[general balance] in depth analysis of weapons (updated .981)

Swords are best because having a shield means more defense/dodge and you're basically invulnerable. Bows are still useless.

No analysis for staff of souls ?

well staves are non competitive since they are supposed to be equipped by mages

the ones with magic stats accomplish their role, its quite hard to talk about balance because whole spell system would require a balance pass imo, some might be op, like staff of souls

Your analysis of backswing is wrong - it is actually completely worthless since every member of a multi-soldier unit rolls accuracy separately, and backswing only works when they ALL fail. Which is very rare.

So backswing is only good for low-accuracy heroes. Maybe henchmen.

Maces are better than sword against leather + shield or chain. They take an initiative penalty, but swords have a really hard time with armor (remember: damage increases quasi-quadratically against high armor, not linearly). Maces are fine-ish, it's just that the AI never makes them useful by only using low-quality troops.

Nice post to atleast awaken the thoughts.

I too think maces are rubbish, too big penalties.

I usually use spears when trying to use trained troops. These penetrate the high armour I meet from the AI (Higher difficulties will actually wear armour and stuff).
That said, I only use spears when I have the "Defensive" trait since that produces the best trained troops, and also I like the idea of huge bonuses to defend my cities.
(So Krax, or a pointless custom faction where I make myself not pick the best traits, but instead go for more pointless combinations like defensive and archers)

Also the defense ignore off spears is almost the same as bringing elemental weapons, so magic tree is just plain superior to the warfare tree when talking about weapons.

So thanks anyways.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I'm with OP.  I only use weapons with counterattack or weapons with maul right now.  Sometimes I use spears.  So here are some ideas:

a ) Make counterattack a % chance to happen (like bash) instead of automatic every time

b ) Nerf the damage on weapons that do counterattack

c ) Increase the initiative, increase the damage, increase the chance of bash of blunt weapons

d ) Increase the initiative, increase the damage, have backswing do double damage of axes

e) Increase the range of spears by 1 (so basically they have a 2 tile range)

With these changes, I think I would have a tougher choice to make regarding weapons.

yeah leather doesnt have blunt defense ok, but given a X defense swords are so far better it hurts

then if that X comes all from leather ok maybe its comparable but early on you shouldnt really fight a war, you mainly go against monsters

now with the nerf to basic of armors the % that is really blunt is lower for whatever X a good % will be from traits/skills/generic items/bonuses etc

so dunno, ofc its partially caused by ai not building much leather stuff but you cant really build a lot of leather stuff early

also can you provide a formula for armor reduction?

I think it would be enough to buff the other weapons to make counterattack less powerful. The bash chance should be damage x 2 in my opinion and backswing should work like an additional attack with - 15 to accuracy.

Weapons should have no initiative penalty. Instead they should have a high weight.

Armor reduction :

Max damage = Attack * Attack /(Attack+Defense).

For very high defense values (compared to the attack), this is ~ Attack ^2 / Defense

For very high attack values (compared to the defense) this is ~ Attack

So, against unarmored/poorly armored enemies, damage grows linearly with attack. As armor increase, higher attack has increasing returns, because more attack means more base damage AND more armor piercing. Example: against 10 armor, 10 attack gives 5 max damage, 20 attack gives 13.3.

Maces are slow and give significantly less power against unarmored troops (not to mention counterattacks!) but can reliably hurt moderately armored troops.

No, that's just not true. That's only true because the AI is terrible at producing decently equipped armies. Against full leather + a good shield, or anything in the ballpark of 15-20 armor, maces start being more efficient.

Edit: and that's not even considering that swords are much more expensive metal-wise.

The whole analysis is not very useful unless you include armor. Spears and Maces are best against chain and plate. They have some penalties, but cutting damage just doesn't cut it when your enemy has good armor. Of course, no one hardly gets to a point in the game where the enemy has plate, but that is a problem with the AI, not weapon balance. 

Here is how I see it:

Say there are two armies, TripD8's Army and Sean's Army. TripD8 has all broadswords, chain, and kiteshields. Sean has chain, and boar spears. We are both using the best traits, Charge, Muscle, Strength. The armies are as large as possible to avoid the advantage of first strike.

We will have the same initiative because I have 10 less weight and he as a +2 initiative. In the scenario I will go first and be the AI player. I move 5 spaces forward with all 9 units and get first strike. My Boar Spear plus Charge do great damage and with the new accuracy boosts from improvements, all attacks hit. His armor is only half as useful because I ignore 50% of his armor value. He would lose at least two units from every attack. If we are using groups, that would be a loss of 18 soldiers out of 45 total. He now has 27. I have 45. He gets no counterattack. He gets the next move. He also has charge, but his weapons use cutting damage. That means my chain armor is twice as good as his chain armor and he gets no armor piercing. He does very little damage due to the perfect counter to his strategy and the fact that I got first strike. 

Say in the second scenario he goes first and hits all my units with charge. I will still have much better armor. He may kill one unit per attack for the sake of argument. I would be at 36 soldiers and he would have 45. On the next attack I would kill 14 soldiers, leaving him with 31. There would be little chance of him ever coming back, but the battle would be at least close.

