My issues with Kick, and also NPCs

Carnage, it was just an example. It's not like thousands upon thousands year old Sorcerer-Kings or gigantic bugs are terribly realistic either. At any rate, I wasn't referring to the parts in Akira where Tetsuo is a gigantic monster.

Anyway, have you ever been kicked in the face? I have, and it was during a sparring match that I had fallen to my knee in. We didn't have gear on, and I got my cheekbone cracked (Fractured, I don't know what to call it, but I didn't need like.. reconstructive surgery or anything) And that wasn't even a full out kick (It was more than we both expected though)

I just used the Akira reference because.. well, it's Akira, and I thought more people would be able to imagine it.

To summize, kicks to the head = bad things, and should probably happen less often in stand vs. stand combat, more often in stand vs. sit, and nearly always on stand vs. sleep/rest/unconcious.

[Eternal]

Ever killed anyone with kick as the last attack... try it...

I believe kick has its finer points, and agree that circle kicks are a little odd for the setting.  I don't see any reason to nerf it, however, as it can take quite some time of -believable- training for kick to become a good skill, this is true of many (most... all?) of Armageddon's skills.

Gith have never been that scary to me... most byn troopers can take one in one on one combat, and that seems pretty weak.  Heck, I don't think I've even had magickers who were killed by them in the fashion that some people describe.

[the halfling]

I posted a silly reply to a silly post.
Yet another complaint about how NPCs are too strong.
Not to mention, We've all been killed by NPCs at one point.. though I can never recall being killed by them because of kick..  Some do far worse things then that.

I want to know what these people who complain about the fact that when they say arm is suppose to be harsh that they mean it.
To be able to walk anywhere they want and be able to kill any NPC out there?

Some people make it sound like you step out the gate, and you instantly die from a gith attack.  There are many places you can go that you don't have to worry about super NPCs kicking your butt, that isn't in a city.  But those super NPCs need to be there.

Why I think it needs to be made more harsher?
Well, it isn't that.(I realize that some people don't want that, so I'll just leave it alone)  I just want more hidden npcs.  To give rangers another edge over warriors for traveling in the wild.

[Elven Mul]

Well you certainly posted a silly reply, let me tell you.

Tough NPCs exist. They don't need stupid things like super kicks to make life difficult. Super kicks (both on the PC and NPC side) are annoying for the reasons already exhaustively discussed. I trust that is simple enough even for someone as smug as you to understand?

Stop whining about keeping the world harsh, players not being able to handle being killed, and so forth. Those are colossal straw men, or perhaps you didn't understand the point in the first place.

[Swordsman]

So, you're basically saying that some races shouldn't be able to kick you hard because they're physically less strong, on average? Well, I always saw damage as including a big skill factor. In other words, someone very skilled but maybe not very strong can still do lots of damage to you if they hit, which I tend to agree with. Placement, speed, timing, etc. all have a lot of say in how much something hurts IRL, so I think it makes sense to have this in the game, too. If you're going to say that strength is the most important factor in determining how much HP damage an NPC does, then basically anyone with low strength can train for years and years and become incredibly skilled but they won't do as much damage as a strong but unskilled novice warrior, if he happens to hit. Doesn't seem right to me. (I'm not saying that's what you were saying, this is just an example for discussion.)

Anyway, two common things I see with elves, gith, and halflings: they always go on foot (no mounts), so it stands to reason that even if they're below human average on strength, their legs at least would be decent, and (except for city elves) they spend all/most of their time in the desert/forest, i.e. their natural environment, so it stands to reason that maybe they get some advantage from knowing the terrain better. If you're used to fighting on loose sand instead of a nice solid training floor (whether it's rock, packed earth, or whatever), I think you should get an advantage to your footing and positioning when you're fighting on loose sand. Obviously, these are just a couple of ideas to OOCly rationalise what we see happening in the game. If we're dead-set on seeing kick damage from some races as unrealistic, this couldn't and wouldn't convince us otherwise.

