Can you critique my new Weapon Triangle: Blades, Spears, and Blunt Weaponry?

Design
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What are Blades? Swords. Axes. Knives. Blades- I mean “Longswords”, let’s rename the heavy sword set of Iron/Steel/Silver Blades to Longswords to avoid confusion with the Blade weapon type. They’re sword and sword-like objects. Swords are normal, Knives are lighter and weaker, Longswords are heavier and stronger, and Axes are stronger and heavier than that. This gives swords the physical 1-2 range throwing weapon they have always needed: Throwing Knives. And Throwing Axes. Knives are weak low-skill brave weapons that ignore a portion of the enemy’s armour. Blades are guaranteed to critically hit on open terrain, which means grassy plains, bridges, roads, and castle floors.

Spears, Polearms, I haven’t decided upon a definitive name for these yet though I’d prefer something that starts with B for consistency’s sake. Lances, Javelins, Poleaxes, Glaives, Pole Flails, big swords on big sticks. If it involves a big stick, and it’s not an axe, it’s a Polearm. They might seem like the weakest of the three melee categories. However, they crit if their user moves five or more spaces per turn, and gain a half-point of Might for every space the user moves before attacking.

And finally, Blunt Weaponry. They all specialize in destroying armoured enemy units and Polearms. Hammers take the role Axes once held, Fist Weapons are lighter and slightly weaker, and Warhammers crank up the damage and weight past 11, while Maces are the lightest and weakest option. Throwing Hammers provide the 1-2 range option.

Blades beat Blunt Weapons, Blunt Weapons beat Polearms, and Polearms beat Blades. Having the Weapon Triangle advantage guarantees a crit, ensures 12 points of bonus might, and denies counterattacks.

What do you think of this setup?

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Slash > Crush > Stab > Slash, then?

I could get behind it if it’s explained concisely and used effectively. Guaranteed criticals is probably too strong at 3x damage, so I’m assuming you’d lower crit damage.

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Blades, Spears, and Blunt Weapons could totally work as an alternative setup. However, the benefits sound way overtuned. Guaranteed crit, 12 mt, and no counters??? Way too much.
You could boost the mt bonus from vanilla’s 1 to 2 or 3, and grant maybe 5 or 10 crit, and it would have a dramatic effect already. I could say more, but that’s just my initial impression.

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I like that name theme but you can slash and stab with swords.

Also yeah, I was thinking criticals could do x2 damage, with swords dealing 3x.
Or criticals could deal 1.5x, and swords could deal 2x.
Or all weapons could just deal 2x. It’s probably enough of a buff for swords to have the easiest terrain-based crit condition(Lances need space to move before attacking and Blunt Weapons only crit on polearms and armoured foes), to have extra critical damage on top would probably be overkill, right?

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How about 8 mt for weapon triangle matchups, normal counterattacks, and x2 critical hits?

In this game Bows would also crit if they’re on Forests, Hills, or Forts. They would also gain +3 Vision and +2 Range on these tiles.

Mages crit if they attack enemies that lack adjacent allies, and the Light Magic and Staff categories are combined into one.

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Sounds like a lot of ambitious and out of the box ideas, but I think the most important thing would be to introduce all of these concepts slowly so the player has ample time to adjust.
For what its worth, I really like the idea of the increased range and vision on vantage points as long as they are not too common, otherwise it could get annoying.

Regarding the weapon triangle, I would say the bonuses are way too steep. Guaranteed crit, +12 might and no counter? Basically a guaranteed oneshot if you have the triangle advantage, so you probably won’t even get to see the no counter effect lol. In my opinion, the no counter effect would be really annoying when utilised by the enemy as it basically ensures you cannot have any sort of enemy phase unless you cull all enemy variety and have battalions of enemies with the same weapon type like in fe4.

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Seems Not Real to implement in a romhack or LT/Tactile game.
If it’s for an original game engine… well, these bonuses are overtuned unless there’s inflation across the board and it behaves like other SRPGs (Disgaea, FFT, Luminous Arc).
In which case, it seems kind of odd to post here?

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Solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist. If you want weapon asymmetry, doing so by just giving them all a ton of auto crit is beyond silly; why is it healthy for pro weapon triangle match ups to be an instant kill? It’s a whole lot of extra overhead in service of making combat narrower and less flexible, making it all about these extremely braindead to set up autocrit scenarios over and over. Just give the weapon types unique tools, you do not need to reinvent the wheel for the sake of having done so.

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Swords are normal, Knives are lighter and weaker, Longswords are heavier and stronger, and Axes are stronger and heavier than that. This gives swords the physical 1-2 range throwing weapon they have always needed: Throwing Knives. And Throwing Axes.

