Edit: The main weave of conversation follows the outline in my second post and explains the details of 3 main points. If you don't feel up to hacking the walls of text that is just fine. In between those posts there is much conversation so feel free to join in.
So, lets talk about weapon mechanics! This thread is not just for me to ramble on. If you see a discrepancy, feel that I am missing something or just have something to add, speak up! The mission of this thread as stated here is: to help us as players teach each other how realistic weapons function and most importantly, ask each other how realistic we want the weapons to be in our games.
To be perfectly clear this thread is about how weapons work. Later on we can start a master list of each weapon we would like to see and the particulars of each.
With the plans for a modular unit design system in the works its apparent that we as players are going to have a lot of choices to pick from. Its easy to provide the developers with a list of weapons that you would like to see in game. But first you must ask yourself if you really want a gigantic selection of choices, most of which a highly redundant. In a statistical sense does it really matter if the developers include katanas, zwiehanders and kopeshi if all of them just end up as Swords with a varying attack strength?
In a word, yes. All of those might be swords in that they share the features of sharp edge and a handgrip. But each weapon has a unique identity that makes it perform differently in combat. If you take the time to include these differences what you end up with is a much more realistic game with choices that affect your gameplay rather than being simply cosmetic. This is what most people would call adding depth to the game. To do this you do not have to detail every single weapon down to the last inch. Instead you must understand and quantify the mechanics that make each weapon work the way it does in real life and should in a computerized setting. If I arm my soldiers with halberds I want that to mean something. Halberds should not be just another spear with a +2 bonus against horses.
Well I think we're getting a little off-topic here. I'd love to hear more of what people think about how warfare and tactics should be implemented into this game in a way that's practical and enjoyable.
Whats up? Welcome to the convo.
Depends on what horsemen, and what pikemen. Pikemen will generaly beat cavalry in a head on fight for the same reason we don't hammer upside down nails with our hands. Its just a stupid idea to run into a wall of sharp objects. Therefore the cavalry rarely even TRY and the pikemen win by default. The equipment carried by each will have a huge effect on the outcome of any battle. But what really decides who wins this scenario is how disciplined they are.
Lets say those hellhounds had boiling hot blood. If you wound them with anything sharp this blood can spurt out and burn you. Generally speaking the wounds dealt by crushing weapons don't bleed externally. Mace and hammers can't cut arteries and rarely even break the skin, so you can use them against hellhounds without needing to worry about getting burnt. Right there is your mechanical advantage. If you don't differenciate between cutting and crushing then there would be no difference between halberds at maces and no way to avoid getting burnt.
As for the second question. No armour of course, it lets you run away faster.
What kind of game involving realistic swords and maces has cute graphics? Any little sister worthy of the title would run screaming from Age of Conan. In any case, would YOU have considered those same differences before picking up this game? The people who are willing to learn and understand the system behind the game are the same people who will enjoy playing under that system. Our challenge is to make the game as intuitive as possible so that people can understand how it works even if they don't have the patience to learn the numbers in the background.
This is only a problem if our realistic logic can't make sense of your "realistic mechanics". We run into things that the game doesn't explain enough so we fall back on real world logic to try to make sense of them. If real world logic fails us as well then we realise more and more that were are playing a game and the reality built into it is really just weak and shallow.
Its called breaking immersion.
I appreciate the reply, Tamren, but allow me to clear up what I was trying to say in that post.
In my example of horsemen and pikemen, I am making the case that different players subscribe to different realities. Naturally, you can resolve this single situation by saying pikemen win, but that fails to address the point of the example: that someone else may apply their own reasoning and knowledge to the situation and say the horsemen should win.
A better example might be longbows attacking heavy armor. Depending on who you ask, people will tell you that a longbow can easily penetrate heavy armor or that it cannot. Some people believe English archers were able to defeat French knights at Agincourt because of the longbow, others say it was mud. Because there are different realities (longbows vs. mud), it is completely possible that what you whole-heartedly believe in (let's say you believe in longbows) turns out to be different from what the devs believed in (let's say mud).
So you initiate a battle against the computer's heavily armored soldiers with your longbowmen and... as it turns out, you fail to even scratch them turn after turn until they bulldoze your archers in melee. This would have
A. caused the tactics in this game to degenerate to memorization of counter tables.
B. caused you to feel cheated, lost when you wholeheartedly believed you should have won.
C. broken immersion because the game disagreed with your version of reality.
In any case, would YOU have considered those same differences before picking up this game?