As for the actual messages you see ('the tiny halfling kicks the huge half-giant in the head') I guess we'll have to live with them until the imms get around to updating them or adding in code to check for heights. Just my take.

Swordsman

[Supreme Allah]

What is a circle kick anyway?

I ...agree that circle kicks are a little odd for the setting.

Time for a little martial arts lesson.

Circle kicks aren't what Tony described. That's a spinning heel kick (or possibly spinning back kick or something else, I'm not sure what he was thinking of), and is generally not used in practical combat - Tae Kwon Do in general isn't a very practical martial art, just a widely known and relatively simple one.

A circle kick doesn't involve spinning or anything like that. It's actually a very quick and effective kick. A circle kick assumes you have a rear leg and a front leg. The rear leg sweeps through the air in an inward circular motion, clockwise if it's your right or counterclockwise if it's your left. The wider the circle the better, usually (as long as you don't do it dumb and throw yourself off balance) because it adds to momentum. The kick's aim is to strike the side of an opponent's jaw with the outside edge of your foot - ideally with the spot just before the toes.

Circle kicks are appropriate for actual fighting.

If done in the opposite direction, by the way, the kick is called a crescent kick.

Huzzah! So that's a circle kick, we just call them inside or outside Crescent kicks depending on the direction.

What I was thinking with a circle kick was a really newbish roundhouse, where the kid doesn't chamber and just kind of puts his foot out and spins.

Though I'm afraid of Cresecent kicks now... I sprained my left knee doing spinning pump crescents (I landed badly on the left, was kicking with my right (Yes, flashy and useless, I was impressing my friends, go figure))

[Delirium]

Supreme Allah is correct.

Another martial arts lesson. Your strength does not matter nearly as much as your precision, timing, and the location you hit. You can put power into a kick without being super strong.

There are parts of the human body - the groin, for example - no, not the family jewels, a little higher - if you land a well-placed blow there, no matter what your opponent's size compared to yours, they will assuredly drop to the ground in agony.

Power comes from Strength, Strength comes from Speed, Speed comes from Technique. Or so I'm told.

[Swordsman]

I've always thought of the circle kick in the game as a spinning heel kick, actually. I'd assumed the circle kick was a leftover from the original DIKU code, since it didn't seem practical to me for unstable terrain (i.e., loose sand). IMO the crescent kick isn't as widely known, but then again maybe one of the original DIKU programmers was a martial artist. I guess I'll have to go back and look at the kicking messages again, heh.

Tae Kwon Do: I have to ask, Supreme Allah, which Tae Kwon Do are you talking about? Are you talking about the WTF style that we see in the Olympics? I don't necessarily disagree (depending on what exactly you're talking about), but I do think you're making a very sweeping statement. I've met an elite-forces soldier IRL who trained in Tae Kwon Do, and I doubt he would mess around with anything impractical, but then I should add it wasn't WTF.

Swordsman

[John]

I've met an elite-forces soldier IRL who trained in Tae Kwon Do, and I doubt he would mess around with anything impractical, but then I should add it wasn't WTF.

I'll quote the WoT series and say "Anything is a weapon. A pitchfork can be just as deadly as a sword, it's all a matter of how you use it".

Same for karate techniques, some will be better weapons then others, but even WTF style could probably be used in a fight, just not as well as other styles.

[Rindan]

Probably a little late to ad, but I always thought of kick as being 'close combat maneuver not involving a weapon to do damage'.  I wouldn't be offended if someone kicked me, then emoted trying to elbow me.

Often times I think people are a little too caught up in the idea of standing face to face with someone slashing weapons, then all of a sudden one guy throwing out a kick.  I tend to picture combat as being faster and involving a lot more movement.  Whenever I had one of my characters do a kick, I generally liked to describe how he could possibly get his foot in without having a weapon hack it off.  For instance, if the person in question had a shield, then my normal kick maneuver would be to emote throwing my weight into their shield, and trying to lift a knee under their shield.   Is that a real combat maneuver?  No clue.  Seeing my character throw his weight into another person and try and snap up a kick knee to the groan looks nice to me though.  Further, if I was stopped, I would emote being pushed off the shield, or having my rising knee be caught by the shield.  Play around with it a little.  You don't have to just kick the person.

