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| Thread: How to make healing&vampires logical&playable | |
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B0rsuk
Promising
Famous Hero
DooM prophet
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posted October 13, 2003 02:10 PM |
bonus applied. |
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How to make healing&vampires logical&playable
To all of you convinced, that "Quake1..er, Heroes3 is perfect game and there will never be a better game" = please go away. You won't like it.
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At the moment, vampires don't heal themselves by attacking victims. They resurrect themselves ! At the moment, healing spells are much less useful than they should be. Medieval armies always had many wounded veterans who survived battles instead of dying... Here's my idea how to implement wound status, and keep it relatively simple!
[theory]
When unit stack (A) attacks unit stack (B), damage is (let's forget about attack and defence for now) divided by defender's hp, and this determines how many of them die. This is EVIL, because some defenders will die, one will most probably receive some wounds, and rest of them don't have even a scratch.
My suggestion: only 50% damage works like usual. Another half isn't used for simply killing, but for raising defender's NEW, SHINING "Wounds" attribute. This would be calculated as follows:
totalhp - totaldamage x 100%.
totalhp - (all unwounded defenders) multiplied by (base hp)
totaldamage - total damage dealt by attackers
Example: 100 pikemen 20 hp each are attacked by dragons and receive 510 damage.
(old system)
Normally, 25 pikemen would die and last one would have 10(20 max) hitpoints.
(my system):
1) only 12 pikemen die, and last one has 5 of 20 hitpoints left.
2) Another half of damage is distributed evenly among remaining, unwounded pikemen.
255 divided by 87(one wounded) is 2.93. Each previously unwounded pikemen would take 2.93 damage.
So after attack there would be 88 pikemen with about 17 hp left, and top one would have 5 hp. "Wounds" attribute would be at 3/20 = (15%) .
In next attack (again 510 damage) MORE pikemen would die from same amount of damage: 15 instead of 12... because they were wounded. And the rest has more wounds than before, so death rate increases.
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Vampires sucking blood wouldn't rise from dead, they would simply reduce their "wounded" percentage.
Healing spells would be more useful, because you could heal more than one creature. At the moment you have up to 299 hp to save per stack...
There would have to be limits on how much Wounds% can you heal per spell etc....
[/theory]
... and all the numbers are for educational purposes and examples. It would open new possibilities: certain monsters would kill many but wound almost no one, and vice versa...
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EvilLoynis
Famous Hero
The Dark Shadow
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posted October 13, 2003 03:22 PM |
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Wow. It might be interesting to have that in the game but they wouold require major balancing with the stats after that.
Also after the battle do the wounds close? Or does it take until the next turn to have the rest of the guys back up to full health. It would be kind of annoying to have to face a tough wandering army live but have a lot of your army wounded then run into other players army. Might be interesting to have this as an ability that can be turned on and off, or to have it only as a creature ability.
____________
"I am both selfish and instictive. I value nature and the world around me as means to an end as well as an end in itself; at best I ... too long to display...
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Gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted October 13, 2003 06:09 PM |
bonus applied. |
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great idea worth paying lot of attention to imho
B0rsuk:
it's a nice idea, but to me it never looked good, because i thought it would have to take into account that creatures in a stack are wounded some more severely than others and some completely healthy. so i thought it would be better to stick with the old system that is basically:
1) it's better to get an enemy creature out of battle rather than do minor damage to every creature.
2) so attacking creatures first kill the first creature in the stack and then start to kill the next creature, etc. sounds unrealistic, but could pass for a "natural law" inside the game.
this solution is not a good one, but fortunately it somewhat fit the spirit of the game.
now that you finally did the numbers, i think i have an intuitive feeling (didn't do any statistics) that your system might work just as well as a significantly more compicated system with every creature having different wounds.
and there are some things to think about imho:
#1 the statistics i just mentioned - how does it correlate with your system?