I would have, but that doesn't mean anything because I'm not the only type of person playing the game. My little sister example is to construct a situation where someone plays the game for unrelated reason X, and then gets repulsed by a nonsensical combat system.
The people who are willing to learn and understand the system behind the game are the same people who will enjoy playing under that system.
Now this is where transparency comes in. What if this system that you are proposing people learn is unlearnable for some of those who would otherwise enjoy the game (little sister example)? What if, actually, this system depended completely on subjective factors such that nobody could learn what's going on without rote memorization (longbow vs. mud example)?
The challenge, I would reiterate, is not to make the rules of the game intuitive. Intuitive is fine, but transparent and simple are what will make or break the game. Let's make another chess analogy.
How angry would this make you...
We're sitting down playing chess, you move a rook onto the same vertical line as my bishop to capture my bishop next turn.
I take my bishop, move him in a straight, not diagonal line, onto your rook and captures it.
Your first reaction is probably "Bishops can only move diagonally! That's cheating!"
I turn around to the referee and asks him whether that's cheating.
The referee mulls it over in his mind and says it's fair. The reasoning he gives for that ruling is "everybody knows bishops are smart. Vitruviansquid's bishop obviously was able to see the rook moving in a straight line and learned to imitate that. So Vitruviansquid's bishops can now move straight as well as diagonally."
To make something intuitive is, in actuality, an incredibly tricky business. Intuition only works if it is possible to predict what players will assume. As I have shown, it is impossible in this game to predict what players will assume or even if they will have assumptions. Just as you in the chess game would not assume pieces can learn to move differently, not everyone will assume things like scale armor was designed to negate slashing actions or silk armor was used to pull out arrowheads.
The core thing I'm trying to state is related to this quote:
Our challenge is to make the game as intuitive as possible so that people can understand how it works even if they don't have the patience to learn the numbers in the background.
Why not simply let people understand how the game works because it's simple to learn?
Im sorry but I still don't quite understand what you are getting at. Keep trying thought, we'll land on it eventually.
There are many flavours of reality but I prefer the one called "common sense".
Both are wrong answers, what they should have said is: "What longbows and what heavy armour?"
This situation could only occur if someone makes a rule that states "Heavy armour is immune to missiles". The game I have detailed here not based on rules, it is based on realism. Your going to have to wait till "chapter" 3 to find out what that means.
Also for future reference, "can longbowmen defeat mounted knights wearing plate armour, yes or no?" is a trick question. The answer is shoot the horse.
The only type of person who enjoys any game is someone who THINKS they would enjoy it and makes the effort to find out for sure. I can only repeat what I said earlier: "The people who are willing to learn and understand the system behind the game are the same people who will enjoy playing under that system." If you little sister is not willing to make that investment then she will never enjoy this game and won't play it, its as simple as that.
But it is possible. Have you read section 2 where I detailed the properties of crushing weapons? That knowledge is intuitive to the topic at hand because if I ever mention hammers, maces or just crushing/smashing/flattening in general then you will immediatly realise what I am talking about. If I say "the orcs carry warhammers" then I can safely be certain that all of you will assume that they are mundane hammers unless I give some clue otherwise.
./snicker Brilliant!
There are many flavours of reality but I prefer the one called "common sense". You've failed to consider the possibility that you can believe one thing and the devs can believe something different entirely. Even if you were always right, the devs may be wrong.
You've failed to consider the possibility that you can believe one thing and the devs can believe something different entirely. Even if you were always right, the devs may be wrong.
What he really failed to consider is that "common sense" is an egregious misnomer; it's one of most uncommon resources on the planet.
Ah, but what devs? The only developers reading this are the people from Stardock as far as I know. There is no game being developed here, I am both the developer and the co-player. When you walked into this thread you crossed the line between reality and reality as described by me. This mockup of a game is realistic in that I have set boundaries and given you the information you need to understand what goes on within those boundaries. If you don't understand something then there is a problem that I have to fix by adding yet more information.
Its not rare per se. Its just that we rarely choose to use it.
