By the same token, any bladed weapon that loses its adge would become blunt; not just axes. Swords are a good example of this as well. Honestly, I don’t think a system like this needs to be super realistic; it just needs to make sense. I think its a system that would need a lot of fine-tuning, but yeah.
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That’s not the point and you know it, but I’ll go further with that then.
A sword doesn’t even need to be blunt for this, pommel bashing and the flat of the blade can be used for blunt-damage.
The whole issue here is the underlying issue with this entire idea is deliberatly over complicating something for the sake of being different without any kind of rationale other that “well I don’t like how axes aren’t slashing weapons even though combat axes aren’t overly sharp so I’m changing everything and (given how engage has release) make the Break System but if you get broken you just die because crits.”
It’s just not something that even remotely works in any reasonable capacity, and serves to make a game like fire emblem worse rather then better.
I’m adding new things to my game because I want to experiment. I like it when Fire Emblem characters have a variety of tools in their arsenal to choose from. A sword-locked guy might have a sword to hit people with and a dragonslayer/armourslayer to use when that’s a strictly better option. I want to go further. In my game even a sword-locked guy might have a good sword, a better sword with lower durability or higher rarity, a dragon slayer, a rapier or armourslayer for knights, a long-range option, a weak option for hitting multiple foes, maybe a super special chosen one sword, any Combat Art from a list, a Gambit, the possibility to be used in an Attack Stance formation, the possibility to be used for a flanking bonus, class skills, skill book skills, a personal skill… You have to weigh your options and decide how you’re using him and every other piece of your army and every other option they have. It might even be worth it to use him as a delivery service to trade a Battalion from one unit to the unit who can make the best use of it this turn.
I know there are people who say “You’re violating the simple purity of the game by adding complexity!” but I like complexity. My goal is to create a challenging Player Phase-focused experience where it feels like you’re constantly struggling against impossible odds and overcoming foes greater than yourself by carefully considering all your options and making smart plays.
However right now I feel as though I’ve made blades underpowered in my game.
Piercing weapons in my game currently deal extra damage against Monsters, and Beasts like Taguel and Horses and Dragons. Blunt weapons and Magic attacks in my game deal extra damage against armoured foes like Knights. And Blades… I’m not sure yet. It might be too much to say they deal extra damage against everyone less armoured than a Knight. It might be too little to say they deal extra damage against cloth-wearing foes like Mages and Priests.
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We know the weapon triangle. Swords beat Lances which beat Axes which beat Swords. But when it comes to enemy armour types, how should the weaknesses be balanced?
The hammer is classed as an Axe (for some reason) but it crushes Armour. Magic and a Rapier also beat armour, but only a few sword characters can use Rapiers. The Armourslayer exists, and so do Swords that beat Dragons.
But let’s say your game has Slashing, Piercing, and Blunt weapons. Swords and Axes are Bladed, Lances are Piercing, Bows deal Piercing damage while remaining in their own category, and Maces and Warhammers are Blunt.
Magic and Blunt weapons beat armoured foes like Knights and Great Knights, Piercing beats Monsters and Beasts such as Dragons and Taguel and Horses, and Slashing weapons beat… what? Cloth-wearing Priests and Mages? Everybody else less armoured than a Knight? What should they deal Super Effective damage against?
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Well, most of us do
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I too had been pondering an alternative to the Weapon Triangle with a greater focus on effective damage, primarily inspired by Age of Empires. In this context, I would’ve had Swords be 2x effective against infantry, Lances be 2x effective against cavalry, and Axes either be 2x effective against armored or simply have better stats all around in exchange for not having any effective bonuses.
Of course, I still need to put more thought into how to handle magic under a system like this.
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Lol I totally missed that when I first read through the OP.
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I said it wrong as a joke to point out the inherent absurdity of the triangle, which is inherently a gameplay contrivance. In reality a spear beats axes and swords. The greatest swordsmen can go toe to toe with spear users, even spear formations, and he might even win sometimes, but ask him how hard it was to win, and ask the spear carriers how much easier it was just to poke a guy, maybe surround him and then poke him. Ask the swordsman how hard it was to master the blade when the bow is right there and the spear is easier to master than both.
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This is the same general idea, keep it all in one place.
I feel like what you are getting at is you just want to play a Fire Emblem themed DnD game.
Also in what universe does standing on open terrain (aka 95% of the tiles that you will ever be standing on) giving you an autocrit (even if its x2) make any sense at all.
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Objection
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Pretty sure these kinds of mechanics would work much better in an action RPG/diablo-like than an SRPG. If strageryizing is necessary as a gameplay element you could take inspiration from Transistor. Just, having to juggle that much information but in a way where it doesn’t feel natural (like when you’re grid locked phase based movement with discrete stats) means if you’re not the developer the game will take approximately 6 hours to beat the prologue map if you don’t just look at it and decide “Nah” first
I’ll just keep hammering this point home until you either directly respond to my comments or I get through to you.
this topic is far too nuanced for the design ideas you want to implement, regardless of balance, weapons have these categories due to the complex nature of a one on one combat scenario. this topic has also been approached by so many people without a clear yes or no with it almost always turning to, “ultimately the skill of the user would actually determine if it’d work”.
you have so far refused to comment or even acknowledge some of my points that show the blatant contradictions in your attempt to re-contextualize the weapon triangle and it only shows how ill thought out it truly is.
so please, enlighten me, how exactly does any of this wonky overcomplication of weapon types ACTUALLY HELP.