#2 wounded and worn-out soldiers might not fight as well as healthy ones.
additional comment about #2:
i would also like to say that there should be some fighting stance like things in homm. you could choose if you e.g. attack offensively or defensively (less damage but less casualties from retaliation. something like that, a very raw idea). and low morale should make your troops sometimes choose defensive stance automatically. this doesn't relate to the main idea here no more that i would suggest not to take morale of the wounded into account in #2, just physical fighting ability.
and about the vamps: why not let them resurrect? healing their wounds would imho be a nice ability for ghouls.
EvilLoynis:Quote:
Wow. It might be interesting to have that in the game but they wouold require major balancing with the stats after that.
maybe.. but the most important thing.. you didn't say why you think that. as for me, the reason for major balancing is not very obvious, please explain.Quote:
Also after the battle do the wounds close? Or does it take until the next turn to have the rest of the guys back up to full health. It would be kind of annoying to have to face a tough wandering army live but have a lot of your army wounded then run into other players army.
so, after facing a tough wandering army with the traditional system you would just have less creatures when you face the opponent player. what difference would it make? or if you think that the opponent player hero gets too much exp it's easy to make the exp depend on the real health of the wounded creatures.
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Dingo
Responsible
Legendary Hero
God of Dark SPAM
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posted October 14, 2003 02:03 AM |
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I don't like the idea. Creatures would die more easily because of this. Battles would be shorter, less fun.
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The Above Post/Thread/Idea Is CopyRighted by, The Dingo Corp.
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B0rsuk
Promising
Famous Hero
DooM prophet
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posted October 14, 2003 09:59 AM |
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Quote:
I don't like the idea. Creatures would die more easily because of this. Battles would be shorter, less fun.
Nonsense. Total damage dealt is the same, and hp is the same. Each stack would need to take exactly as much damage to die (as in old system).
Creatures die slower at first, but later their dying rate would be faster than normal to compensate.
Gerdash:
1) Yes, it's better to kill whole enemy stack with one blow/spell. But it's not about "what's more profitable". Main adventage of this solution is, that healing and vampires would work as they should (more than one can be healed, vampires don't rise from undead)
2) The damage is split into 2 parts because:
- first half damages creatures standing in front line, they risk a lot !
- second half of damage goes for creatures standing farther from front line.
I know that it's another simplification, but profits are described in 1). System with wounds for each creature would be more complex, and not necessarily fun.
All creatures would be healed when combat ends.
During combat, creatures are more and more wounded unless they can be somehow healed.
No balance is the same in two Heroes games. Each time developers had to balance things from beginning...
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Gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted October 14, 2003 11:10 AM |
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Quote:
Quote:
I don't like the idea. Creatures would die more easily because of this. Battles would be shorter, less fun.
Nonsense. Total damage dealt is the same, and hp is the same. Each stack would need to take exactly as much damage to die (as in old system).
Creatures die slower at first, but later their dying rate would be faster than normal to compensate.
i also think the battles would get shorter. as far as you have described it, a creature still does normal damage no matter how wounded it is. more creatures alive = more damage dealt every round => shorter battles.
Quote:
1) Yes, it's better to kill whole enemy stack with one blow/spell.
no, i didn't mean that. a creature is not a stack but it is a creature in a stack. maybe i should have said
'it's better to get an enemy creature out of battle rather than do minor damage to every creature in a stack'
or
'it's better to reduce the damage you get next round by reducing the number of creatures in a stack rather than doing even amount of damage to every creature.'
in some rpg-s (e.g. older versions of mud-s) there was no limitation on how many players could attack one opponent player (or creature), i.e. the concept of space was a bit different.
just like in homm all creatures in a stack attack the top creature in the opponent stack, which is also the most effective thing to do with those unrealistic rules of the game where space limitations are not implemented.
that's why i thought the traditional top creature attacking somewhat suited the board game style of homm.
oh, this thread is about vampires? lol, i almost wanted to ask you why you keep bringing the vampires into this damage calculating topic. the resurrecting vampire concept may be true or not true, but it's extremely fun to play. maybe the "killed" vamps lay unconscious and wake up as soon as the other vamps give them something to drink?Quote:
2) The damage is split into 2 parts because:
- first half damages creatures standing in front line, they risk a lot !
