tRoS Combat simulator

[Brian Leybourne]

9000 lines, huh...

Brian, you da man...

I played with the last one you sent me for about half an hour yesterday just fighting myself...it was great fun.

Jake

Yeah, but approx 6,500 of those are the hit tables :-)

After I got armour, helms and shields sussed out last night, I had my first armored vs unarmored combat. Man, was it fun.

Geralt had a 12 die CP, 2-handed longsword and nothing else.
Stefan had an 8 die CP, 1-handed longsword, full helm, large shield, plate on his torso, and leather sleeves and leggings.
They both had 5 for everything else

It was actually quite a long fight, and really interesting. When I started I thought the 4 die CP advantage would be the decider, but it was actually really hard as Geralt, because I had to assign enough dice to get through the armour (and forget attacking the torso or head, pretty much) but at the same time keep enough back for a defense just in case. Geralt/I felt very naked against such an armoured opponent. Basically, Geralt kept hitting very minorly, usually doing 0 damage attacks. He was trying to be careful that Stefan never had the opportunity to take initiative because if his die were low at that point it was good night. Stefan could afford to be a little more of a risk taker, because the armour and shield were damn good protection. Having a TN of 5 for blocking doesn't hurt either.

Partial Evasion and Full Evasion/Beat were Geralts friends, I can tell you!

Eventually, Geralt won. He had been chipping away at Stefan for ages with very little headway (Stefan had a Blood Loss of about 6 but kept making his blood rolls) and so Geralt went wild with a big 10 die cut to the upper legs (saving 2 for a 2-die full evasion and hoping that would be enough if it came to that) and Stefan botched his 6 die parry. The resulting wound (against leather only) gave Stefan 7 pain, which meant he had a CP of 1 from then on :-) It still took another 4 full combat rounds for Geralt to hack his way through the armour and bring Stefan down, but it was basically unopposed slaughter, and quite fun :-)

I have to say, it was a really stressful feeling going through that combat, being afraid  of losing initiative and facing steel with no protection. This is one cool combat system.

Brian.

[Lance D. Allen]

Neat. Sounds like some good fixes. (had some trouble the first couple of combats where I didn't notice the dice allocation choice on the attack...) Can't wait to try it all out..

As for feedback... Sorry, been out of the loop lately. Screwy work hours and some problems at home have been taking up free time. But hey, did a few combats, and noticed a few problems. Should I post those problems here, or should I just e-mail them to you? I'll e-mail you either way, but what I want to know is if feedback should be posted so that others know what has been suggested already, or.. whatever.

[Brian Leybourne]

I'm happy for issues to be posted here if you like, that way we can discuss them etc and others can see what's been discussed/fixed.

[Brian Leybourne]

Here's your feedback from your email, with my comments.

>        First off, Counter. Most people don't do this, so it's not something
>you notice right away, but just to check the system, I did a full out counter
>in defense from a full out attack, all dice. I gained 3 from it, but it
>counted the CP as empty, and therefore ended the round, and THEN refreshed
>the dice pools, adding the 3 CP bonus then. This is, if I remember correctly
>when I posed this question to Jake, incorrect. If both opponents exhaust
>their CPs but one gains bonus dice (and it is not the 2nd exchange of the
>round) then he will gain an unopposed attack using those bonus dice. Not
>absolutely sure how you've got it coded, but it seems to me that simply
>moving the line which adds the bonus dice from the counter to a position
>prior to the line that checks for empty CP ought to fix the problem.

Yup, I missed that, easy enough to fix. It's presumably also going to be the case with block open and strike, which also gives bonus dice, so I'll make that change too. Well spotted.

As an aside, most people don't do counters? I do them all the time, it's a bloody good maneuver (although admittedly, not being able to pick where your counter goes can be frustrating if it heads towards their breastplate etc).

>        Secondly, I either missed any rules declaring Evasion to have an
>activation cost, or this is a mistake. I'm not saying that it *is* a mistake,
>as I've managed to make a fool of myself by missing the obvious before, but
>if I am correct.. it's an issue which needs addressing.

Hmm.. are you talking about evasive attack, or full/partial/duck&weave evasion? Evasive attack does have an activation cost. The three dodges don't, can you give me an example of where it gave you an activation cost, because it shouldn't have. The only situation I can think of where you might have got that cost is if you had declared an aggressive stance, then thrown a white die and evaded the other guys attack, that would give you a +2 activation cost for being in the wrong stance.

>        Thirdly, just for my preference, I would like to see the actual number
>inputted when calculating damage.