So, wait, to be clear; before we get started here.

Axes are now swords. This is awful.

Knives are weak low-skill brave weapons that ignore a portion of the enemy’s armour.

This ruins the game. Doubled attacks with garbage stats ruins the game. Fire Emblem prides on being simple, so math is mostly addition and subtraction. As a result; consider basic algebra:

When is ( A - B + C ) going to be greater than (A - B ) * 2?

So consider if you have a 2 might brave and a 10 might normal weapon available to you. You’d need to have just seven more strength than they do defense to make the brave deal more damage. Not that unrealistic for a lot of damage dealing characters.

But if they also partially ignore defense then they’ll ever more destroy this.

Blades are guaranteed to critically hit on open terrain, which means grassy plains, bridges, roads, and castle floors.

You should go play Wargroove. Each unit in the game has a Critical mechanic along this line.

It’s really cool and fun, but it is not appropriate for Fire Emblem, because FE terrain is a lot different function-wise than Wargroove or Advance Wars.

Critical strikes aren’t actually cool to play against if they come up too often or come from enemies with real stats.

However, they crit if their user moves five or more spaces per turn, and gain a half-point of Might for every space the user moves before attacking.

This is garbage. Like, I can’t stress enough. This is enjoyable in The Fantasy Trip or in Dungeons and Dragons; because it’s extremely difficult to strategize with and you have very limited – but often comparable – action economy with the opponents, and you can judge when you need to go for a charge or you need to get the damage in even if it isn’t boosted by charging. But in Fire Emblem, you won’t really have that, you’ll easily be able to get it every time you want to take a fight.

And finally, Blunt Weaponry. They all specialize in destroying armoured enemy units and Polearms.

So, do you mean, like, every Blunt deals effective damage to armors?

The class type that already is famous for sucking? And you want to make them even worse.

Blades beat Blunt Weapons, Blunt Weapons beat Polearms, and Polearms beat Blades. Having the Weapon Triangle advantage guarantees a crit, ensures 12 points of bonus might, and denies counterattacks.

This is way too much. Critical and +12 might - even assuming you meant +4, which gets tripled by the critical to +12 - is going to let you kill the target, making denying the counter next to pointless.

It also slows the game down to a disgusting crawl in a lot of circumstances.

What do you think of this setup?

I think it’s really really really bad.

Not everyone needs 1-2 access to be good, and limiting it is very useful for the games overall.
Why add throwing weapons to swords when you could take them away from spears and axes? How does that change things?

A lot of these change things that are perfectly functional as they are.
I think that it is noble to question the basic premise to see what can be changed, but this - and I say this desperately - is not it.

To summarize with a lesson, in essence, if there is something in the game for the player to use, it ought to have a purpose and place. Having things that are Just There is fine, but you only need a few of those, and having a bunch of game mechanics that are annoying or that completely control the rest of the game are the worst.

In the game you are proposing, I cannot see any world in which I do not constantly waste a ton of turns moving units into awkward lines and then moving them all forward to position themselves to deny the enemy lances their critical, or pulling swords into defensive terrain to negate their critical, and never fielding an armor because if a single blunt user shows up I’ll lose them…

Which eliminates the strategic diversity from chapters because now I am being dictated that I must play this way not by “a few specific” weapons, but by overall gimmicks of the weapon type.

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Yeah, I can’t even begin to understand how you think half of this begins to sound good.

A large portion of this seems to be trying to reorganize the underlying structure of the weapon types without understanding just how rigid weapon design truly is.

As a small example, you list poleflails as a spear type weapon where as by default they would be a blunt weapon due to the weapon head still being a flail which is officially a blunt weapon.

Then there are actual swords with grips long enough to act as spears, which were intended to be used against horse riders to begin with and several spears actually have bladed heads so this entire point is a jumbled mess that catetorigcally doesn’t work that well.

Auto-crits are horrible for design under any circumstance never ever do this. this is inexcusable from a design standpoint and only works if the player units all have 80-120HP at base otherwise the early game would literally be impossible due to the ai singling out units to just blindly crit to death.

Even in what few hacks I’ve played that had weapons with 100% crit only “The Sun God’s Wrath” did it badly since it was on two late game bosses with inflated stats.
The other one had it on a swordmaster weapon and it had 2MT and the generic using it had about 12 strength but 25 speed. It was for a damned meme.

Other nitpicks, fist should never be effective against armor because well, have you ever tried punching a steel breastplate? You’d just break your hands.