- second half of damage goes for creatures standing farther from front line.
I know that it's another simplification
about half a year ago i was thinking about a formula that would calculate the number of creatures that can hit each other depending on stack size and creature size. it was about swarming a few giants with small creatures, but that wasn't so trivial at all, especiallt when there were e.g. battle screen terrain obstacles.
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B0rsuk
Promising
Famous Hero
DooM prophet
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posted October 14, 2003 09:41 PM |
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Edited By: B0rsuk on 14 Oct 2003
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Quote:
i also think the battles would get shorter. as far as you have described it, a creature still does normal damage no matter how wounded it is. more creatures alive = more damage dealt every round => shorter battles.
More creatures alive = more creatures alive.
At the moment a creature deals full damage no matter how wounded it is, so what's the problem.
All that matters is how you define "hit points". You can think "how much damage each creature can get and be able to continue fighting .Just because you can't see it in Heroes doesn't mean it doesn't occur. You don't see creatures cutting each other's throat, but you assume it simply happens.
Perhaps after hp falls to 0 the creature falls to the ground, and dies several hours later in terrible pain ? You can also rename "Wounds" to "Vitality". It could be defined as mix of wounds, exhaustion, and more.
End of story.
Quote:
(...)that's why i thought the traditional top creature attacking somewhat suited the board game style of homm.
My concept is mixture of both. Attacking top creature would still have it's place.
Quote:
oh, this thread is about vampires? lol, i almost wanted to ask you why you keep bringing the vampires into this damage calculating topic. the resurrecting vampire concept may be true or not true, but it's extremely fun to play. maybe the "killed" vamps lay unconscious and wake up as soon as the other vamps give them something to drink?
I'd can't imagine vampires being altruistic. It sounds funny.
This thread isn't ONLY about vampires. Vampires work very stupid if you ask me. Just like playing Medic in Wolfenstein :Enemy Territory, using vampires promotes very stupid and careless behaviour. Medic with average aim can kill very good player without much problem, because he can retreat and heal forever, medic is therefore the most aggressive class.
In Heroes, vampires can handle many battles without help and all you need to know about their use is: don't send them at TOO big armies. It's not like limits are low. 15 Vampires kill 30 Cyclopes without losses...
As stated before, all kinds of healing are hardly useful (except for one-man-army heroes; I hope Homm5 won't have combat heroes). It's extremely annoying for me. Not that I like Haven town too much - it has worst music, plain units, Knight's town was better in every part of homm...
Healing spells should be (potentially) battle winning devices, not "Hypnosis Mark 2". Level1 Magic Arrow is generally more useful than Mass Healing.
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Gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted October 15, 2003 06:40 PM |
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Quote:
More creatures alive = more creatures alive.
At the moment a creature deals full damage no matter how wounded it is, so what's the problem.
...
End of story.
lol, yeah, ok. but think about it. as you described it, it's the total health points of the stack that matters, and total health points are reduced normally. so damage per health point increases as the stack gets attacked. so it does more damage but dies faster.
1) a stack dies when the total health points of the stack are zero.
2) a damaged stack has more creatures than a traditional stack with same total health.
3) more creatures in a stack means more damage.
battles will be shorter. it's not too complicated. the other side of it is that i don't think we need to cry over it, and i don't think balancing will be difficult. or we could reduce damage of the wounded stack, but this might make the stack damage estimation tediousQuote:
Healing spells should be (potentially) battle winning devices
after all, your idea about making healing more important is a strong one. the pain of minor balancing is imho insignificant compared to the gain of better healing spell that adds an imho very important new dimension to battles.Quote:
Quote:
(...)that's why i thought the traditional top creature attacking somewhat suited the board game style of homm.