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I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean.
I want to put more weapons into my game because I like it when units in Fire Emblem have many options for how they can be used, so I thought giving my units even more options would make my game better. Instead of a steel sword, a steel blade with a slight power increase and speed penalty, a bronze sword, and an anti-armour sword, a sword-locked non-Lord character might have a sword, an axe with a bigger power increase and speed penalty, a boomerang, and other weapons with specific uses, advantages, disadvantages, and trade-offs.
Sword, Lance, Axe… It’s a good triangle but changing their names to Slashing, Piercing, and Bludgeoning increases the number of weapons that can fit into those three categories, while keeping the pro-player phase aspect of the turn wheel. I think giving units weaknesses to common weapon categories based on their armour type would add more player phase focused planning.
My goal is to make my game a player phase focused experience where smart on-the-fly improvisation with your fragile vulnerable units and their bags of tricks is more important than planning the growth of your units long-term to become optimized unkillable demigods. I don’t ever want players of my game to feel like they’re too strong to have to think. I know I’m a beginner at this sort of thing so it likely won’t come out perfect. But that’s what patches are for. And if people complain about it being too complicated or too easy I can always add extra difficulty modes later like Easy Automatic and Dante Must Die. Well, in this case, it would be called Dagdar Must Dagdie.
At one point during development, that was how swords worked in my game.
I’ve made a few posts at this point detailing contradictions within naming weapons to damage types, mainly that many weapons are technically capable of inflicting multiple damage types entirely based upon how they work. I personally take issue with swapping axes to slashing since, historically, axes are blunt.
what you want is actually to be able to decide what type of attack is being used, but this still doesn’t resolve the underlying issue of, what does this do other then complicate the game further?
while you may want your units to be more about what they can do rather then their stats, but it is unlikely to be as such.
honestly Fire Emblem really isn’t ideal for what you want to impliment.
The way I understand the Weapon Triangle conceptually, it has less to do with damage types and more to do with combat styles. Sword wielding is fast and nimble and it can counter the powerful but slow axe attacks, but spears outreach them. Axes, meanwhile have the power to break through a spear+shield wall and combat the reach of a spear. If you are going for piercing/slashing/blunt force type weapons, I would probably ignore the triangle and focus more on effective damage. Slashing swords and axes would be highly effective against unarmored foes, but less effective against armor. Piercing weapons would be effective against medium armored foes (can easily find the gaps in chain mail or pierce through padded armor) but less effective against heavy armor. Meanwhile, blunt weapons would be effective against heavy armor but less effective against medium armor (chainmail and padded armor are decent at absorbing blunt force).
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This type of system is too complicated for the kind of game FE is. FE is all about having a simple and easy to understand system mechanically and using that as a baseline to create challenges that are intuitive to tackle while still being challenging in their own right.
This kind of system laughs in the face of that concept and is essentially an insult to the very nature of Fire Emblem as a series. Its like if a mainline Mario game suddenly required you to jump through all sorts of hoops just to jump or be able to stomp on an enemy’s head.
This kind of system is much more at home in a game like FF tactics or Triangle Strategy where the systems are much more complicated but the boards/maps are much smaller and units are fewer to compensate.
Think back to Dark Deity, that game’s systems were universally frowned upon because it overcomplicated a system in an environment where that sort of complication didn’t belong (a fire emblem wannabe).
With the type of big bonuses to this system too every map will either be an easy snowball fest if enemy density and variety is small or a turtle hellscape if enemies are everywhere and there’s variety in weapon type as such large bonuses require you to pretty much always fight at advantage or neutral in order to even survive, which in of itself goes against the very nature of Fire Emblem as a series as it was conceptualized, a game where deaths can be overcome and one where you shouldn’t lose so many characters that you can’t ironman through it.
Now do you see the problems people have with this system? I didn’t even mention some of the other issues people have but I hope I got my point across to you.
Also please stop making new threads every other week just as a personal request, I did at one point and I deeply regret doing so.
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That, however wraps back to one of my earlier points, armor ranks.
since you can’t just do stuff like having a silver sword without silver armor also being a thing, which you’d now have to create a leather rank roughly the same as silver for this to make sense.
Which now also creates the issue of bonuses and penalties for attacking say, steel armor with iron weapons or iron armor with steel weapons. It literally makes a bunch of things more complicated then it needs to be.
I don’t know if it is as complicated as you make it sound. It is definitively more complicated than what FE normally goes for, but Tear Ring/Berwick Saga already implemented shields in a Fire Emblem like game, so armor wouldn’t be that much of a stretch. Just have three types of armor (light/padded gambeson, medium/steel chain, heavy/silver plate) with durability. Then the weapon types could interact in different ways with armor types. It could be as simple as a certain type of weapon ignores the DEF bonus of certain armor types.
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Except it is that complicated.
You can’t realistically expect bandits or raiders to have access to expensive silver plate armor, and a kingdoms main army wouldn’t have every single armor knight using armor of the absolute highest quality.
There is also issues with inconsistent armor within same weapon classes.
I however would need some more time to organise my thoughts on how to best explain this.