But even then we do use it all the time. Lets say I created a game tommorow and wrote "destructible enviroment" on the box. When you get into the game and punch a window, what do you think is going to happen? Common sense would dictate that the window shatters into pieces right? Now it is perfectly possible that when you break the window you find out that the window is really A Magic Mushroom In Disguise That Just Exploded In Your Face. But if that happens I would lay off the LSD.
How many times are you guys going to make me spit water all over my keyboard?! I need to stop drinking while reading these forums...
Sorry about the lack of action but without all this info the rest of the battle is going to seem like a big pile of Deus Ex Machina. After reading how I described the unit interface when we were talking about the winter wolves you should have a good idea of how it looks and works. Instead of examining each new unit in detail I can skip to the most relevent points.--The ice warriors were created by magic so they have an extra tab on the unit interface detailing the spell that gave them a semblance of life. The animate warrior spell conjures a spirit of magic in the shape of the caster. The spirit then forms a body for itself out of any material on hand. If this battlefield were a grass field instead of a frozen lake there would have been much ripping of sod and we would have ended up facing turf warriors instead. Destroying this body releases the spirit which dissipates into its component magic.Examining the stats you find nothing extraordinary. Each warrior is slightly stronger than a normal human and the horde is armed with a mismatched jumble of crude ice weapons. The combat box has a few significant points: 1. Animated: The "soul" of this unit is a magical spirit of some description. This trait comes with a whole slew of pros and cons. A few for example: Animated warriors don't benefit from positive morale but they don't suffer any penalties either. They require no food or pay and no magical upkeep if you conjure them for a single battle. Spells that dispel or disrupt magic can destroy them outright. 2. Lesser Ice form: In a nutshell the ice warriors inhabit bodies made of magical ice. This ice won't melt from ambient heat but otherwise behaves exactly as you would expect. This also applies to thier weapons, but very few of the actually carry any, most are armed only with fists. 3. Lesser Regeneration: Lesser regeneration allows the slow healing of wounds but it will not replace missing parts. If you get your arm cut off, it will stop bleeding very quickly but will not grow back.For us this is bad. Lesser regeneration means that we have to put them down for good, or they will continue to be a threat. Luckily for us the ice warriors have a key weakness. They are made of ice and in game speak that counts as crystal armour. Crystal armour is strong against all weapons but hits that overwhelm its material strength will weaken or break the material. The best weapons to do this with are those that crush, mass energy transfer remember?The bolt throwers we have deployed are powerful enough to destroy the ice warriors by the dozen but they fire very slowly and once the ice warriors reach them they will be forced to pack up and retreat through the portal. Our guards are so strong that arming them with hammers at this point would have little effect but they are not numerous enough to hold back the tide. We will have to think of something else, perhaps Caprice and her magic?-- Lets have a look at our engineers. The good news is that the siege engineers have a couple special abilities that will be of great help: 1. Fortify: The engineers are good at creating defensive emplacements using whatever is at hand. This ability also allows them to demolish such fortifications in a quick and efficient manner. Fortification also covers the setting of traps using the terrain as a base. 2. Siege Gunnery: Allows the unit to operate projectile siege engines. This includes enemy siege engines that you have captured if such a situation ever occurs. 3. Farsight (Item): Farsight is the ability to see farther than "normal " human vision. The items in this case are small telescopes the engineers carry. Among other things this allows them to be more accurate with siege engines at long range.The bad news is that the battlefield is not very acommodating for siege warfare. Given enough time these men could build you an ice castle but the tools they have on hand are too slow for the task. There is no convenient terrain or high ground to work off of. The ice underfoot is a problem as well, the men can't move around as quickly and whenever the bolt throwers are fired they skid backwards and must be realigned for each shot.The engineers themselves are armed to a high standard and each could hold his own against 10 or more ice warriors. Each man wears a full set of leather armour under a chainmail shirt and articulated plate greaves which reach just past the knee. Each carries an ax and hammer on opposite belt hooks, a coil of rope and packs of tools that vary in size.Deploying these engineers is going to be a challenge. There is no castle for them to siege, and no castle for them to defend against the approaching army. The wagons full of ammo and the bolt throwers can not be moved anywhere without serious effort and there is no terrain advantage to keep them safe. To use the engineers to fullest effect we need fortifications. The engineers can build them but harvesting ice would take far too long. There must be something else available that we can use...