Ignoring partial defense is far harder to work with once it hits odd numbers (GBA FE rounds down in this case) and just complicates things further since most knives can’t cut armor to begin with. And you haven’t event approached magic, bows, and magic weapons and honestly you really shouldn’t

Random comment, any weapon is a throwing weapon at least once.

Now, as a suggestion I recommend you tinker with a sacred stones rom and give every weapon 100% crit all the enemies crit immunity and see how not fun that is, and you might get why the crit thing on the whole isn’t feasable.

As for the rest, the balance is way off and doesn’t work unless the stats are hyper-inflated across the board.

I mean, just take the second map of sacred stones as a base. Erika will likely have 16-17 hp and usually takes 5-7 damage from the soldiers on that map. With a 12mt triangle bonus alone she dies. The two axe fighters will likely oneshot gilliam plus franz and seth become unusable, since if you use seth’s lance to kill the soldier the axe fighters will kill him and the same occurs with franz. It just doesn’t work.

edit: it works even less then I figured. took a minute to test the changes myself and got two different results with how I worked the triangle changes for working solely off player phase ideas. this is seth attacking the fighter on chapter 1 of FE8 with a silver lance with the hit loss at -127 to act as the blocked counter attack please. note I didn’t increase the hit gain from it it just underflowed I think and made the axe always hit as a side effect.
Fire Emblem - the Sacred Stones # GB2A.emulator
note that if this could crit, seth is now dead on map one, turn one.

and for the sake of arguement. since the soldier there would then follow up instead if you used his sword,
Fire Emblem - the Sacred Stones # GB2A.emulator

again, seth is now dead if it had autocrit

seeing the problem here?

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I really think there is no real concrete answer to if this new systen you are proposing its good or bad. Of course, if you added this changes to a prexisting game (say, FE8), game would most likely be terrible, but i am assuming that you would design the game around these new mechanics and would therefore take it into account when making new maps, classes, etc.

I would suggets you just try it. Insert these mechanics into your project and just start experimenting and tuning them out. I doubt it would be a good system or work as intended the first time, but from your tests, you can make fixes and changes until you have a satisfying game experience in your hands.

Add, change, experiment. As a more personal opinion, i dont see the problem in adding or changing a lot basic mechanics at the costs of “overcomplicating” things. There will always be hacks and games that follow the traditional formula of simple maths and classic design of vanilla FE. I see nothing wrong with changing up the formula radically, even if that means there could exists more complicated calculations involved. It always a good idea to try to keep them intuitive and easy to understand for the sake of gameplay flow, but go ahead and try your ideas. Its always nice to see new games with completely revamped mechanics.

Do keep in mind that if you make major modifications to one area of the game, you should also take into account the consecuences it brings to other areas of it and change them accordingly. Again, as an example, you system wouldnt work in vanilla FE8, you would have to change a lot of stuff in that game to make your new system work. So keep in mind that changes in one area will make you modify and change other aspects of your game.

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What if the new weapon triangle was “Slashing, Stabbing, and Crushing” weapons? Swords and Axes, Spears, and Hammers fit neatly into these categories. Swords could have combat arts like the Thrust for Piercing and the Mordhau for Crushing to make up for how weak Swords are when not fully mastered.

I had some friends beta-test my game, turns out giving every weapon category its own unique method of earning a critical hit was a bit too extreme, and some of these crits are far easier to obtain than others. Perhaps my weapon categories should only earn crit if an adjacent ally has the same weapon type equipped. 2x crit damage, perhaps 1.5x crit damage, that sounds fair to me and it makes up for the removal of Pair Up while encouraging characters to stand next to each other for bonuses anyway.

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I do not understand what you are seeking to do with having a new triangle. What’s the flaw you’re trying to correct from “Sword, Axe, Spear”; and how is what you are discussing a solution to that flaw?

To no small degree what the triangle does is create a simple way for the game to require a diverse party. Contrast the effect in Thracia 776 (± 5 hit) and Radiant Dawn (± 10 hit 1 damage OR nonextant on hard) with the other games; where the effect is next to pointless (in FE5 due to its general smallness, in FE10 due to units globally having more stats so a flat change is less relevant).

This system is based on its simplicity. It makes it so that early on you are highly rewarded for using all sorts of units that you get given, while being small enough that later on you can just continue using the favorite units you have.
(I personally think this is a weakness and that the triangle scaling in relevance is among the best features FE11+ have.)

