armor/attack related behaviour and more ideas

[titi]

Today i talked to JammyJamJamman and an idea came up:
We started with this:
How to make it possible that a swordman cannot attack a castle?

In the techtrees xml-file we have
<attack-types> and <armor-types>,
followed by <damage-multipliers> setting something about how much damage an attack will cause.

If we set the damage multiplier for slashing(sword) and armor stone to 0 for example, a swordman will not be able to cause any damage on a stonewall. But the problem is, he will still try to attack this building.
This should be changed! When searching for a target to attack things that cannot be damaged wiht the units attack should be ignored!

This would change the gameplay a lot and something like "walls" would get much more interisting .....

And this made another idea come up. What about making for example ultra CPUs taking into account the damage-multipliers when looking for targets in the attack range ....

[titi]

I have been thinking about something like this as well, once I do my extensive changes to the armor system.

Basically the AI will scan for the unit it can deal the most damage to after armor and resistance mitigation and attack that unit.

I think its a very bad idea to implement this logic as the default for all typs of control. The micro management in a fight is part of the fun playing glest. If its used for all players an important aspect of "playing the game" gets lost.
Combined with a random factor this should only be used to let the AI-classes fight different.  CPU-EASY and CPU should not use this, as its quite unfair. CPU-ULTRA should use it a bit and CPU-MEGA maybe a lot . Human players should never have this kind of support....

If it can't deal damage to a unit it will never attack it.

This is the only thing I would recommend for all types of control type, human or cpu

I was also thinking of setting up tags, as this may be a simpler and less resource intensive method. You can just have a type tag for a unit and then you can specify which types a unit can attack.

So a swordsman cannot attack a <stone> wall, but can attack a <wood> wall. If a wall is made of wood they can slowly hack through it for poor damage but if it is made of stone they will search for the next target.

I know I am technically a GAE person, but the implementation should be relatively similar for both engines.

Then you will have two things controlling the same thing, which is maybe a bad idea.

A Problem we already have in general with the whole armor/attacktype thing is the UI.
Its not intuitivly visible for a human player which enemies will be good target for a choosen weapon. Maybe someone has an idea how to Display this?
Maybe some kind of target highlighting after choosing the weapon which shows how much a unit will be affected and all this not in an graphically overloaded way!

[John.d.h]

A Problem we already have in general with the whole armor/attacktype thing is the UI.
Its not intuitivly visible for a human player which enemies will be good target for a choosen weapon. Maybe someone has an idea how to Display this?
Maybe some kind of target highlighting after choosing the weapon which shows how much a unit will be affected and all this not in an graphically overloaded way!

I actually kinda like that it is not immediately apparent what kind of attacks should go against what kind of armor.  The player can easily see what kinds of attacks their units have, and what kinds of armor, and it's up to them to figure out what tactics work best.  A lot of it comes from common sense (don't shoot arrows at a stone building, duh) and some of it comes from trial-and-error (would impact break right through a wooden wall, or bounce off?).  Rather than having a huge info-dump right up front that explains everything, the player can just dive right in.  This makes the game easy to pick up.  However, they have room to learn which attacks are useful in what situation, so that gives some room for practice and mastery.

[Coldfusionstorm]

Is't it really really on time we improve the ui?, i mean for real, it is really beginning to show it's age.

i can come up with some images for UI ideas.

[Omega]

One possible way to display it would be changing the displayed information in the unit's status box when we are hovering over an enemy unit with the attack command active. In other words, if we have an active attack command (that is, the button has been pressed, but we haven't chosen a target yet), hovering over an enemy unit will dynamically change the information displayed in the status box to show the range of damage taking into aspect the target's defence and damage multiplier. Above that could be displayed the target's health (current and maximum), their defence, your attack type, their armour type, and the damage multiplier. The information regularly displayed in the status box would be temporarily replaced with this new information. The icon displayed would be that of the target unit's.

Naturally, we wouldn't have time to go hover over numerous enemy types in real time combat, but we'll presume such a feature would work when the game is paused, would work very well for RPG-style mods, and would allow a way to find out the damage multiplier (etc).