoreticaly be hit by an attack 1 unit. The case where something really can't do harm in that case becomes so rare that its hardly worth worrying about.)

HP is an abstraction that allows a more realistic simulation of a battle.

You take your elite soldier who has 1 attack and 1 defense and give him 1000 HP and he's going to be able to take on a LOT of 1 attack 1 defense peasants.

By contrast, give that same elite soldier 10 attack and 10 defense and it's going to be purely luck on how many guys he's going to take out. The first guy could get a good roll and zap the elite guy.

While luck plays a roll in any battle, it should not be the deciding factor.

This response seems to have glossed over pidgeon's point. 

Making a unit stronger with HP will have the same effect as giving it more attack or defense... but only if you auto-resolve every single battle.  But aren't there going to be tactical battles?  Isn't that a major focus of the game?  If an elite unit can't kill stuff faster or bigger monsters faster you are losing a collosal aspect of experience gain in its relevance to tactics.  Like I said earlier, if I want to crush the right flank of an army quicker so that I can get to that wizard throwing fireballs at my units with impunity, a unit with years of experience and combat training does it no better than a unit right out of the barracks.  And what happens when two highly experienced armies collide?  By your method, they would just sit there and wail on each other for 10 times longer than they would if two inexperienced armies collide.  Fun or strategically meaningful?  No.

If this doesn't concern you, than it would seem to imply that battles are sadly more simplistic than we had all hoped.

And no one is getting even close to asking for violent unpredictability when it comes to combat.  Not even close.  Just create a system where a unit gains a modest amount of attack, defense, AND HP so that we can use them meaningfully in a tactical battle.  You'll have units that strong anyway after you've researched better armor and weapons, so what's the difference between having a unit that has an extra +2 attack from tons of experience and a unit with +2 attack from new and improved weapons?  Just because we want units to gain attack and defense with XP doesn't mean that we must immediately assume that they need to double or triple in stats every level.  That's silly.

I understand what HP represents, but assuming that a better unit can't swing a sword better to kill units faster is utterly bewildering.  And once again, I don't ever see a soldier doubling or trippling their base attack score without spending the entire game in constant combat.  Master of Magic had a perfectly good way of allowing non-hero units of gaining attack power, defense, and HP without throwing the game into disarray.  Why can't it be done now?

It is utterly bewildering that if your veteran spearman can pierce tank armor if he levels up. 

Increasing HP is one way to do it.  ATT & DEF has a different meaning in this game, just accept it (unless Frogboy change his mind later)

This makes the assumption that tactical battles are handled in symetric rounds which they're not going to be.

When unit A and unit B fight, the battle is not going to go back and forth with each "round" being attack of 1 and defense of 1 or whatever.

It's going to compress the battle based on the HP of each unit.

So in effect, if a unit has 10X the HP of another unit, that means each unit of time will consist of 10 volleys back and forth.

Hence, unit A with 1 attack and 1 defense and 1 HP will be killed off almost instantly by unit B with 1 attack, 1 defense and 20 HP because the 1 time unit in the battle will represent 20 volleys.

So HP is not only HP, but also rate of fire ?

Well, this is fine if it's a one on one duel between two soldiers.  Are you saying that HP doesn't just mean hitpoints, but also means number of attacks per round?  That your number of "life points" scales exactly with their number of attacks per "combat round?"  So if Robin Hood had 100 hitpoints, he fires 100 arrows and kills 100 peasants?

Where did I say anything of the sort?

You say on the one hand that you  understand what HP represents and then go on to make clear that you don't understand.

HP in Elemental (and most modern games for that matter) is an abstraction. It is not the "life force" of a unit.  It is the abstracted value of that unit.

The amount of volleys that a unit gets per round is tied to their HP.  Hence, the unit with a lot more HP will be killing units a lot faster.

Example:

Robin Hood is going to kill off a lot of enemy units per round because he will get multiple volleys per round.

Yes. HP is an abstraction for the overall value of the unit.

Obviously, we could create a half dozen other variables that have the same value as HP (and in the game it's just represented by a heart icon anyway). 

We have a speed variable already so HP is not strictly speed.  HP (the heart icon) represents the value of the unit really.

Not a bad idea, but I don't think I've ever seen HP linearly connected to rate of fire (or connected at all, for that matter), and I've played many, many games from PC to pen and paper RPG's.  If this is the case, I'm pretty sure that calling this combined stat which represents life units and rate of attack "hitpoints" will certainly confuse people.  So if I get you right, attack score is more like a "penetration" score.

Will these number of volleys increase per level?  This still isn't quite clear to me.  I guess what I really am itching to know is whether a swordsman will carve through a level 1 spearman faster relative to all of the other units in the army fighting around him (assuming that they have not gained any levels. 