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ngl at this point what’s stopping you from just DMing a pathfinder game

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Reminds me of slashing, piercing and bludgeoning damage types from D&D

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That gives me an idea, actually. Maybe they could be more like damage types.
Swords can deal slash, pierce, or blunt damage depending on how you use them. Same with polearms for the most part, though some may have issues dealing slash or even pierce damage depending on the polearm (I mean, could you see a quarterstaff doing either of those?). Axes mostly deal slashing and blunt damage, with some poleaxes dealing pierce.
All of this would depend on how you use them, so maybe you could have a sort of echoes-style system where certain combat arts could only be used on certain weapons and would deal one of those 3 types of damage. Maybe each one could deal a specific type of damage by default, and have arts that change the damage type? You could even have something like changing stances with swords to change the damage type, for example.
If you wanted to go full D&D style, you could have different armor types assigned to certain classes with different weaknesses to each of the damage types; slashing vs unarmored, piercing vs light armor, and bludgeon vs heavy armor. Though, that’s not really a triangle anymore, is it?

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You still run into some of the same issues I stated back in October, on top of making an overly complicated system for damage interaction in a game that does not need it.

Using the poleflail, once again, under these new ideas is a weapon capable of all three damage types. You may think “no, it’s only blunt/thrust” but remember, when a spike gets swiftly pulled toward or away from its target it cuts.

To further compound the problem would then be material ranks. Since a steel weapon is better than iron wouldn’t steel weapons gain effective damage against iron armor, or would they just do +5 damage, or are we doing the whole “armor penatration” thing.

I really don’t think that this topic holds any weight when it comes to FE solely because it adds at minimum 10 different levels of complexity that is not conducive to how Fire Emblem works as a game.

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Swords beat axes which beat lances which beat swords. Except axes and lances have a 1-2 range weapon and swords have… A magic sword, throwing knives, a whip-sword, or anything like the Ragnell. Armour beats swords and lances and most axes but not the hammers, which are classed under hammers for some reason.

Moving Axes to the Bladed Weapons category and creating a Blunt Weapon category for hammers and maces just makes sense to me.

It would also make sense to classify Bows as a piercing weapon but I won’t go that far.

When it comes to the new weapon types I want to put into my game, I’d have to add numerous new weapon categories for each one if I wasn’t expanding the categories that continue to fit the existing weapon triangle. Swordsmen can gain bonus stats when using swords and stat penalties when using anything else. Or PRF restrictions might stop them from using anything but swords. They could still use Combat Arts like Thrust to inflict Piercing damage and Mordhau to inflict Bludgeoning damage. But when adding a new weapon to my game like Wands, Staffs, Boomerangs, Whips, and more, instead of adding a new weapon category I only have to ask “Is this blunt or not? If it’s not blunt, is it primarily used like a sword or lance?”

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I hope I don’t come off rudely but it seems you keep adding these things, but so far I’ve yet to see a why for it at all. What does this system aim to do that cannot be accomplished with what the base system already does? Why do you need all these different weapons like whips and wands and the like? It’s really hard to give a critique on a big system change like this when you don’t really give anything explaining the intent of what it’s supposed to even meaningfully add/change in direction towards a specific game design/balancing goal you have in mind.

As is, this just exists, it’s all stuff but stuff you aren’t giving people here any clear purpose to them. So currently it just feels like adding things for the sake sake of adding it rather than any real meaning to it being there.

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Again, you don’t seem to understand a fundamental fact about axes, they ARE blunt.

“Most axes are single edge, they have a flat back used as a hammer to do work such as drive wedges into wood or trees. There are double edges axes also. Also if the axe is older and well used and has not been sharpened then even the edge would be considered blunt if used as a weapon the , the edge does not cut flesh but crushes the flesh to rupture. So it is considered a blunt weapon if the pummel is used in defense or assault or the back of the head is used to crush tissue and bone and bruise underlying organs. Again if the edge is very blunt And used to do same, it would be considered blunt trauma”

As quoted above from some random dude on the internet, but for some more juicy fact cross-references here’s wikipedia.

" Blunt instruments typically inflict blunt force trauma, causing bruising, fractures and other internal bleeding.[1] Depending on the parts of the body attacked, organs may be ruptured or otherwise damaged. Attacks with a blunt instrument may be fatal.

Some sorts of blunt instruments are very readily available, and often figure in crime cases. Examples of blunt instruments include:

You are in fact trying to make weapons more complicated through factually wrong information.

Edit: I realise I’m probably coming off like a huge asshole here, but you are trying to reclassify weapon categories based on personal belief rather then any kind of fact. That’s how you get people forgetting that a rapier ment for combat is actually a curved sword, Long Pikes were even a thing, and that most lances have a cutting edge. It actually bothers me when someone blatantly ignores historical weapon design solely because they think they know better then actual history.

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