--Taking a close look at the massive ice elementals reveals some scary information. The abstracted attack rating is listed as the infinity symbol. The reasoning is simple enough, if the elemental hits something, it dies. Calculating the exact level of overkill is pointless, so the computer doesn't even try. For armour they are listed as having 50 (crystal). This is a key weakness that we can exploit. As well the elementals have some unique properties: 1. Greater Ice form: Same as above only the ice is stronger in a magical sense instead of being plain ice. 2. Lesser Ice Meld: Melding is the ability to sink part of yourself into an object or piece of terrain. The lesser form of this ability puts a limit on how far you can do this. Melding also allows "constructs" to repair themselves using materials in the enviroment but again the amount of mass they can regain is limited. 3. Elemental Regeneration: Elementals don't "heal" per se, but they can repair themselves by reforming lost bits. This costs mass, if the ice elemental were to lose a leg, it could reform that leg but the elemental as a whole would become smaller.Its fortunate for us that the elementals do not have greater melding. If they did they could simply sink into the frozen lake and attack us from below. As it is we have plenty to be worried about. Those elementals will take quite a while to reach us but once they do we will have little choice but to retreat unless we can take them out of action. Given that there is plenty of ice around we will have to find some way to deliver the deathblow to these behemoths before they can repair themselves to full strength. They are in thier own element and we must take away that advantage.--One thing we didn't examine in detail so far was the honour guard unit. The unit interface reveals nothing incredibly exotic about them. These are simply very experienced swordsmen armed and armoured to the teeth with powerful magic. They do have some rare abilities of note: 1. Fearless: Fearless indicates this unit is utterly immune to the effects of fear. Nothing mundane will scare them and magical fear effects or spells will have no effect whatsoever. This is different from fear immunity which only protects against non-magical fear. 2. Loyalty: This is a trait that can only develop with long service in your name. These men have complete faith in thier commander and will do anything he asks without question up to and including fighting to the death. Soldiers of this caliber are a rare breed and should never be wasted. 3. Weapon Mastery: These men have been training with greatswords from the very beginning, they know every facet of the weapon in and out and how best to apply this knowledge.Fearless is perhaps an understatement. These are men who will punch Cthulhu in the face.
The spell that you buffed them with is still a mystery to you. Luckily the spell effects part of the unit interface explains the effects in detail. Should a member of the honour guard be negated as a fighting force either through death, unconciousness, incapacitation or by leaving the battlefield by any means, a magical replacement will arrive in fire. The replacement is physically identical in every way to the original and the construct is possessed by the spirit of one of the soldiers predecessors, or in the case of death the late soldier himself. Should the replacement construct be killed in combat then another one will apppear to replace it, this can happen up to 300 times. In other words, 307 of our faux spartans have to die here before the enemy can declare victory.
Being an army general type of channeler my spells focus on two areas. One side of the spectrum is the buffing of large amounts of troops to a higher standard. The other is buffing small numbers of elite troops in creative ways to help them deal with being heavily outnumbered. This spell is about as far up that end of the spectrum as you can get, and you could have picked few better under the previous circumstances.
However things have changed since then. I would very much like to keep the original 7 guards alive but the spell is somewhat random in how the replacements arrive and how quickly. If we retreated off the field we would get 7 clones, but they probably wouldn't arrive at the same time and we can't count on them to be in the same location either. Our only choice is to send them into combat and pull them out of the fire somehow if things go wrong.--Last on the list is Caprice. Hero level pyromancers are a powerful force on the battlefield, and pyromancy is not always destructive. Hero level engineers are capable of turning any battlefield into a deathtrap and this one is no exception. In this example Caprice is the longest serving hero in my army, and also the most powerful.
Caprice herself is heavy armoured which somewhat is unusual for pyromancers and engineers alike. Her robes are composed primarily of maille layered over cloth, with sections of plate armour connected by a network of chains. It looks rather heavy but close inspection reveals that the robe is fluttering in the wind just as much as her cloak. The staff she carries is highly magical, as well as being a focusing aid for fire magic it grants her the land shaping ability. Shaping is a bit like melding and allows the user to change the shape of objects, in this case terrain. Quite a handy power for an engineer. The only other item of interest is her crossbow. It is rather large but she carries it without obvious effort. Instead of loading one bolt at a time there is a box magazine mounted on top, several more hang at her belt. Most tellingly each magazine has warning stripes painted onto it. There doesn't seem to be any way to recock the bowstring except by hand, and there are 3 of them.
