Anyone have the damage parameters down to a science??

[Holy_Diver]

Also, if you do like me and use one of the first three attack types, keep in mind that the physical/magical defense slider for monsters basically just adds to the first 3 / last 5 affinities uniformly. So most likely you want to stop relying on that, and just make sure those stay equal. In other words, they don't actually discriminate between whether you're attacking with a weapon or magic, so really the wording can be a little misleading if you don't pay attention to the weird polygon graph.

I really don't think SoM has enough going on in the pierce dept to make it a worthwhile affinity. But if you're doing a game in the classic KF vein, then might as well stick with that I guess.

[Hguols]

Editing som_db.exe would only be for shits and giggles for the creator. There is really no benefit to doing that though.... if I wouldn't have messed around with that for Trismegistus, it would have been an extra month in completing that..... for literally nothing.

The multi attack, is based on multiple hits.

Setting the single hit to 8 and the multi hit to 16 would be giving an enemy a 36 or 48 damage attack.

If the single hit is 8, the multi-hit should be 3 or 4.

[Holy_Diver]

Oh, thanks for the explanation of the multi attacks... I never would've thought of that 8O

Editing som_db.exe is easiest for playtesting your own game 8)

You can always copy over the changes for a release. If your like me, you wanna see what the changes will look like. I guess that makes more sense if you're customizing everything rather than just one word or something

[Holy_Diver]

:?

If multi-attacks really work this way, is there any real way to know for sure which attacks are multi-attacks?

For instance, with the pants zombie, the attack that seems out of proportion for me atm is translated by John as "2-Hand Downward" ...some of the translations say multi, but others are not so clear.

It would be nice if we had a list of which attacks work that way, and how many times the damage they will do?? Better yet it would be nice if we had some special naming convention for these types of attacks.

[Holy_Diver]

I think I've decided to give all the monsters in m09 100hp. I think considering how stripped down m09 will be (and with very little in the way of stat progression) some extensive testing will probably yield some useful information in terms of what does what.

[Holy_Diver]

This is driving me nuts, I gotta figure this out before I can go forward...

PS: If you're reading this John, I'd really like to know if the manual says anything about damage calculation. I can't believe there is not a debugger option to display damage in hit points??


--------------------------

Anyway, after some monkeying with the defense setting (having isolated hp in my project) it became apparent the defense based calculations were not linear. I don't know what they are just yet. But I've done some initial experiments to figure out at least what the weapon stats mean, and how strength effects them. The raw data is thus...

This is 1 strength + 1 attack point upon a monster with 0 def and 10hp. The numbers are the strength stat = the number of hits to kill the monster...

1=10
2=10
3=10
4=10
5=5
6=5
7=5
8=5
9=5
10=4
11=4
12=4
13=4
14=4
15=3
16=3
17=3
18=3
19=3
20=2
45=1

I can't say exactly what this means at this point right off the top of my head, but it's here for your information for now. At any rate we can see that at 45str we're dealing 10 points of damage with an attack of 1.

The next batch of numbers is increasing the weapon attack stat only. As you can see it seems to raise completely linearly. Ie. 1 attack is 1hp damage, 2 attack is 2hp, and so on...

1=10
2=5
3=4
4=3
5=2

The next time I come back to this I will try to factor in defense / maybe have a hypothesis for strength ready. The only thing I can say for sure is
the damage is rounded to the nearest integer (probably always downward ) ...Ie. why it goes straight from 10 to 5 so suddenly even though the strength to damage growth is fractional.

^the roundoff thing can present unexpected behavior if you start the game with too low of numbers.

[Holy_Diver]

Well, I thought adjusting defense was doing nothing (without the base setting) but I reasoned that I was using units of 1 and the defense calculation was always rounding up, which is why it seemed never to matter.

So anyway, defense rounds up...

Which is more important than it might seem. Because it means, unless you're technically dealing out 0 damage, you will always hit for at least 1. In other words, there is no way to setup a scenario where the player can't deal damage (unless maybe an event sets their strength to zero -- but it defaults to 1 in the sys editor, so that might be the minimum)

[Holy_Diver]

Another bizarre thing I've discovered, is if you set defense for a monster to 1, they actually take less hits to kill than when they had 0... there is no logic to this, other than a different accounting system seems to be used if the monsters defense is not setup.

[Holy_Diver]

Crud I've lost the numbers I'd collected for defense.

Maybe one of you guys would like to collect some defense numbers for us...

The way I was doing it was I had a helpless skeleton with 20hp and a 1 slash dagger and 1 slash fireball with 1 strength and 1 magic. First open the parameter editor, then open the map editor (readonly) ...load the map, kill the skeleton while counting how many hits he took, write that down, then close the map, and increase the skeletons defense by 1, then reopen the map and repeat.

Have 0 defense uses a different damage function so it's meaningless, start with one.


One thing I did confirm is the base stat and the adjustment stats are identical. So raising one by x while lowering the other by x will produce the same amount of defense.


PS: Any less than 20hp and your numbers will be too small to make sense of. Any more and it will take you longer to kill the skeleton.

[dmpdesign]

John emailed me this information about the damage parameters in SOM, the link at the bottom is the beginning of a spreadsheet he created for damage tables. ‎  I will try to finish the sheet in time, but for now this should get everyone started:

-- ---------------------------------------------------------------
John:
There are two main categories of damage in SoM: Physical and Magic.

The player's Strength stat lowers damage received from all physical sub-categories (Slash, Smash, Stab) but has NO effect on magic damage. Every 5 points in the Player's Strength stat effectively adds 1 armor defense point in all physical sub-categories (Slash, Smash, Stab).

The player's Magic stat lowers damage received from all magic sub-categories (Earth, Water, Flame Wind, Holy) but has NO effect on physical damage. Every 5 points in the Player's Magic stat effectively adds 1 armor defense point in all magical sub-categories (Earth, Water, Flame Wind, Holy).

The player's defense stat in one damage sub-category (Slash, Smash Flame, Holy etc) has NO affect on damage received from other sub-categories. For example a maxed out Slash defense has no effect on Stab damage received.

The damage received as a result of ATK vs. DEF in a given sub-category remains identical regardless of what sub-category the damage comes from. For example,

If when:
Enemy has Slash ATK 15
Player has Slash DEF 8
Player receives 18 damage

Then also when:
Enemy has Earth ATK 15
Player has Earth DEF 8
Player will receive 18 damage
And so on for all the damage sub-categories.


SoM calculates damage received in each sub-category separately and then adds the results together. For example,
Enemy has Slash ATK 15 and Earth ATK 15
Player has Slash DEF 8 and Earth DEF 8 and
Player receives 36 damage (18 from Slash calculation and 18 from Earth calculation).

Damage is NOT within a random range in SoM but is always an identical fixed value based on the enemy's ATK stats versus the player's DEF stats.
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www.swordofmoonlight.com/SOMTools/Documentation/SOM Damage Chart.xls