MBX

For the record - conscripts are normally poorly trained as well as poorly equipped, but that doesn't mean they're fodder.  The general military procedure, historically, is to use such low-quality troops in reserve and security duties, in order to free up higher-quality troops for the more aggressive and front-line operations.  During this time they can be given additional training (and equipment as it becomes available), and will likely see very limited combat - so they can get better without being torn to bits.  Once they are ready for full-scale combat duty, they would be rotated to front-line units and new conscripts would move into their former jobs.  This applies no matter if you're talking about modern military reserves or the Roman Auxilia ... there are plenty of combat support roles for the poorly trained and equipped, without just using them to soak up hostile fire.

For game purposes, the conscripts could escort caravans and man fortifications, theoretically freeing up the heavy infantry and cav for offensive combat operations, and putting the best hardware where it can be best used.  This would be sane, historically justifiable, economically reasonable, and militarily effective.

(Only a total psychopath would put his weakest units on the front row.  Lighter, faster units ... maybe, particularly if they were mostly intended as skirmishers ... but not the poorly trained conscripts.  That's just a waste of manpower.)

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We haven't seen any major bugs in a couple of days.

Sent a dev version of this to GA (I hope, if the mail went through), with the recently mentioned bugs touched up somewhat.  As soon as he confirms that the dev team have it and it is working, I'll be ready to hand the whole mess over to them.  Somebody else can work out the factions and the economic issues.

Arrows tend to go through a shield, partially.  While that inch of arrow sticking through on the back side doesn't do much to the face of the shield, it can cut the grip, straps, or the user's hand ... which can make the shield extremely difficult to hold, if possible at all.  The large Roman shields had a center grip and placed an armored metal cup over it, to reduce this, but most shields that strap to the forearm offered little protection from this type of damage.  Even with metal heavy enough to stop an arrow, a well-placed dent can make one hard to hold.  So yeah, arrows can disable a shield ... not specifically by "breaking" the surface (although, since they do tend to penetrate, that is possible too, especially if the shield was cheaply made), but by partial penetration and causing problems on the other side.

In the throwing knives or rocks example - you're not going to get partial penetration with those.  The arm of the user, and the straps and handle of the shield, are all quite safe.  Javelins, on the other hand, take this a step further - even if they don't hit anything vital on the back side, the size and weight of the weapon forces the shield to be dropped.  It's just really tough to balance a shield anyway, and a three-foot javelin sticking out of it will totally ruin your day.

Then again, getting hit with an arrow can be deadly.  If the shield just catches one or two, before you end up with one an inch from your face and have to ditch the shield, that's one or two that did not end up in your body.

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If ordering troops to take prisoners is an issue, somebody with the troops file will need to distribute some non-lethal weapons.  That is historically how real paramilitary/law enforcement deal with the problem - issue hardwood batons (or in the case of Japan, metal truncheons ... but Japan was always known for doing things a little extreme).  I do not have the troops file.

(Note to whoever does that ... check the weapons.  Maces with spikes or flanges are not "non-lethal" ... they are pierce now.  Only weapons that genuinely look like they would not cause massive lacerations are "blunt".)

A mob beating somebody for thirty minutes and doing little or no damage ... that sounds like what often happens to riot police.  The armor protects them from taking any real damage, but they still end up curled in a ball while a hundred angry people kick them repeatedly.  It does look crazy to watch, but that happens a lot, really.


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Harad short spear shows a smallish stone tip, probably obsidian or some other volcanic glass.  It was set to pierce because obsidian is very hard, but that little point in the model is not going to make much of a hole, even if they manage to keep it sharp (which would actually require replacing the tip often).  It is an ineffective spear design, when it comes to stopping a person.

Rhun short sword is curved so steeply that I'm not sure you could ever get a straight jab out of it.  I did not change that, but I know what the devs were thinking... it's a steeply curved falchion, not a "short sword" in the sense of the Roman gladius.  (You can get a stab out of a curved blade, if you know how - but it's usually a pretty weak attack, more so if armor is involved.)