Its apparent that she can hold her own in combat but her real contribution to this battle is how she can shape the battlefield to benefit us. The amount of magic she can throw around is frightening but in the end limited. Proper investment of this power will play a big part in deciding who wins the day.
--
Next up, the fighting!
nice description! I hope the battles will feel like this in game. Playing GalCiv2 I reflect on games and the stories of how events turned out are quite exciting and interesting at least in my head they are!
@Vitruvian_Squid: : For the record, historically long bows caused the downfall of both calvery and heavy armor. If somebody said that a long bow cannot penetrate heavy armor, either they are just wrong or they mean armor suitable for a tank that cannot be worn by normal humans without some sort of special support (like a steam engine or magic).
Sources:
The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare (page 81-82)
By Trevor Nevitt Dupuy
Published by Da Capo Press, 1990
ISBN 0306803844
Imagination is what really draws us into games and the little details are the fuel. I mentioned that the engineers each have a coil of rope. Imagine what they could do with that. Rappel down a wall to escape a burning tower. Replace the bowstring on a damaged bolt thrower. Rig a tent with pages torn from a giant book...
As with all history that is debatable but it does fit with what we know. Plate armour is extremely resistant to missiles despite what hollywood might have you think. The vulnerable horse is what really made it impractical.
EDIT: The two of them combined I mean.
You're entirely right that longbows can penetrate armor, though. But this is usually at a fairly close range, in a way it was not traditionally applied on the battlefield (ever?).
And in the argument Knights vs. Bows, it's all about shooting the horse. Once a knight is on the ground, he's incredibly sluggish. By the end of the era that truly featured those heavy armors that could withstand the latest hot longbow on the market, a knight had become completely useless once he was tipped over, since he couldn't get up by himself.
need to get out the concussion blasts to knock those pesky guys over!
Will it be posible for the engineers to be able to do this in game? I mean if they need a tent and have rope, to be able to do that?
Will an axeman be able to pick up a bow and use it in the middle of battle if you choose?
I do not write code so I do not know if adding things like an archer tosses his bow on the ground and picks up a spear as the cavelry charges his position is possible.
There is nothing that makes it IMpossible but the amount of programming you have to is immense. Its a bit easier if you do it in a building block sort of way. Rope + Large Sheet shaped object = tent/hammock/flag/cloak/banner etc. A rope could be anything from vines to woven hair. The sheet shaped object could be paper, bedsheets, a giant leaf, whatever is on hand. Stranded 2 is a good example of this kind of system, its a desert survival game that has you building tents and houses out of leaves and vines and stuff. Its a nice system to have in theory but it may prove impractical for a war game.
Will we be able to do this in Elemental? Probably not. (thought if the devs are reading this, it would be totally awesome). In the mock battle I have set up here you will see a bit of it. Everything on the battlefield including the terrain can be moved and manipulated, in theory at least. What the object is determines what you can do with it. So you could destroy the ice elementals, chop them into bits and make an igloo or something. The only limit is how many permutations you have the patience to program into the system. Since I don't have to do any programming here I can put in as many as I like. But they do still have to make sense.
I don't mean to be the forum troll, but I don't want to leave any misconceptions. (hopefully this is adding to any balancing that stardock is working upon right now)
The book I quoted before pointed out that the longbow caused the downfall because a peasant without expensive metal and trained horse could still take down a mounted knight without having to come within range of a lance. It devestated french knights during the 30-years war, and after that the french stopped relying heavily on armored mounted knights. Of course horses are better than foot troops for pretty much anything, but horses -started- their decline because of the longbow. I mean, bow or gun, a horse can close 20-yards pretty quickly.
Bows for warfare tend to be much more powerful, with the most powerful bows being the English longbow and the African elephant bow, both of which topped the 900 N (200-pound) at 80 cm (32 inches) mark. Many men in medieval England were capable of shooting bows from 670–900 N (150–200 pounds) — deformed skeletons of archers have been studied, revealing spur like growths on their bones where the over-developed muscles pulled.
