Armor Shredding

[Dai2]

Hello,

I have been playing the game for sometime now, and I recently came back after a long break. And not sure if this was always the case but I have noticed that armor shredding happens a lot more often than I expect. Usually during incursions when farmers do not do enough damage to enemies to overcome armor, they shred 1 armor instead. Also when enemies deal damage, sometimes they just shred armor even though they have no weapon or buff/property that shreds. I have noticed this with warding as well, however the difference I have seen is that in some cases 0 damage is taken without any reduction in warding.

Was just wondering if this is intended as I haven't seen anything more in-depth about how warding and armor shredding works.

[Trekopep]

Yup, 1 armor is shredded any time an attack doesn't deal enough damage to get through the armor. (Like a year ago, there used to be a damage threshold that needed to be passed to shred armor, but we got rid of that because it wasn't clear) Warding can't currently be shredded.

[Dai2]

Thanks for the reply! That makes sense.

[Manxome]

That's a nice simple rule for ensuring that you can't armor yourself to the point of full invincibility, although weirdly it means there are some situations where you will wish an enemy had a stronger attack than they actually do.

[Dai2]

Originally posted by Manxome:

That's a nice simple rule for ensuring that you can't armor yourself to the point of full invincibility, although weirdly it means there are some situations where you will wish an enemy had a stronger attack than they actually do.

The issues I was running into were that during some incursions I was expecting to completely block attacks from small enemies and it was shredding my armor and eventually they started dealing damage which snowballed into flanking attacks which ended up killing my character in one turn. I had assumed that only "shredding" attacks could shred armor and that other attacks would simply get blocked or deal no damage like warding. At first I thought I simply misread, but when it happened multiple times I created the post.

With so many enemies in a single battle, if you happen to be short on AOE capability I was wondering if there is a way a well armored warrior could defend against a larger group of smaller enemies? It feels like the only sustainable way to deal with large groups of enemies is hit and run if you lost a hero or two, or retreat.

[Worldwalker Games]

Yeah in general taking more than one or two hits per turn gets really deadly really fast, the gameplay is designed more around controlling who can attack you, than just tanking it all.

[Manxome]

My SOP in games of this general style (grid-based strategy-adventuring?) is essentially "never let them attack"

1. Kill everything in the first round
2. If you can't do #1, then move completely out of range
3. You'd be surprised how rarely you need a third option

Of course, this means character builds end up focusing pretty heavily on making sure I can kill things in one round.

This "offense is everything" balance-point is kind of a weird contrast with JRPG-style battles, which often have many similar abilities and mechanics but instead tend to have a "defense is everything" balance-point (where the boss has a mountain of HP and essentially your only chance is to have defense+healing so strong that you're effectively invulnerable). I poke fun at both.

But my main gripe with "offense is everything" is that it tends to mean that a relatively tiny slip can easily turn into a disaster. If you planned everything correctly and your luck wasn't too awful, you wipe the board and get a flawless victory. But if you miscounted range by one space, your guy dies. If the line-of-sight rules worked slightly differently than you thought, your guy dies. If you rolled two critical fumbles in the same round, your guy dies. If your last movement of the round revealed an additional enemy that was hiding around the corner, your guy dies.

Best fix I've seen for that is high clarity and low randomness. I like that Wildermyth gives 100% hit chance when flanking; results in a lot fewer rounds where the final killing blow just randomly fails. My current gold standard for the high-clarity-low-randomness style is Into the Breach, where all enemies "charge up" their attacks and you get a chance to interrupt them, and randomness is basically limited to setup plus rare exceptions that work in your favor.

Of course, "high clarity and low randomness" is in a somewhat different spirit than "procedural storytelling" like WIldermyth is trying to do.

[Dai2]

I see what you guys are saying. I think Star Renegades also does high clarity/low randomness pretty well. And I have started to adjust my strategies now, given what has been said.