Which number? It gives you the margin of success, but caps it at 5 because the table doesn't go any higher than that (a margin of 5 is indentical to a margin of 15 in tRoS). That margin is after all modifiers strength, dr, toughness, armour.

>        Fourth, though this is a minor concern, the ability to use Accuracy
>would be nice.

Sorry, that one goes in the too hard basket. I would have to look up the table several times (with the ability to shift up/down by two points, that's as many as 5 possibilities on some of the tables), and show you the results of all possible wounds, then allow you to pick etc. No, that one wont be happening, sorry. It's really something that only works in "real  play" when you have the book in front of you.

>P.S. Playing around while writing this e-mail, I discovered a really, really
>odd bug! Stefan did a Duck and Weave, and Geralt declared a feint and
>thrust... Then when I was clicking to determine how many dice to spend, I hit
>no upper limit. I eventually hit with 24 24 extra dice for 29 total. I got 13
>successes to 3, for a margin of... 5. Then Stefan did not die. It just went
>straight to the next round of combat, where Geralt's CP is -45, but still
>gives me the option to attack with 1 die (or -45 dice). I opt to roll -45
>dice, and it doesn't allow Stefan to defend (despite having a full combat
>pool of 10). It rolls a single die, and fails, so Stefan still isn't
>scratched.

That one has been fixed. There was a bug where if you declared a maneuver, and only had one die available to assign to it, the die counter would allow you to put in any number you wanted. This is actually a minor flaw in the counter component where it screws up if the MaxValue and the MinValue of the component are the same (both 1, in this case). Tricky to get around without a lot of recoding in a lot of places, but it was incidentally fixed through fixing another issue - the MinValue of all die counters is now 0 (and it wont work if you don't change it from zero, so it avoids the problem of accidentally clicking on a maneuver before you assign the number of dice you want), and as a side bonus of that, the lowest MaxValue a counter can end up with is 1, while it's MinValue is always 0, so the bug with them being the same is avoided.

The 13-to-3 margin was 5 because that's as high as your margin can get, any higher is no different. The other screwy bits would have been because it can't handle a negative combat pool (in the normal course of events it can't get negative). Shouldn't be a problem now with the fix described above.

v0.99 is ready, but I'll do a 0.99b with that counter fix in there and send it off.

Brian.

[Brian Leybourne]

Actually, on top of the 45 die issue, you were right that there was a (second) problem with feint-to-thrust. I forgot to change the "attacktype" variable from a cut (1) to a thrust (2) when doing a feint to thrust, so when it went to the damage tables, it was looking in the cut table for a thrust location, and because there isn't one (cut are only 1-7 and thrust only 8-14) it was returning nothing, that's why in your example Stefan was unharmed by the margin 5 cut-becomes-thrust attack.

Well done. It's stuff like that that I need/want playtesters for.

Brian.

[Lance D. Allen]

As an aside, most people don't do counters? I do them all the time, it's a bloody good maneuver (although admittedly, not being able to pick where your counter goes can be frustrating if it heads towards their breastplate etc).

Sorry. To clarify, most people do not do a full out (all dice) counter on the first move of combat, or do a full-out (all dice) attack, either. Counters are very useful, so they get used often, just not as described.


Evasion & Evasive Attack: Disregard, my mistake.

Which number? It gives you the margin of success, but caps it at 5 because the table doesn't go any higher than that (a margin of 5 is indentical to a margin of 15 in tRoS). That margin is after all modifiers strength, dr, toughness, armour.

All numbers. Damage is calculated by the success margin, +DR (ST+Weapon DR) - TO -AV = Damage Level. I'd rather, just for my own sake, see it calculated out, like so:

Geralt hits Stefan with a damage level (successes(2) + DR(ST(5) +2= 7) minus toughness(5) and armour(0)) of 4...

As I said, this is just personal preference, but I'd like to see it included.

Accuracy: Aww...

Odd bug fixed: Excellent. Can't wait to see the updated version.

[Brian Leybourne]

Progress report:

I have added a new checkbox beside "show die rolls" called "show damage calculation", since that was asked for. When checked, it will break down successes, damage rating, toughness and armour for each successful strike. Remember that any result above 5 is lowered to 5 though.

I have finished the major reworking I had to do with activation costs (my bad - I forgot that different weapons might have different activation costs for the same maneuvers, so I had hard coded them, such as 2 for counter etc). That took a lot of work, but now allows me to add some new weapons (pole axe and maul probably today, since they're the same length as the longsword). This work also means it's going to be easier to incorporate range, so I'll work on that over the weekend, and then I'll be able to add longer and shorter weapons.