Correct.

Attack and Defense are related to equipment.

What we loosely call HP here represents the overall "strength".

Instead of HP we should probably just call it "strength" or something since it's just causing confusion.

Ah, so hypothetically a strength score of 10 might yield 10 life points and 2 attacks and a strength score of 20 would correspondingly yield 20 life points and 4 attacks.  Alright, that works, and I appologize for making such a ruckuss.  I've had a lot of enthusiasm infused into this game, it I thought it had all just flown out the window.  If we've learned anything from this, though, I think there could definately be a better term to refer to HP (I don't think I was the only one confused, there.)

Good idea. Terminology is important. People hear "HP" and think a specific thing. Since this stat is actually doing something different, another name would be better.

get yourself a SEGA Genesis emulator and play WARSONG.  It does this very thing and it works great.  In fact in my own designs for games I use HP as a determinate for number of attempts at attack as well.  Although I do the same thing warsong does and give every unit ten max HP...

Weird system. I suppose it could work, though...

One question: if I want to make a unit or mod in a creature within the context of this combat system, is it possible to make a big, lumbering unit that is very hard to kill, but attacks very slowly? Basically, a unit that can take an immense amount of damage but not deal out very much damage?

If HP is directly tied to the rate at which units kill other units, it doesn't seem like that would be possible. Although I suppose if its attack value is low enough... But then, this big lumbering unit with 5000 HP but only 4 attack wouldn't be able to even scratch a dragon with 40 defense, even if the concept called for a big lumbering beast that attacks very slowly, but each attack is devastating...

Tying HP directly to damage output seems non-intuitive and pretty limiting in terms of unit/creature creation. It's different and confusing enough that I suppose I'd have to actually experience it to figure out whether or not I like it, and how exactly it works...

One thing though: it seems you're trying to make things simpler by reducing the number of combat stats by making each state play multiple roles. But the result appears to be an immense amount of confusion among the people who will, among all your playerbase, probably figure it out the quickest... That's not necessarily a good sign that the result is actually simple and intuitive. Separating these things out into multiple figures can make it much easier to figure out how a unit will perform in combat.

Edit: just read your post about possibly calling HP something else - good move, because it's extraordinarily confusing. I'm still somewhat skeptical about it but will reserve judgement until I can get my hand on it! 

Lol, I think pretty much everyone in this thread was of the assumption that HP only meant the ability to take damage, regardless of which side of the argument they were on.  I would be curious now to know what this relationship is exactly.  If it's 1:1, that might be a bit odd, especially when you end up with ranged heros like Robin Hood who would have 100 "HP" and end up firing 100 arrows in the time that an archer with 5 HP could fire 5.

Yes, we were. Which is why terminology is important.

I think its relative. Robin Hood with 100 HP when fighting something with 100 HP (an adolescent dragon or something) is probably on equal terms, they each get one attack for one of the other. But against a 10 HP soldier, Robin Hood is the far superior unit and would get to attack multiple times. So even if they both have attack 2, Robin's superior skill is going to win him the battle.

Yep, in a 1 on 1 fight you are totally right.  It also works in game without tactical battles.  It's easy to imagine Robin Hood's 100 HP representing that he's shot some number of arrows to inflict some amount of damage.  IT doesn't matter in a duel.  Now, add 1000's of soldiers.  Now it definately matters how many arrows Robin Hood is lobbing, especially if he is firing at units that have 1 hitpoint each.

Why not? I don't get it...Example: X unit has 1000HP, 10 DEF, 1 ATT, no magical dmg type/resistances/immunities.

*edit*

I am kinda confused about this HP system. So basically we don't have hit points in the game?

See ... I TOLD you we need an official religion named as Dragon-cult! .... or rather Dragon-Cult for the Fallen and Dragon-Council for humans. Still, we need a Dragon-cult feature!

So, a unit whose HP are reduced will be less effective in combat ? Oh yeah that's really really gfreat news, you know why ? It means the first strikes will be more important than in any other game. In a fight you need to stay alive. That's the first lesson of any martial art. I just hope that someone with the max HP (or strength) will get a bonus to attack and defence (then the first one to hit will get an advantage over his ennemy)

In a case of him vs 1000 very weak zombies, it depends on how the combat system works. The 1000 units could be treated as a single entity (army of zombies), in which case he could kill dozens or hundreds at once. Or it could be 1000 zombies, in which case he probably kills a few at a time (in this system each of the 1000 zombies is distinct, they just happen to take up the same tile).

Basically, is it 1000 zombies with 1 HP, or 1 group of zombies with 1000 HP?