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Bleeding script is not part of the item specs ... you will need to get somebody else to plug that in.  It can be found down in the discussion thread where the conversation was held.  It is somewhat bugged, in that the last hit point of damage causes the bleeding victim to twitch a lot ... somebody will need to clean that up before it will be ready for TLD.

Another good one was the topography map in the little "backspace" command screen.  Can't remember who wrote that one ... Fisheye, maybe?  Anyway, I can look it up if somebody wants it.  It does work on 1.0x, I know.

Horses run 60 to 90 HP ... a solid hit in the head from heavier weapons should bring them down (with the 2x head shot multiplier), if there's no armor to speak of.  A really solid hit to the body should put them down, again minus armor, but you'll really have to hit them - they're big animals, they can shrug off a little damage, at least long enough to finish the fight.

If the shot was just poorly done and the projectile shoddy - well, critters might take a hit in the head and not go down.  It does happen ... my dad watched a guy he was hunting with, hit a deer right through the middle of the head - ear to ear - with an arrow (with an almost two-inch wide broadhead, no less), and the stupid thing didn't go down.  Three of them chased it for hours, because for legal reasons in that particular wildlife management area, the guys with black powder rifles were restricted to buck only, and the deer with the joke arrow through it's head was a doe.  They finally did end up shooting it with the guns, because the guy with the bow couldn't hit crud - the head shot was literally an accident.  The game warden looked at them very suspiciously when they told the story, but he figured that poachers would not come to him and try to explain it, so he let it go.  That's not the only story like it that I've heard, but that one I know everybody in the story, and they all told the same story (with the same mix of humor, dismay, and a slightly queasy feeling), so I figure it's pretty accurate.

Seriously, the tissues of the brain are certainly more vulnerable than most parts of a living body, but NOT every hit in the head area is immediately fatal - on man or horse or whatever.  There are a lot of places on a head where injuries are not immediately debilitating, no matter how hard you hit them.  Add just a little armor, particularly if it is concentrated around the most vital areas, and it throws the numbers all out of proportion.  You can put a projectile through a horse's sinus passages or some places on the jaw, and draw a lot of blood without really damaging anything immediately critical.

Weapon damage is just crazy that way.  In one way, weapon damage is sudden and deadly, but then there's a chance that it just won't work out as planned.  That's what makes damage models for games so hard - reality is more complex than a simple formula will compute.

But I bet the horse didn't take a second arrow very well, unless it was wearing some serious armor ... the chances of getting lucky twice in a row drop off pretty fast.
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I'll check that armor - it may just be over-priced, or it may be a typo.

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On the orcs ... do note in that report, riders (without horses) beat the crud out of said orc.  The only issue was that, due to armor and general toughness, and the Rohan guys probably not being well equipped to deal with heavy armor, it took some time.  (They were, after all, armed to fight from horse ... a very different problem than how you arm infantry.)  Had the big orc actually beaten the heavy troops from Rohan, that would be a different issue. 

Getting some tough sucker with heavy armor who keeps taking hits and getting back up, and having to take some time to beat him into the ground, is not unreasonable.  In fact, it happens all the time ... military and police often report some junkie or madman taking 20 hits from handguns and being run over by a car, and still fighting.  Inflicting critical damage can happen fast, or not so fast ... and against heavy armor, it's much more likely to be on the not-so-fast side.  And Tolkien's orcs were monsters bred for war, so much like junkies and insane people, once they get worked up to a frenzy, some of them are likely to keep fighting until you physically cut their heads completely off.  (Also like junkies and insane people, they're about as likely to fight each other as the enemy - a point that greatly benefited certain hobbits in the story... but I don't advise trying to model that in M&B.)

That's where that zero-damage stun factor comes into play.  It means that you can beat somebody (some thing, whatever) into the turf, no matter how much armor they are wearing.  Armor does not make you unstoppable - it just makes you less likely to be injured or killed (or at least injured less seriously) by any given attack (how much less depending on the specifics of the attack and the armor).

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And somebody else has to mirror the download - that's the only site I can get working from here, at the moment. 

Sometimes it does strange things like that ... give it a few minutes, usually it clears.