btw i just hope people noticed that i didn't say it was the best attacking system imho possible. i said it wasn't too bad in homm context. just got the impression that i might have been misunderstood.Quote:
In Heroes, vampires can handle many battles without help and all you need to know about their use is: don't send them at TOO big armies. It's not like limits are low. 15 Vampires kill 30 Cyclopes without losses...
i think i see what you mean.
this could be one of the main strategies of an otherways weak town, but as such it is extremely difficult to balance, and the boredom you mentioned is real in most cases.
what i like about vamps is that their numbers can get reduced significantly during battle and they regain their numbers in the end. and this is imho the main personality of homm vampires. the problem i see is that in most cases the vamp stack is too powerful for the battle and regains it's numbers every round, and this is boring.
imho the demon strategy with homm3 pit lords was a lot more powerful than any vampire strategy, but it was also a lot more risky, so it was interesting in almost every battle.Quote:
I'd can't imagine vampires being altruistic. It sounds funny.
for example, to me it sounds funny that vampires fight in an army. if you really want to find a reason to say that something is funny, you will. but imho it's a better attitude to first try to find ways how things can be done.
ok, let's assume that resurrecting their fellow vamps is altruistic rather than reasonable. then maybe it's the necro that is reasonable and commands them to do so, no matter if the vamps want it or not.
and the wounds system makes the resurrection look different without any hero interference. i don't think that the vamps will look altruistic if they get satiated (healed to full health) and then use the excess blood to resurrect instead of waisting something that they consider most precious.
i would rather try to keep the resurrect ability, but in a way that makes the player want to keep vamps out of the main battle in most cases. for example, one thing that i would consider is strike and return like harpies, and that the vamps don't retaliate (also keeping the traditional no retaliation of those whom the vamp attacks), because.. because.. vamps in melee doesn't look good imho. vamps are good tanks sometimes, and the problem here is that they become worse tanks. but if they can tank then they can probably do the battle alone. and again, should they tank?
easy to get carried away with this discussion. i guess i recall that the problem is that most vampire battles are boring. but the solution of not letting them resurrect has the problem that the vampires become less unique (actually their special ability would be: almost always receiving exactly half damage with system without wounds). vampires are conseidered important by many players and i doubt that it's best to try to find the solution to those problems in five minutes of braistorming.
i think that the wounds idea is interesting and reasonably complicated without bringing vampires into it. the vampires are a detail that can be adjusted as needed, but the wounds thing is a main concept. that's why i think that the vampire discussion is distracting here. or has the wounds system been discussed before and i have missed it?
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csarmi
Supreme Hero
gets back
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posted October 30, 2003 12:38 PM |
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distribution of damage
It should not be equal. I mean, your system is not a bad one, but I would go further.
First pikemen get half of the damage, end the other half is distributed in a lineary decreasing manner. Something like this:
Black Drahon fights 10 pikemen.
Black Dragon does 176 damage.
1st Pikeman takes 88 damage
2nd Pikeman takes 44 damage
3rd Pikeman takes 22 damage
4th Pikeman takes 11 damage
5th Pikeman takes 5 damage
6th Pikeman takes 3 damage
etc.
Damage always carries over to the next unit.
Result: 5 Pikemen die
6th Pikeman is damaged ( 7 HP left)
7th Pikeman is damaged (28 HP left)
8th Pikeman is damaged (29 HP left)
Not quite fine?
He attacks Nightmares now.
There are 5 Nightmares vs 1 Black Dragon
BD does 176 damage again
doing 1,2,4,8,16 damage would not be enough
so make it 6,12,23,45,90 (I can make it mathematically precise if needed)
So no Nightmare dies.
1st has 20 HP left
2nd has 65 HP left
3rd has 87 HP left
4th has 98 HP left
5th has 104 HP left
Sounds better?
Another idea (quite different).
We can make it to work MOO1 style too - a creature stack can kill only up to its size (so one kill per creature) unless it has a special ability. Normally no damage carries over (unless fire breath for example).