As to the actual balance of it, I too would like to see it tweaked.  In fact, I would like to see all combat maneuvers tweaked.  For instance, I think that kick should be less successful then it is now on a standing person.  However, I think that kick should be far more likely to succeed then it does now on person who has been knocked over.  If someone falls for one reason or another, kicking makes perfect sense.  I have found though that if there is a difference between kicking a person who is standing and a person who is not standing it is minimal.  Further, I would like to see kick leaving a person 'off balance' for a few rounds.  I would suggest having their defense temporarily being lowered after a kick.

Additionally, I would like to see more failure and success types to the different maneuvers.  I know that I fell down laughing the first time my bad ass mercenary grabbed a newbie kick spammer by his left and threw him onto his ass.  If someone wanted to get real fancy, the chance for a kick (or disarm) to succeed would drop the more it is used over a short period of time until the point where yields critical failures even against people who are not veteran warriors.

Armageddon has some neat quirks to its combat code.  Between two evenly matched warriors there actually is some level of strategy involved in terms of when you use your special moves.  Namely, if someone performs a special maneuver, depending upon their success or failure, there are ideal responses you can make.  I would very much like to see more quirks like this.  A little more strategy could be achieved by increasing the positive and/or negative effects of using a special move.  If you wanted to get real fancy, you could have special moves affect each other.

[X-D]

Kinda scary, I don't think I have ever disagreed with any or Rindan's posts...I must be getting old or something.

Anyway, I would also like to see almost all the same things allowing a bit more strategy in combat, I always think it is kinda odd when the opponent I am fighting falls to the ground and I really cannot land a kick on him any easier then normal, nor does it do any more damage if I do, yet I will be hitting him a lot easier with my weapons, specialy when you consider your feet are in a better position to strike a prone person then your weapons.

Some other messages would be nice too and oh, how about a chance on bash, based on skill of each person or something of both people going down, kinda like a partial fail, so and so slams into you knocking you both to the ground in a tangle of limbs and weapons, or knocks you down but loses his balance and falls, (should apply to mobs...eer npc's too) a chance that both people could lose a weapon on a disarm, a chance of maybe disarming more then one weapon at a time, things like that.

[Supreme Allah]

Tae Kwon Do: I have to ask, Supreme Allah, which Tae Kwon Do are you talking about? Are you talking about the WTF style that we see in the Olympics? I don't necessarily disagree (depending on what exactly you're talking about), but I do think you're making a very sweeping statement. I've met an elite-forces soldier IRL who trained in Tae Kwon Do, and I doubt he would mess around with anything impractical, but then I should add it wasn't WTF.

Well, the use an actual fighter has for Tae Kwon Do is a great deal different from the 'pure' form of the martial art itself. I didn't mean to say that Tae Kwon Do is completely worthless - that is not true. What a person like your friend (a soldier) does with Tae Kwon Do is incorporate its strong points into a more broad-based fighting style. Your friend may have taken Tae Kwon Do, but I'd wager that he also recieved a great deal of training in grappling and/or other martial arts.

The thing about Tae Kwon Do is that it is competely centered around the use of kicks. If someone were trying to learn how to kick better in general, then Tae Kwon Do may be a good class to take. But I doubt many of its techniques - such as a spinning heel kick - could really be used effectively against a trained fighter in combat.

If a green beret, a marine, or a man like your friend encountered an enemy in the battlefield that happened to be a WTF-style, Olympic-class Tae Kwon Do martial artist, he'd probably take the guy to the ground (after taking a kick or two at most) and snap him in two.

[Twilight]

Tae Kwon Do is essentially a sport.  70% kicks 30% punches or so.  No grappling (that I know of at least in the pure form).