You take a small wooden shaft shapened to a point with metal tip coated in bee's wax (they did that in england for some reason) and shoot it at an eight inch sheet of industrial iron at 700 N from 5 yards (not a hard target from that distance, but still well outside the range of any spear), you'll find what happens. We did a test like that at my high school, and the metal was totally broken through.
This video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRXwk4Kdbic demonstrates the point. I believe they were not shooting the bows at more than 500 N, but I guess only really the english pull that off on a wide-spread basis. I think the above video is basing off of regular archers as well, rather than specilized yeomen.
The test we had at school cheated a little because I think we had heavier arrows than what most archers used, but that isn't the point.
Historical science is iffy by nature. For example it could be argued that lead caused the downfall of the Roman empire. It fits with the evidence, lead is toxic to humans and the Romans used it for nearly everything. Lead drinking pipes leeched into the water, wine was boiled in lead pots, heck they even used lead oxide (rust) powder as makeup. Some historians point to evidence that the higher classes of roman society were having difficulty with procreation and the higher you go on the pecking order the crazier people tended to get. Nero for example.
But all that is speculation and the downfall of the Roman empire was a combination of many factors, lead being one possible component of many.
The deformed skeleton evidence is often quoted but its a tossup as to what actually caused it. The muscle theory is one. The bones deforming in strange ways to support the tremendous stress is another. The latest one I have read about actually has to do with the poor nutrition that people had to live with back then. Like with the Romans I would guess that it was a mix of all of those to some degree.
The one biggest flaw with every single anti armour test I have seen is that the bows are shooting into plates of metal that are flat. EDIT: That or they are fired perpendicular to the armour. I mean no set of good plate armour has a flat face on it. Every single surface is curved to some degree and later sets were often heavily fluted as well. Not only are the majority of arrows deflected harmlessly but the ones that do find purchase then have to deal with the effects of sloped armour.
Any and all updates will be in smaller chunks now, I don't have as much free time as I used to.Now it might have seemed so far that I am just having fun telling a story here, but it is entirely a demonstration of the same basic point. Once you quantify something then you can simplify it while retaining access to all of its inherent detail. The engineers are a great example of this as you will see.
Time to fortify. The current position we hold as of now is simply untenable. Unless we can delay or hinder the enemy then we will get overrun in short order. Our first priority is to delay the enemy and protect the engineers. The swordsmen can't do much to help so they sit on the sideline for a bit. That leaves us with the engineers and Caprice.
The very first thing we want to do here is deploy the bolt throwers and get them firing. They are capable of firing now, but because of the ice they would skid out of position with every shot. Normally siege engines are weighed down by things like sandbags, the engineers did bring bags with them but there is no sand or dirt around and chipping up enough ice to fill them would take too long. We will have to improvise. The bolt throwers themselves can be imagined as giant crossbow turrets set on a cruciform mount. The mounts have wheels which allow horses to pull them around, once the weapon is in place the wheels are retracted and the bolt thrower rests on the ground. In a slightly macabre move the engineers gather up all of the orc corpses that were laying around and use them to weigh down the 4 legs of the bolt thrower mounts. The extra ones are piled in front of the bolt throwers to form protective berms. In the unlikely event that the bolt throwers face enemy missile fire the berms will help to protect crew and machine.
The bolt throwers now rest in a line facing the enemy, its time to fire them. The bow limbs of the bolt throwers are divided into 3 pairs much like Caprice's crossbow. Unlike her crossbow the reloading mechanisms on the bolt thrower are strong enough to wind back all 3 strings at once. Generally the 3 strings are used to fire 3 bolts in sequence. In cases where the enemy is very far away or the thrower is firing on a hard target, all 3 strings are used to fire a single bolt.
One such case is now, the enemy is still waaay over at the far edge of the lake and the leading ice warriors are only now coming into maximum range. You designate a small group of 5 wolf riders as the target and the bolt throwers fire. 3 bolts arc through the air.... and they all miss the riders by more than 50 feet. Not that the shots were wasted however, each bolt shattered better than a dozen ice warriors and severed various limbs off twice that many. A quick check over the engineers produces no obvious problems. It isn't until you examine the siege engines that you figure out whats wrong. The bolt throwers are third generation and incorporate new technology. So new in fact that the sighting mechanisms on the bolt throwers still have yet to be zeroed in.
