Why do 2handed weapons (especially Claymores) suck so bad?

[GreyRobin]

I couldn't figure out why every world I have ends horribly after I'd even all my gnomes what I thought would be the "best" weapon... I think I'll go hammer and axe until this balance issue is sorted.

[R86]

i think i tried that back when mants were deadly and easily murdered with torches.  4  gnomes in full steel armour with two shields with perks held out against 10-16 mants for a day or two, then died.

For my shield kingdom I'm going to give them "The Best Defense" and "Frenzy" instead of "Shield Wall" and "Guard." I'm hoping shields count as weapons for these offensive perks. I'm not going to rely on their damage alone though, I'll likely include zig zag bridges around their guard stations. (Not their training room though, cause of accidently death all the time.)

[Merry76]

I think Faark analyzed the source code good enough, and he kind of found out that everything besides "bare handed" fires those perks. So Shields just might get extra damage with them.

[R86]

Just read Faark's findings in the ranged thread and it seems Frenzy excludes Shields. Guard and Shield Wall give a bonus to block rate, which makes me imagine the Gnomes will choose to block more often than attack with these perks, which would actually be worse for a pure Shield kingdom. I can't imagine a shield having a very high disarm chance, so none of the perks would really end up helping that much.

Still sounds really cool though.

[CabbageFoot]

This is a super old post I understand, but it has high google relevance so it may be worth posting here is someone is interested. 2H weapons don't sucks as much as people think they do. 2H weapons technically do as much damage at 2 1H weapons combined, which makes them worse for blocking because blocks are calculated per weapon used (shields are also a weapon and they are better at blocking). The real advantage to 2H weapons is overcoming flat resistances from armor. So if a plate armor has 360 slashing resistance and 40 blunt resistance leather armor has the oposite (40 slashing/360 blunt resistance). Your 2 axes do 940ish damage per hit(after a generous amount of multiplies to damage), then 940-40 = 900 damage. That's about 95% damage penetration against leather. Not bad. Vs the plate armor your axes would do 940-360 = 580 damage. That's about 60% damage penetration. So obviously axes are worse vs plate then leather. Now looking at battleaxes the damage penetration is 98% vs 90%. The difference in damage penetration is a lot smaller, so it takes lest swings with both hands to do the amount of damage you need to to break through the armor, additionally, because the damage to armor is more focused, their armor is bound to pop quicker vs 2h swings on average then with 1h swings which will be more spread out on different body parts on average. The way damage works in this game is once you crack the armor you do massive damage, if you don't crack the armor you don't do anything, so the deeper the hit the more likely you are to do enough damage to cleave right to the bone. I did the math for this in a google doc by mining the weapon stats and checking out the damage formula. There are a lot of drawbacks to using 2h weapons, don't get me wrong, but having a squad of literal armor crackers (warhammers) makes a lot of sense, and as long as you have prosthetics, you can patch them right up afterwards.

[Merry76]

Hi CabbageFoot

This post was indeed super ancient. After I posted it before RoboB0b recoded how combat (and armour, specifically) worked. The Land Of Claymores saga happened back when the "hitpoints" of the armour was not pooled, but you had 3 different types of hp - one vs slashing, one vs piercing and the last vs. blunt. This caused the claymore that did have 2 damage types at the same time to divide its damage potential into two pools, being actually the worst thing since the invention of a shit sandwich. Twohanded got a lot better, but the game had a weird balance in the end (unmodded) in which the armour had the brunt of the health, and the gnome beneath it was basically squish. To elaborate: Gnome skin, flesh and bone together was about 100 hp with very low block (if anything at all), steel was 9k or something. A steel weapon did about 700 damage. This means that everytime the armour broke, the gnome was basically dead. Armour blocked all the damage until it broke, but let status effects through sometimes, wich caused the attacked to be knocked prone or loose its breath etc.

If I would revive it, i'd buff gnome resilience by factor 5 and lower the scaling of the weapons (so they can take a hit naked), while lowering the scaling of armour too. Combat would again be bloody (and unrealistic. I do care little for that). Unfortunaly thats about all you can mod, because how combat/armour actually works is pretty hardcoded.