Tang So Do is closely related, but is a combat martial art.

As for circle kicks, I always thought they were basically a very quick roundhouse, although crescent kicks make sense.  But when I emote, I pretty much always ignore that the code is always going to give me one kind of message in favor of what is realistic for the fight.

As for crescent kicks, I had a girl, 5'4" 130 pounds, black belt accidentally kick me (5'11", 210 pounds, green belt) in the jaw once, sorta in a roughish, hard full out sparring session.  We weren't supposed to do head shots, so it was surprising.  It basically turned me all the way around so that I was facing the other direction from her, and put me to my knees.  I couldn't physically close my jaw all the way for three hours.

Yeah, kicks can be effective, my Shihan, she's like.. 5'3", amazing at kicks, and when she sparred with one of the students from another class (The kid was testing for his black) She could always keep the kid away with her kicks, and since she really never needs to put her foot down during the time a sparring session takes, it was really tough for the kid to get close to her, and since she was so quick with the kicks, he couldn't grab them either, just had to block and hope to push in.

She says our style is Kempo Tae Kwon Do, but she's studied under about five more styles, so I get to use my fists more, good thing since my kicks are bad. Well, not bad, but I can't get them past stomach height (On someone my size, that being  6'4")

Agreed with Rindan, a 'kick' doesn't always have to be a kick, I've emoted elbows, and lots of knees. With the knees I emoted that I was striking at their weapons with mine, just trying to tangle them up enough to get a knee in. For the elbow, it was if I missed a string of weapon attacks, so I would emote dragging my elbow back across on a really unbalanced miss.

Maybe we should rename 'kick' to 'strike' and depending on where you hit, it gives a different message. Still, it should be harder to land a hit to the head, just like combat.

[elven mul]

OK guys, every time one of these issues comes up some experts end up debating incredibly detailed points about the merits and disadvantages of the combat manouvre in question in real life terms. We have people tell us about their martial arts experience, their Society for Creative Anachronism experience, etc., etc. That's great, but it's always in the kind of detail that will NEVER be applicable to Armageddon, so why bother? The issue was pretty simple; it wasn't a call to total realism or to ask for the coding of complex advanced martial arts in the game.

Kick. Way too much damage currently. That's it. No need to discuss how you can kill someone with a single kick and so forth, that's all moot. In case you haven't noticed, we're playing a game where characters can get slashed, gored, stabbed, bitten, clubbed, etc., several times over and over, so if a two-handed sword slash to the neck isn't going to kill them, please don't give me the elaborate details about kicks in real life. It's a game, not the same thing as real life.

If you don't think that 15-20 points damage through good solid armour (!)is too much damage for an elf kick (that practically never misses), please do discuss, but I honestly can't understand how the combat system is helped by something that unbalanced.

I say this playing a character who has a well-developed kick skill by the way, so I'm not saying this because I think "other" classes have an unfair advantage (although I'm fairly sure my character has never kicked as hard as certain elves/halflings/raptors etc.).

[John]

OK guys, every time one of these issues comes up some experts end up debating incredibly detailed points about the merits and disadvantages of the combat manouvre in question in real life terms. why bother?

I think they were enjoying talking about it, and how they imagine certain things in Armageddon and all of the other points they raised. Sure it's a bit off topic and has nothing to do with Arm, but I know nothing about martial arts and I found it quite interesting.

So I say continue talking about that strange thing called RL. I might play it sometime.

[Twilight]

Ok, RL aside, I think kick damage is ok as it is.  Could you please elaborate on what you would consider appropriate damage, Elven Mul?  I'm just wondering how toned down you would want it.  Having played a warrior at the time when most races kicks did 1-3 damage, no matter what your skill, I think that more damage for kick is nice.  When a kick does that low a damage, but you still have to deal with wait state, etc, one gets to ask what is the point of the skill?  At least with the potential to do as much damage as a sword hit, or a couple of sword hits, kick as some value.  Now, perhaps these kinds of damages should be reserved for those skilled at kick, and that kick damage should scale more, with low levels of kick maxing out damage at the 4-5 range, and scaling up to a max of 15 damage or so, as you skill improves.