That might be too harsh, then make it so that 1 creature can kill number of creatures equal to its level. So you can kill 4 creatures/Angel, 3 creatures/Vampire etc.
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Yes, I play the game only on the forums.
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Gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted October 30, 2003 01:04 PM |
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imho the main beauty of the idea is that you don't have to micromanage health of individual creatures.
also, i see potential for development in the direction of making the deadly damage vs harmful damage ratio depend on min and max damage the attacker and health of the defender.
btw i have a gut reaction that the result would be extremely similar to micromanaging individual healths of creatures with a suitable damage distribution system.
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1 kill per creature would be an interesting change that would open up some interesting tactics and special abilities.
but imho that's a question of how we interpret the attack animation: as a single hit or as an attack possibly consisting of many hits.
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Djive
Honorable
Supreme Hero
Zapper of Toads
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posted November 08, 2003 07:45 PM |
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off-topic bonus applied.
I also think this ideas has some potential.
I'm a bit doubtful if it works well as proposed here. For the idea to be successful, you need to design the system so players won't win anything by micromanaging.
On the other hand, there is an advantage to be had with keeping the concept of taking the Health from the top creature. It's very simple and it allows the player good control over what will happen, and that are both good advantages.
The idea would hold more merit if creatures doesn't automatically recharge to full health all the time, and this is also something which could be considered. Logically, it would then make sense if the Vampires could raise their fellows after combat by replenishing health from slain creatures on the field.
When it comes to the Vampires, then I'd say they are raised and not resurrected.
____________
"A brilliant light can either illuminate or blind. How will you know which until you open your eyes?"
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Celfious
Promising
Legendary Hero
From earth
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posted November 08, 2003 11:00 PM |
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interesting..
There is confusion when you look at 5 dragons vs 500 pikemen.
Then look at 1 dragon against 1000 pikemen.
The dragon, dose sort of mow down the pikemen with his breath but I dont think all 1000 pikemen can get an attack in and also more than 1 would be wounded. Its all very complex. Very hard to simulate realisticly. If you signified large stacks by 2+ individuals (9 max?) then you would feel a desire to spilt the stack in the middle of war.
Well, perhaps not with a larger battle field. Its typical of players/AI to keep units strong not scattered. But it could be possible to spilt units.
It would be cool to see dead bodies lay when the stacks move from a place they were attacked. (pikemen-a mix of blue, white, flesh and blood, or crisp red and black)
____________
What are you up to
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Gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted November 11, 2003 12:34 AM |
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Quote:
The dragon, dose sort of mow down the pikemen with his breath but I dont think all 1000 pikemen can get an attack in and also more than 1 would be wounded. Its all very complex. Very hard to simulate realisticly.
suppose the dragon kills 1 pikeman out of the 1000 and wounds another for 5 health points.
there are 999 pikemen left, one of them is wounded 5 points.
now you attack the stack again. let's make an assumption that the probability of hitting any pikeman in the stack is the same. so you have 1/999 probability of hitting a pikeman that is wounded 5 points, so the pikeman that you hit has average wounds of 5*1/999.
which should just be as simple as
sum_of_all_wounds / number_of_creatures
it would be average wounds per creature.
of course, the player doesn't have to see any of the probability reasoning. what the player sees is that the stack gets worn out if it's attacked much in battle.
also, it might make it possible to have some alternative kinds of creature bonuses, spell effects, etc. like trolls regenerating their wounds could be significant even if the trolls didn't have super health.