Which spear?  Which faction sold it?  Because I didn't find it ... well, I suppose I could check EVERY spear, but how long would that take?  They are all named "spear".

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The throwing axe velocity is not a joke.  You ever throw a hatchet?  Throwing a Cherokee tomahawk is still something people play around with, out where I came from ... and while it can be done, and more efficiently than you might think, lobbing one of those things for any distance is like trying to throw a bowling ball.  It's not really an effective attack, except for the point of extending your reach by a bit (which can work to your advantage, for a number of strange reasons).  The speed, arc of travel, and limits on effective range are accurate ... annoyingly so, it seems, if you favor them as a "ranged" weapon.

The lower speed on thrown weapons has the secondary advantage of getting the AI to get close enough to actually make them effective, instead of just hurling them all straight up into the sky from 50 yards out and wondering when and where they will come down.

Smaller and better balanced weapons, like the Roman-type military darts, will get a little better range - but even then, to make a single throw effective, you will need to get pretty close.  Attacks from more than 20 paces were done in volley against squad-sized targets, and even then it was considered extreme range.  Axes are a lot shorter ranged than that, much heavier and harder to throw.

Anyway, throw an axe at something, and watch.  They look like they fly in slow motion, and getting one to hit blade-first is pure guesswork.

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Personally, I think pretty much all the bows could be used from horse, with the possible penalties in how M&B handles horse archery pretty much compensating for the increase in difficulty when doing so.  But again, I'll leave that one to someone else, as a game balance issue, rather than start something.

Merlkir:  Exactly.  Even a blade that does not really cut through can inflict considerable blunt force trauma.

On weapon testing:  Yes, there are a lot of bad tests done, which produce a lot of aberrant results, both ways.  One of my favorite ones, recently, was very extensive but had two serious problems ... one, most of the swords in the tests were "replica", i.e. looked good but were never built with cutting in mind.  This meant that the few blades that were designed as blades (even poor blades) massively out-performed the replicas in cutting tests on cloth or leather.  (Against metal, the replicas made about as good a chisel as a real blade did.)  This produced some very odd conclusions, particularly since one of the blades that was actually hardened to take an edge happened to be a katana (enter the whole European vs. Japanese blades can of worms).  Second, the arrow tests were conducted with practice arrow tips - which are deliberately engineered to stop quickly in target backstops, particularly cloth or styrofoam.  That test massively over-rated cloth against arrows, and somewhat over-rated other armors, compared to what any hunter knows about sharp broadheads.  And that was one of the better tests I've seen.  They go downhill from there.  Fortunately, if you have a sharp eye for this sort of thing, you can sort out the issues, compare enough different tests and average out the results.  Even the poor test procedure tells you something - in that case, how really poorly designed arrowheads would do against armor.

On stun:  Getting hit hurts, even if it doesn't do any real "damage".  If you're getting beat up so badly that you can't do anything but be stunned, then you are losing a fight.

On fists:  Armor is generally tougher than skin.  Any armor at all will render most bare-hand attacks completely ineffective.  Punching somebody out rather depends on hitting something soft (say, the face), so that the target takes more damage than your fist.  Not to mention, have you ever seen anybody killed by being punched and kicked?  It's not easy to do.  Even gang stompings, where several guys knock somebody down and proceed to kick and stomp them into the ground, can take dozens of blows to incapacitate a mugging victim - zero armor, usually an accountant or some such (not a tough, generally damage-resistant sort).  Boxing matches go on long enough to be a spectator sport, and bare-knuckle matches are often not much faster.  Fist damage should be dismal ... that's why people started using weapons in the first place.

The impact of fists being marginal against armor is only an issue if you are trying to take prisoners - which is a pretty big problem.  Realistically, it can be hard to capture somebody alive, particularly if they would just as soon die here as whatever will happen to them as a prisoner.  Any weapon that is really effective is also usually deadly, at least without modern medical facilities, and using ineffective weapons (fists, small sticks, etc.) is a really good way to make somebody extremely angry.  This is reality - police face it all the time, where their use-of-force policies say that they can't do anything effective, but their target (even while unarmed - why they can't use more force) proves extremely hard to subdue.  Welcome to the fun world of realism.  Unless an entire group surrenders at once, taking prisoners is a tough prospect.