I personally don't mind kick the way it is.  Its survivable.  Its getting hit on my waist and going from 100+ to zero stun in one hit I don't like  

Yes, I was having a good time discussing it, but it also did have something to do with the game. Specifically, the probability of a kick getting through in armed combat, knowing what the hell the game is telling us when it says Circle Kick, the probability of kicking someone in the head.

I know it wasn't what you wanted to hear Elven Mul, because it seems you're concerned solely about the damage and NPC skill levels. Then again.. you haven't been the -nicest- guy throughout this thread when people differ from the topic a bit.

[Vositus]

...Tae Kwon Do in general isn't a very practical martial art, just a widely known and relatively simple one...

No offesnse but I believe Tae Kwon Do is a pratical martial art.  I've been at the sport of just about 5 years and think im pretty good at it. TKD's fighting style , while not the most offensive, can teach some pretty rough kicks.

[krelin]

I think in this respect the term "practicality" has something to do with the length of time required to master the art well enough to use it in a fight.  I don't think anyone would question the ability of a master in TKD (or a number of other somewhat extravagant martial arts) to kick ass in a bar-fight.  The real question is, how well does the 1-2 month range of students do at defending themselves?  With respect to what TKD I've studied, my guess is not that well.  Being able to throw a kick your opponent can't read/block/counterstrike takes a great deal of study, and a lot of the TKD I've seen taught focuses heavily on kicking strikes.  A few other arts focusing on hand-strikes, chin na (holds and grappling techniques), and very limited kicks (knee-strikes, sweeps), seem more practical in that sense.

*plink*plink* The two 'sid I stole from that templar over there.

[Carnage]

It teaches you how to beat the crap out of someone in self defense. How to hurt them and minimize damage to yourself.

It's practical.

[Elven Mul]

cry me a river for sticking to the topic instead of heading down lengthy tangents that have no applicability whatsoever to the discussion and that, on these boards, typically derail the topic in an egregious manner no matter how interesting. It's been said before: the messages you see when kicking are not necessarily accurate in terms of location, so why should they be accurate in terms of explicit message? If you pay attention, you'll see you can get kicked in any location, including the feet. But the kick message doesn't say so, of course. QED as far as my objections to date go.

But no, here we are in the Code Discussion forum waffling on about martial arts needlessly. Open another discussion in another section of the boards if you must, but don't derail my OP please.

The kick I'd like to see is one that is more balanced in terms of the actual combat system as a whole. Right now you can be very skilled at combat but still get killed or seriously hurt by a couple of lowly raptors in the mood for kicking (or any other kicking NPCs really) if you don't kill them fast enough. The critters wouldn't be able to land a blow on you, but when it comes to their kicks it's a completely different story--and for more damage (through armour) than their actual blows would deliver, were they able to connect.

So the damage factor is way too high, because kick becomes an arbitrary attack. I don't know what it takes to avoid a kick in the game, obviously I am not familiar with the code details ( I know if your kick skill is sufficiently higher than your opponent's you can trip them up, but this is only once the kick attack has succeeded). But it shouldn't come to the point where you get kicked to oblivion by one or two NPCs (or PCs for that matter) who are so far below you in terms of prowess that they never land a blow on you in combat.

If kick is to be such an arbitrary attack then it very simply needs to be toned down. 15-20 (or even more) damage through armour is way too arbitrary for me. It's hardly acceptable when facing one kicker who can put you out of commission with three or four kicks, but when facing two this arbitrariness can cost you your character (plus, it's difficult to notice that you have been kicked if there is a lot of combat spam).

Obviously I'm not talking about scrab kicks here--they are pathetic kickers. But others are, shall we say, a little too good. I agree the days of kicks doing 1-3 damage were not good enough. However 20 damage through armour today seems to me as ridiculous as 1 damage back then. I explained why in an earlier message.