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gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted March 26, 2005 08:27 AM |
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not exactly to the same topic, but related and i don't know of a better thread to post it:
(btw by 'creature' and 'stack' i mean different things)
each creature in a stack having individual wounds wouldn't get out of hand if stack size grew to infinity.
it's because all creatures in the stack are the same, so we could have some possible levels of wounds (like 0%, 20%, 40%, ... 90%) and would just have a number of creatures for each level of wounds. in the extreme case, every health point of a creature could correspond to a wound level.
actually it might be more reasonable to have health levels (100% means no wounds) instead of wound levels.
example
target stack of 100 creatures:
100% health: 47 creatures
80% health: 33 creatures
60% health: 12 creatures
40% health: 0 creatures
20% health: 8 creatures
what this would simulate: imps scratching behemoths while behemoths kill an imp with every hit.
analogous effect without health levels (the topic of this thread) would probably be 10% of imp damage to behemoths goes to killing first behemoth in stack and 90% of imp damage to behemoths goes to wounding the behemoths (reducing average health of behemoths in the stack). 90% of behemoth damage goes to killing imps and 10% to wounding imps.
i.e. the proportion of damage that kills and that wounds depends on single hit damage of the attacker vs creature health of the target.
with levels of wounds the creatures in a stack might die a little more realistically. for example, if behemoths attacked behemoths there would probably be severely wounded behemoths who would die even if imps attacked them. i.e. the damage is unevenly distributed among the behemoths.
but if imps attacked behemoths (same total damage to stack), no behemoth is likely to be seriously wounded, so imps attacking those behemoths again should cause no casualties (assuming that the 10% damage of the imp stack that goes to killing first creature in behemoth stack is not enough to kill behemoth).
this level of wound simulation may be unnecessary, though. just wanted to estimate how realistic the average wounds system might be (and accidentally wrote it and posted it).
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Polaris
Promising
Known Hero
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posted March 28, 2005 10:41 AM |
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I think this idea is too awkward and the benefit is too narrow. It's true, healing isn't very useful but there isn't any reason for it to be. After all, you get a resurrection spell and skill for both dead and undead creatures (in H4). It's unrealistic to expect healing to ever be worthwhile when you can resurrect without too much difficulty. And if healing is ever stronger than resurrection, then that's not right either (is it?). Which is why you shouldn't bother trying to make healing useful in the first place.
However, I will still analyze the system...
The following is the effective life each unit in a stack has under your system assuming no healing spells or effects are used:
Nth unit in a stack with K units having L base life would have
2*L*(K-N)/(K-1) effective life
(Healing effects would change the (K-N)/(K-1) factor)
If you compute the sum up to the Nth unit, you will find that, approximately 50% of the stack's life is in the first 30% of units and less than 10% of the stack's life is in the last 30% of units. (Use of healing spells would further increase the percentage of stack life in the top half of units) I could extrapolate a picture of how this would affect combat, but I think I would rather let you consider this and come to your own conclusion. But you have to promise me that you will seriously consider it and not just argue with me as soon as you finish reading my reply ;-)
One last thing to note is that the last 2 units always die at the same time... Which could be particularly problematic when facing a stack of 2. This didn't fit anywhere in my post, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
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gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted March 30, 2005 01:58 PM |
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re: Polaris
a short comment on healing vs resurrection:
i don't like it the way that one spell is better than the other in every aspect. if resurrection has the advantage of resurrecting dead creatures, then heal should, for example, have the advantage of healing more health points. heal is very much limited if we can only heal the top creature. so i guess i must be a little more interested in the topic.
about the formula:
if K is number of units in stack and L is unit base life then
2 * L / (K - 1)
should be constant for a certain creature and certain stack size.
which leaves us with
const * (K - N)
where N means that the health we get is health of N-th creature.
so, if we have a stack of 10 creatures, we get
N = 1 => const * 9
N = 2 => const * 8
N = 3 => const * 7
N = 4 => const * 6
N = 5 => const * 5
N = 6 => const * 4
N = 7 => const * 3
N = 8 => const * 2
N = 9 => const * 1
N = 0 => const * 0 (i.e. the last creature is already dead)
i feel that there must be a misunderstanding somewhere. what i would suspect is that maybe you described the wounds instead of 'effective life'? but where is the damage the stack has taken? the strict linearity of the formula is interesting, though.
under the rules that all hits of the attacker go to random target stack creatures, we should indeed get "linearly wounded" target stack, especially if attacker creature minimum damage is 1. i guess it should also assume that number of hits is much larger than number of target creatures or that the hits of attackers are "spread" over the target creatures according to the probability.
we could roll dice to create more damage distribution variery, etc, but i think it is arguable if this is the spirit of the game, etc.