This is the intended balance for swords. They are supposed to be superior against leather and have counterattack. They are countered by spears and chain.

Maces are also very good if you have a full army of them and your enemy has leather or chain armor. They do better against chain and spears than swords and the advantage of focusing all bash attacks on the enemy's most powerful unit is not to be overlooked. In the messy real scenarios, maces can be your saving grace. 

Still, the best army is a multifaceted army. I generally play the vanilla game with one of each type to see how they have changed. I find that a weak faction is better off using spears since they will be the most affordable. Chain and spear is much better than leather with sword and shield.

 yeah but you guys keep using few assumptions that are not true at all

1) when plate or whatever armor is available that is the best option

this is not true ever

whatever armor you have available it has a cost, high tier armor has a very high cost and it has to be high so its not like scaling equally in terms of cost

its true that a plate win against a sword

but plate cost like 5 times more than a sword

also plate alone just survive the sword while there might be other factors in the fights, like magic

sword gives pure advantage in every situation even with magic present

plate gives a good advantage against swords but lose badly if there is magic too

so swords are jack of all trades with a counter that isnt really a jack of all trades  but just only a specific counter

2) someone need to tank

whatever math you come out with there need to be at least one tanking the damage

that guy is just so much better off with swords no matter what

then if it was possible to decide who attack who your math could work

but truth is you cant control everything

so its just better if more ppl has sword than mace because unless you a re using a sovereign tank  (that is not supposed to die) others may die and the guy with mace supposed to just attack will have to take hits and reply to them

3) time line

you keep forgetting the games go in one direction

armors are the future and a very expensive future while the rest is the past

every game is about going well early, then future is irrelevant, only exploitable ai makes you resist until you have plate, because you really cant in a competitive scenario

so even if ai would be enough good to equip at best his army there would be a war way b4 he can research that stuff (And build it)

4) champions, you talk like all the game is about army vs army while its not, a good portion of the game is about champions and improving your sovereign, and there is just no talk about it, every weapon but a sword sux long way for a sovereign against 90% of monsters

i never said spears are the worst

also spears have immune to counter, ofc they are good vs swords

the matchup is instead maces vs swords

also in your analysis you forget about defending

who attack first face more defense

lets make this right

a full leather is 8 defense against sword but ignorable by maces

round shiled has 4 overall defense+10 when defending

thats makes it 19 for first attack right?

you see how irrelevant is the specific cutting def vs the general one?

but lets keep with calculation

mace is 16 dmg vs  19 def

broadsword is 12 dmg vs 22 def

2 times

then mace again etc etc

basically assuming mace attack first (totally nonsense assumption but ok)

a mace hit for 16x16/35= 7 dmg

sword hit twice for 12x12/22=6 .5 dmg

then from now on mace hit for 16x16/20=13 dmg

but sword hit much more times exactly 1.5 times more

on the other hand mace sometimes proc bashthat is happening13% of times

so basically dps for each is

TLDR

sword each turn does 6.5 dmg*(1.5-0.13+1)= 15.4

mace each turn does 13

so a 16% less dmg

and since less init for mace sword will always attack first and the first troops to die will be maces (unless exploiting ai)

Incorrect. It's 12*12/(22+12), which is only 4.2 damage. So you do 2.1-4.2 damage and I do 3.25-6.5 damage. Even at 1.5 more attacks, the mace is doing quite well. And Bash will prevent a counterattack, as well as reduce dodge to 0.

You are right though about Maces being the second one to hit, putting them on the defensive. This is why I only keep one in an army. Oh, and maces cost no metal, so they can be used by all. The best use is to have one mace troop attacking the tank unit to bash it and overcome high armor. It's not useless, but it is specialized. I think that is a great way to balance things.

you are right

uhm it seems they can work then as source of dps maybe nearly as good as spear, surely more specilized

ill update opening post then i was too rude on poor maces it seems

also well it seems they have some role after all, mace being good mid game after the unarmored part of the game, when leather comes, while its bad again later when its plate time

I dunno, always thought maces were rubbish too. No matter how you put the math you still have more than 20% lost turns due to -4 initiative. And maces weigh tons and tons compared to swords or spears.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

i counted -1 for weight on maces

dont forget we are talking about a specific situation

against FULL LEATHER

this is not common, its very rare tbh

also this calculation didnt prove maces to be far better, just slightly better so basically when in this specific situation you see maces being ok to good but not so much better to notice

on the other hand in many other situations swords, spear or 2h are much much better

the game offer various situations usually so picking a random weapon your perception depends on the n situations you are facing

The worst part is the balance between weapons ATM doesn't count bonus damage from trinkets or traits... or so it would seem anyways.
Thats usually why I find the best weapons to be the fastest ones.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

On a more positive note, totally agree about daggers. Daggers are only possibly good for an early game leather tank, due to many extra turns and counterattacks. It's also good for a mage to hold, which is stupid. The crit bonus is not enough for normal units (and I am pretty sure they can't crit) and heroes will always find better daggers from loot. 6 damage is weak. If we are going to keep that, it needs to be piercing damage and it needs to have something better, like 2 counterattacks. I really don't like the initiative bonus as it makes all other choices for a mage pretty undesirable. 