I'm still not convinced about pugilism or grappling though. They probably wont make it, although we'll see.

Almost all the maneuvers from the book are in there now. I'm having problems with how to implement Simultaneous Block/Strike, but I'll work that out. One question for Jake though - with a bashing attack, the description (and common sense) seems to indicate swung attacks (i.e. to the same locations as cutting) but the bash tables have all of the thrust locations as well. What's the story? Can you swing a bashing weapon at any location I-XIV or only to the swing locations I-VII?

Brian.

[Jake Norwood]

Bash thrusts are for fists, jabs with the staff, etc.

Jake

[Brian Leybourne]

Bash thrusts are for fists, jabs with the staff, etc.

Jake

OK, so in terms of the "available maneuvers for different weapons" tables, those count as thrusting attacks, not bashing attacks, they just roll on the bash table instead of the piercing one?

In other words, if a weapon has Bash (0) and thrust (1) then a bash thrust has an activation cost of 1, right?

[Jake Norwood]

yup

[Brian Leybourne]

Cool, that saves me a lot of backtracking :-)

[Brian Leybourne]

Well, there's good news and there's bad news...

Actually, it's all bad. I would tell you just how bad, but swearing in the forums will probably get me kicked. My car was broken into this morning, and my laptop was stolen. On it was the only copy of the source code for the combat simulator. Yes, I have a backup, but it's a week old and pretty much the entire program was done in the last week (except the interface and the cut tables), so for all intents and purposes, it's gone.

Yes, I will do it again, from scratch, but don't expect it really soon. I'm pretty discouraged at doing the same thing over, and besides, I'll have to wait until insurance comes through and I get my laptop replaced.

In the meantime, luckily the program was 99% done. I didn't get around to finishing range, but there are a few weapon options in there (Maul, Poleaxe and Longsword one or two handed), shields, armour, all the maneuvers except Toss, etc etc. In other words, it's quite usable and I think pretty good at simulating combat in tRoS as long as those are your weapons of choice. For a while at least, you'll have to make do with it anyway :-) I have suggested to Jacob that he throw it up on the page as is.

Sorry guys, totally out of my control. You wouldn't believe the day I have had, dealing with two insurance companies (car and contents), the police, the glass company, the locksmith (had to get my house locks all changed because he took my keys as well), cancelling all my credit cards (wallet), my cellphone, etc etc. Pretty fuc*ing bad day, as days go. To be honest, the *contents* of my laptop is the thing that pis*es me off the most, everything else is just stuff, and can be replaced, but on there I had the combat sim (a couple of weeks of really hard work, I took unpaid days off work to develop that thing!), all the writings for my 2 RPG campaigns (including NPC writeups and many many maps painstakingly drawn in CC2), some other software I was developing on the side, all the prep work I did over three weeks for a project that's starting soon. Some of it is backed up, but a lot of it isn't and I'm just gutted.

Anyway, rant over. I hope you all download the combat sim and give it a try. There's a lot of love gone into it and it'll be at least a little while before I go there again.

Brian.

[Lance D. Allen]

Man, that blows goats, Rocky.

Well, thanks for your efforts, Brian. I personally appreciated them. Sorry I wasn't respondent with the updated vers. but so far, in my few attempts to tweak the system, I've found nothing wrong with it.

[Mokkurkalfe]

Oy, Brian!

I found something suspicious while fooling around with the simulator.
Both guys have a long sword and small shield, but no armour. When one guy whas hit in zone III, the damage calculation said that he had armour 6. Is that the shield?

[Brian Leybourne]

Oy, Brian!

I found something suspicious while fooling around with the simulator.
Both guys have a long sword and small shield, but no armour. When one guy whas hit in zone III, the damage calculation said that he had armour 6. Is that the shield?

Yup. Shields are right from the rules, and I worked out the sizes the shield could cover using the guidelines in the book:

Buckler: AV4, covers left arm only (Zones 7 and 14)
Small Shield: AV6, covers left arm (7 and 14) and side (3) and chest (10)
Large shield (actually uses stats for medium shield in book): AV8, covers everything above, plus zones 11 and 4 (upper chest, left shoulder).

I don't have the code anymore, but I'm 99% sure that's the areas I had shields cover. Eventually I was going to add a tower shield also (large shield from book) with AV10 and covering a large chunk of the body - very tricky to get through.