This is an unexpected problem that is going tobe a pain in the ass. Zeroing in refers to the process of lining up your sighting equipment to where the weapon actually fires. So if you were adjusting a sniper rifle for example you would fire many shots at a target and adjust the scope as you go. If you aim dead center and the bullet hits 6 inches to the left, you adjust the scope six inches to the left and keep firing until the crosshair matches up. For siege engines this is a far more difficult task because repeat shots take so long. As well the bolts fired all vary slightly in weight and have a different trajectory. As a result we can keep firing but we will not have the accuracy to single out any specific targets such as the more dangerous wolf riders. On the bright side by the time the ice elementals get into range we should be able to give them a pounding, or more accurately in this case, some uneccessary ventilation.
Until I say otherwise it can be assumed that the bolt throwers are firing continously from now on. It occured to me that none of you would understand what I meant by "triple limbed crossbow". So I drew up a little image in Paint:
Figure A is the bow limb arrangement and shows how all 3 stack together. The black circle represents where the bolt sits when the weapon is loaded. Figure B is a cross-section of the firing track and shows how all 3 strings can push on the same bolt. This configuration allows you to fire 3 consecutive shots instead of one but the limbs must be released in the order of R-G-B. This represents "third generation" technology because althought you can do this with any crossbow, the trigger mechanism required is very complex. Caprice's crossbow works the same way.
Now that the bolt throwers are up and running we need to have a go at fortifying the terrain they sit on. The engineers are not suitable for this because they have no convenient building materials on hand. That leaves Caprice as our only option because she has the ability to change the terrain. The first thing she does is get rid of the slippery ground problem. Characters with terrain shaping abilities have no trouble with difficult terrain because the ground under thier feet will change to provide support and traction. The swordsmen still have cleats on but the engineers do not. As I may have mentioned earlier they had not expected to be fighting on ice, otherwise they would have come prepared.
She taps her staff on the ground and a wave spreads outward like ripples on a pond. Where the wave has passed the ice surface takes on a rough texture similar to a tile mural. Its not completetly safe but it is an improvement. The engineers who load the bolt throwers can move much faster now and the firing speed noticeable increases. Her second act is a bit more fancy. She holds the staff horizontally in the air in front of her, balancing it on both palms. Amid some low chanting she slowly begins to raise the staff upward.
A large triangle of ice with our units in the middle begins to rise from the rest of the lake surface, elevating the portal with it. After a heigh of about 5 feet another slightly larger triangle also begins to rise around the first one. This continues until the "steppe" tetrahedron is 4 levels high. One point of the triangle faces the enemy army and its vertical edge reshapes into a long staircase. The end effect looks somewhat like an Aztec or Mayan pyramid. The mass of the ice that makes up the pyramid had to come from somwhere and as the pyramid rose from the ice, a trench of similar volume sunk into the ground in front of it facing the enemy. This trench spans about 100 feet wide and the only way across is a small bridge that lines up with the staircase. However she aint done yet. The sides of the lowest level begin to split into rubble and fall to the ground where they meld with the ice surface. Suddenly a triple chevron of waist high ice pyramids begin to rise from the surface in front of the moat, again facing the enemy. Almost as an afterthought small walls rise on the edges of the top platform, turning the pyramid into a proper fortress.
Our troops are now occupying a considerably advantageous position. Consider:
If we happened to have deticated missle troops we could hold off most other armies for quite a while. It will be interesting to see how such conventional defenses hold up against a magic horde.
To give you a sense of scale, one ground tile is about 20 feet wide. Each elevation level is 5 feet. The units are not to scale, and sorry about the bear proxies but they were the one item I couldn't draw.
Man, did I ever mention how awesome your little mock ups are. What do you use to create those?
I believe he's using MS paint... which just makes them that much better. I think I'd kill myself if I tried to make such a complex technical drawing using paint.
I guess its the magic of the line tool. gave karma already
Bask in the power of my insomnia.
And yes that is MS Paint. There are people who can do some amazing things with Paint, just search "ms paint" on youtube for dozens of examples.
However getting that good at paint is like learning how to play the accordion with your feet. Its possible but.... why?
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