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ok, enough of the details, it seems that if the number of creatures in stack and the number of hits tends to infinity then the wound formula tends to linearity.
this means that 1 creature dies when
damage_to_stack / number_of_creatures_in_stack >= creature_base_health
when 1 creature dies
damage_to_stack -= creature_base_health
in my opinion this result is bs because it favours large stacks too much.
on the other hand, all damage to first creature is unrealistic in another way (although not catastrophic as we have seen in the game).
maybe there could be a different solution.
assuming that creatures in stack stand in formation, so number of creatures that can attack or get damaged is not the whole stack but
const * sqrt(number_of_creatures_in_stack)
might alleviate the situation a little. if this is not enough, maybe some
%damage_to_first_creature
might be incorporated (this combination might not be an extremely elegant solution, though).
whatever, i have exceeded my time limit for posting today, no matter that imho a satisfactory solution was not found.
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Asmodean
Responsible
Supreme Hero
Heroine at the weekend.
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posted March 30, 2005 02:10 PM |
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Minor point - no stats 
What if the vamps aren't resurrecting dead comrades, but creating new ones. After all, those that are bitten by a vamp in myth generally become vamps.
Not exactly realistic when you have no of units killed vs no of vamps raised, but maybe they were just hungry and decided to drink all the blood and killed the enemy creature.
____________
To err is human, to arr is pirate.
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pitsu
Adventuring Hero
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posted March 30, 2005 05:34 PM |
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A link link to a Homm4 beta screen.
http://heroes.ag.ru/stuff/screens/exclusive/12.jpg
There was also one with wounded titans, but cannot find high res version of it anymore. Of course I have no idea in which form NWC "wounds" imagined and tested and why it was scrapped.
A few more thoughts:
If damage is distributed among many members of a stack, the wounds should not be removed in the end of battles. Or low HP critters should get more bonuses than they have now. Damage distribution would increase the durability of titans, dragons and behemoths a lot compared to other units.
Cure in H3 is not a weak spell. Its main use is not increasing HP, but removing ill conditions (i.e blind).
____________
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Polaris
Promising
Known Hero
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posted March 31, 2005 08:32 AM |
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re: Gerdash
Your reply sounded rather vague on what you understood my formula to mean, so I thought I would clarify it slightly.
Each progressive creature takes less and less damage to kill due to wounds. The formula I posted precisely describes how much less life the next creature has. I call effective life of the Nth creature the amount of damage required to kill the Nth creature in the stack. To find out how much damage it takes to kill all the creatures up to (and including) the Nth one, you simply sum the formula from N to K.
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Conceptually you can think of it this way. Once you deal damage greater than or equal to the effective life of the top unit, you kill it and the rest of the damage goes to the next unit (which has a greater wounds rating or lower effective life, depending on how you think of it). That next unit is now the top unit, and you repeat the process until you run out of damage or the stack dies.
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Part of the point was that the "wounds" stat does not really give the kind of behavior you would necessarily expect or desire (although maybe you do), and part of the point was that 50% spillover keeps stack sizes close to full until they die, which is *probably* not what you want. There is also a slippery slope with healing- if it becomes too effective then battles are prolonged until one side runs out of healing magic. That is pretty boring, but if healing were to be "good enough to use," isn't this situation unavoidable?
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gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted April 01, 2005 01:06 PM |
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for clarification, i don't think i am talking about individual wound levels anymore but rather about 2 numbers:
1. number of creatures that take damage (could be all creatures in stack or a portion of creatures in stack that is on the front line or something like that).
2. stack wounds.