The damaged shields may only have 1 hit point, but they still have an armor value in the range of 60.  So that one hit point still requires the shield be hit pretty hard to damage it.  Plus, what did you expect from a broken shield?

The uruks have high strength and a bunch of hit points, to generally represent the point that they are scary beasts who live for nothing but war, and can shrug off a lot of pain and damage that would put a human into shock.  I did not have the files to modify that, but I can't disagree with the point.  Now, when you add considerable armor to that, yeah, they can get pretty formidable... particularly if nobody in the group has any decent anti-armor type weapons.  But that's not really a mistake ... it just makes the point that heavy armor can make a target more difficult to bring down than what you often see in Hollywood (where, often as not, the armor appears to be made of cardboard and tinfoil - both in how it looks and how it performs).

Don't think of it as charging men in plate armor.  Think of it as charging a whole herd of monsters, scary Halloween-looking critters with ink-black skin and fangs, atrocities bred for nothing but war and violence.  To kill them, you're going to have to totally beat them into the turf, because they will not just lay down and call for a medic if they get hurt.  Add effective weapons and armor to that, and they become quite formidable, as was very much intentional by their masters (who seriously believe they could win a war of epic scale using these guys as the front-line shock troops... and very well could be right).

The Dunland troops - the really high tier, nobility and the like, have slightly better gear.  Still nowhere near what anybody with some industry has, but slightly better.  Still, that was not my doing - I just put specs on what was there.

The equipment upgrade question - M&B does have a quite unreasonable system where equipment just grows on troops when they level up.  On a horde of mercenaries who were literally improving their status by scavenging, this might make sense, but not for army regulars.  We were planning to fix that in ONR, when Fujiwara got bogged down in Real Life (tm) and we couldn't finish it... it's a major re-organization to deal with - whole new troop trees, dialog with outfitters, a complicated mess to convert.

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Update:
We're getting a lot of suggestions and the like, but not finding many new bugs.  (Found some text bugs myself, but I'll get those.)  So I figure I'll go over the file and get some of these issues, and put together a beta version for one more round of tests.  If the stats themselves are working, then we can send this to the primary mod team, and all of these other suggestions can go to them (as I don't have many of the files to modify some of this, even if I had both the ability and desire to do so).

Related to that, note that there is a tremendous difference between some mountain goblins with no gear and a patrol out of Mordor, whose orcs are equal to lower to mid level human troops of similar level.  On the extreme high end, Gondor will have some advantage in armor and weapons ... but not by much... and a significant advantage in heavy cav, to somewhat help offset the orcs having more troops in general.  It was in the books that Gondor could not have won the war by force of arms alone ... Mordor was, in any reasonable assessment, considerably stronger.

There isn't really any lower-tier armor in Gondor.  The recruits have little protection at all.  This is painfully realistic... professional standing armies might have time to build up their equipment, but when you try to quickly bolster their numbers with a bunch of conscripts, you sort of get what you pay for.

Yeah, I assigned troll skin to be "somewhat protective", on the order of a coat of heavy maille, plus or minus a bit.  (60 points, if I recall ... about the same as Gondor's heavy maille.)  You have to smack it pretty hard to get any damage through that at all.  I can turn it up some, but if we're not careful, it will get to the point where elven blades won't cut it either.

The big Mordor trolls actually wear armor, on top of being tough.  Damaging them at all is really a tough assignment.  I was shooting for making them about as formidable as I could make any living thing without it seeming absurd ... if they got up to the point of shrugging off hits from antitank guns, somebody would notice that things were getting a little strange.

Still, being used for target practice by an entire company of elven archers would probably do one in pretty fast.  It's a troll ... it's big and tough ... but it's not a titanium elemental.  (Reference to "The Order of the Stick", if anybody missed that one.)  You shouldn't need thermite to make a hole in one.

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Zbylut:  No idea what to say.  I'm not using the launcher, I set up a copy of M&B as TLD-only.  It works that way.  I have no idea exactly what that launcher does.