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« on: November 18, 2011, 07:14:19 pm »
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).