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re: Pitsu
indeed, i forgot cure had a special effect that resurrection didn't have.
yes, we don't know if nwc wanted to just show the wounds of the top creature on this screen.
to compensate the bonus of creature having more health, we can just give it less health. sorry i havn't said it, but i have had the thought now and then. i think armor could count as a random damage absorber (per hit) and otherways pikeman and crusader might have comparable healths.
i don't think that crusader could possibly have more than twice the health of a normal warrior, assuming a normal warrior is also a somewhat strong human.
e.g.:
pikeman: 10 health, armor absorbs 0..10 per hit
crusader: 20 health (maybe 15), armor absorbs 5..50 per hit
as discussed before in at least one thread in this forum, myth dragons were usually considered to be the size of a cow. of course there were mythologies where dragons were the size of a mountain range, but my personal preference is having dragons that could be defeated by a human hero like in most such mythology (according to the impression i have got). so a dragon could have considerably lower health but such armor that only an excdeptionally hard or lucky or otherways special attack could penetrate it.
so, i think that making higher health more beneficial is actually a means of avoiding the need for inappropriately high health creatures. and top level creature having 50 times more health than 1st level creature is an artifact imho. many people might not agree with my opinion, but i hope this will not disturb the wounds discussion overmuch.
i see large stack benefits as the greater problem.
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Polaris:
the further clarification was extremely helpful. i wouldn't really use the word 'vague' for how i understood your formula, but would rather say that i went in the wrong direction altogether.
my formula in my previous post was made with too much haste, and is nonsense. i had some time (although not too long, so it's half-way) to think it over, and have some plans to try it with probabilities. so far i have even started to doubt in the linearity of the hopefully resulting formula (it's amazing how fast i have forgotten elementary school math).
i am somewhat afraid that this system won't describe the difference between behemoth's deadly attacks and imp's scratching attacks, but i guess it might be a spot to start.
[edit]
i assumed i had a stack of 5 creatures and the stack got single creature attacks (if multiple creatures had attacked the stack it would just have been many single hits).
so the probability one hit hits one specific creature is
p=1/5=0.2
and the probability that the hit doesn't hit the specific creature is
q=1-p=0.8
[edit]
probability of unrelated events is multiplied. e.g. when tossing a coin
P_heads=0.5
P_tails=1-P_heads=1-0.5=0.5
probability to get heads twice is
P_heads*P_heads=0.5*0.5=0.25
probability to get heads then tails is
P_heads*P_tails=0.5*(1-0.5)=0.25
[/edit]
if the number of hits that the creature stack gets is Hs and we want to calculate the probability P_Hc that a creature in stack got hit Hc times
P_Hc = p^(Hc) * q^(Hs - Hc) * B
where B is number of all combinations (if i understand correcly, this should be called permutations. whatever, it just means number of possible orders of e.g. 1 and 0) of Hc and (Hs - Hc).
e.g. Hs = 2: 00,01,10,11
has 2 orders containing '1' 1 times, this means that the creatures that got hit once is sum of the creatures that got hit by the first hit only and of those who got hit by the second hit only.
P_Hc means probability that a creature in stack has been hit Hc times.
according to the above formula i calculated
P_Hc = (P_Hs, ..., P_0) and the results are given in the same order.
results:
Hs = 3
0.008
0.096
0.384
0.512
Hs = 4
0.0016
0.0256
0.1536
0.4096
0.4096
Hs = 5
0.00032
0.0064
0.0512
0.2048
0.4096
0.32768
it doesn't look linear, looks more like some kind of bell shaped curve or to me, especially at Hs = 5.
btw i didn't do more than Hs = 5 just because i don't know a formula for getting number of n-digit binary numbers that contain '1' m times. if someone has accidentally something to do with discrete math atm and can get the formula, i think i would be interested to calculate with higher numbers of Hs.
[/edit]
Moderator's note:This topic has been closed, as it refers to an older version of the game. To discuss Heroes 3, please go to Library Of Enlightenment, to discuss Heroes 4, please go to War Room Of Axeoth, to discuss Heroes 5, go to Temple Of Ashan.
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