Maybe something more like this:

6 Pierce attack

+8 to crit

+2 counterattacks

+2 Initiative

Weight 0

In my mod:

6 Pierce attack

+2 counterattacks

+2 Initiative

5% chance to ignore 50% of enemy armor. (1 in 20 strikes go between armor)

That would be a great weapon and really add some power for assassins, not mages. 

Would it be possible to give Daggers two attacks per turn? That would be more realistic in portraying the Dagger as fast weapon than the Initiative bonus.

Just something to consider with maces/other "blunt" weapons:  several monsters, namely Ophidians, Crag Spawn, Earth Elementals, Rock Spiderlings, and Earth Shrills (and possibly others, these are the ones that I can remember seeing) have high defense against cutting attacks and low (0 for Crag Spawn, Ophidians, Earth Shrills, Earth Elementals, and Rock Spiderlings).

This means that if you want to clear certain wildlands, or are facing large numbers of certain types of creatures, it may be advantageous to use a mace/other blunt weapon instead of a sword as the damage dealt by the blunt weapon will be much higher than the damage dealt by the cutting weapon.

yes ofc the more stuff you add the more performing is swords for init and for counterattack

basically like we say in calculation sword is 1.x times a mace, so whatever flat + is better on sword

also init is particularly good for those "dead or alive" cases

i mean sometimes you face a ogre, slag or something that killing 1 turn sooner is very important and the chances are you are gona do it with faster weapon

uhm right now 2 attacks per turn would just be equivalent to 1 attack with 2x dmg (or well there is a chance for 1 attack dodged and 1 not and such)

not really fun tbh

dagger for champions just need more specific traits, i modded that stuff, sean has new traits too in his mod, thats the only way to go for champions

2 counter seems too good early for champions while still being not that great for troops (btw i dont feel that urge to make troops viable with dagger )

your mod type is more what i like (but still i dont think its a viable option for troops)

And so we should base the balance on the fact that the AI produces only rubbish armies, or should we base it on what a competent player would do?

Against 20 armor (some chain, or leather + shield + buff/traits), maces deal more than +20% damage (it can go up to 77% when armor goes to infinity). Also, maces cost no metal and you can use a shield.
Again, you analysis is only based on the lack of AI resistance. But you can beat the AI with staves anyway.

I agree with Seanw3: this part of balance is very good. I use maces all the time against wild creatures/sovereigns with high armor.

My problems with the weapon is of an entirely different order: the whole game is based around obsolescence. The tiers are so pronounced that when you discover a new weapon tech, all previous techs are obsolete. This also makes mercenaries utterly useless - they'll be outdated in the blink of an eye.

So, maces are strictly better than warhammers (barely more expensive), daggers are useless, etc. That reduces the amount of choices one can make to build troops, because the best equipment is ALWAYS better. There's no "quantity vs. quality" either, because quality stuff is vastly more powerful and only marginally more expensive (at least, not expensive enough to warrant not using it in large amounts).

Combine that with the AI's inability to evolve past leather (when I have plate - that's on challenging), and the AI ends up not being a match for human players.

There are two solutions to this:

-Un-tier-ize the game. Make early stuff still relevant in the end game, still able to be useful in great numbers. Right now, the early stuff can't get through armor and the late stuff is too cheap (and too good) for this to happen. If leather + spears/axes were still relevant in the mid-end game, The AI would be much more efficient because it produces the stuff by the spades.

-Make the AI more obsessed with research and produce only high-quality stuff.

The game is far too tier orientated. I want some tier based superiority, but there also needs to be uses for leather and spears in the later game. Of course it's hard to balance or get beta testers to support that notion because most players don't even get that far. Most players don't even train units. Assuming we get the AI to carry the game past turn 200 and hero leveling in check, this discussion will be the most important one for game balance:

How do you make low tier weapons play well with medium and high tiers?

How effective should some leather clad axemen be against chain clad swordsmen?

like i said, you are axiomatically assuming plate will always be the best choice

but its not proven like other things

and like i said its not only a ai flaw you exploit, there are MANY situations in the game that are not ai dependant, one for all early game where you cant have researched everything and dont have to production to build so many armored troops

well while i agree it is maybe too much pronounced thats how it shoudl be

you waste n turns researching the next tier of weapons

they HAVE TO be better
just plain better; there is no other option; otherwise why would you reserach them?

maybe this could be balanced partially with higher cost but still they have to be better

Considering how much better a chain/plate troop is compared to a leather/naked one, it's always the best choice. Even if it costs you all your metal, 1 full-plated, horse mounted + late game weapon troop will crush entire AI armies with barely a scratch. And they don't even cost THAT much.

you know there is magic too?

also you seem to not consider the time to reserach one of the last tier of the game

also apart from pure magic there is magicl dmg coming from staves, summons, magical weapons etc etc