Simple Combat Manual

Need a simple starting guide for getting into Exanima? This guide aims to highlight and cover the basics of being effective in Exanima combat, including reading item stats for weapons and armor, core techniques and principles for controlling your character, and tactics to help you survive in both the Campaign and in the Arena mode.

The Basics: Core rules to getting started with Exanima combat.

In my experience, the following are the most fundamental do's and do-not's of Exanima's combat system. The fundamental core of the game is that it deals strongly with dynamic, real-time physics interaction, so depending on how things are visibly moving onscreen, controls that might be for a specific attack can potentially be modified based on how you aim or maneuver your character.

For getting started out quickly, however, this assumes you've gotten a basic feel for the controls, this is more for the quickest and simplest pointers on how to use them effectively.

1. Spacing is Key

The most important element of combat in Exanima is spacing - you can attempt any kind of attack on an enemy, but unless the correct part of the weapon is making contact with the target, the damage won't carry through effectively.

Each weapon has what can effectively be called a 'sweet spot' where the weapon is most capable of doing damage. Globally, this will be at the furthest tip of the weapon, as it travels fastest by nature, and will tend to contain the most mass on any high-impact weapon.

This applies also not only for the offense, but the defense: staying at arm's length is the best way to allow your parrying to work best, while also giving you leeway to use your dashes or steps to potentially avoid an attack and prepare for a counter. Improper spacing can also be used effectively against your opponent, too, if they use a weapon that's much longer than yours, though getting into a point-blank brawl can cause physics to get unpredictable.

When switching weapons, get a feel for the effective range of your weapon with a couple of good practice swings, and recognize the effective area your weapon covers. Also recognize that enemies have optimal ranges at which they operate as well, and you can move and play around their spacing as well, to both exploit and counteract their effects, and predict where an opponent might try to move.

If you practice this tenet regularly, you'll be that much better at preparing to fight in a balanced style with good offense and defense.

2. Don't Overreact with Mouse Movement

Combining with the above, you usually won't need to put that much mouse movement into your swings to boost their damage. In fact the main use of such movement in practice is to usually curve an attack around an opponent's shield rather than to make your swing more powerful.

What's most important about this rule however is the risks that overreacting with mouse movement poses - you can potentially twirl your character backwards if you move your mouse too severely, for example, which can leave you wide-open to an enemy. If you're keeping your movements simple and maintaining a good distance, you are already well capable of landing solid hits by following the first rule. In most cases, overreacting with mouse movement is more risky than it's worth.

Instead it's more valuable to generally practice your attack manipulation and distancing by using effective footwork, combined with keeping your mouse consistently aimed at your opponent. This allows not only for your dash or step to put extra strength into your attacks, but lets you keep parrying as you would normally as well, and will essentially guarantee safety as long as you can maintain facing or shield strength.

3. Keep an Eye on Momentum

Combat in Exanima is punishing, and will not inherently give you a lot of tools to escape certain pitfalls if you fall victim. This is why enemies such as golems or the giant temple demon (aka 'Sir') are so dangerous, because many of their attacks are powerful enough to send you straight to the ground, making you bait for an immediate follow-up attack.

Thing is that this creed applies in both ways, in that if an enemy gets pushed or knocked down, you'll want to capitalize on the weakness and land extra hits while your target is downed or stunned.

If you've landed a good hit, don't be afraid to swoop in and land some extra ones, as most (but not all) enemies usually will have their attack stopped if hit in the middle of an animation. Inversely, if you've just suffered a hit, it's usually best to try and move out of effective range and wait until you re-establish a neutral stance, capable of parrying further strikes.

Controls: Movement & Camera

Probably the earliest thing you'll learn in this game is that the movement with WASD is tank controls out of combat, and essentially a targeting system in-combat - except the target isn't automatically locked onto an enemy and is instead your mouse, as shown on-screen with a red circle. In both cases, the direction your character is facing is extremely important to how using your WASD keys will affect their movement.

WASD keys can be used to either execute steps, or dashes. By tapping the key, you will do a short-distance step which can be repeated rapidly, and by holding it down, will do a longer dash that can only be done once a second. Dashing is generally more intuitive for movement, avoidance, and offensive windup in time with your swings or thrusts. Meanwhile steps are useful for fine positioning and spacing, especially for narrowly avoiding incoming attacks and preparing your own when in-range. The fact that steps are quick to complete means that once you've used it to defend against an attack, you can quickly follow it up with a dash to pair with your own counterattack!

Of special note is using A and D to strafe, considering the fact that your mouse works as a targeting-point for your character, A and D essentially cause you to circle around your mouse point, which makes it the most effective maneuver you can use to escape being cornered (note that running up against walls, debris, or other things that can potentially trip your character's walk cycle up, are all extremely dangerous). It should also be noted that your character also moves left or right with these keys, relative to their facing, not the camera's. As a result if the character's facing down and you press A to move left, they'll move to their left - or your right. To alleviate the difficulty quickly, it's best to use the V key for automatic 'mouse' viewing, which will effectively reset the orientation of the camera to match your character's.

Depending on tastes the camera can be manipulated further to suit your needs. A completely top-down camera, for example, can give a great objective view for measuring the exact distances attacks might reach (though it might be disorienting for others).

Controls: Offense and Defenses.

In essence the offense and defense in exanima is a bit more procedural and automatic than what you might be used to. The big thing here is that defending is done automatically when in combat stance. Inversely, this defense becomes more difficult the more movement, spinning, or attacking you're attempting to do.

The most effective ways to defend, in general, are to move to gain greater distance and not attack. By not taking other actions this will allow your character to automatically execute parries with maximal efficiency.

Your character will attempt to parry so long as you are not holding down an attack button (LMB). How effectively they'll be able to shift their stance to succeed at their action is dependent on several factors, including your character's skills and your equipment configuration. With certain skills, you can maintain defensive movements while still performing attacks, but the fact still stands: defense is the most reliable when you're not actively attempting to attack, so it's advisable to be light on your LMB to minimize vulnerability!

The Three Types of Attack

Exanima allows you to execute three different types of attacks with your character, each with their own use cases, advantages, and disadvantages.

The Swing
To perform a swing, simply click and/or hold the left mouse button. You do a right-to-left swing by default, but can move your mouse to do a left-to-right swing instead.

Swings can be imparted with extra momentum either by rotating your character with your mouse, or by stepping into the direction of your swing as it starts (W and/or A/D).

+ Covers a wide arc around you, making it easy to hit targets with.
+ Benefits most visibly from effective movement in terms of force applied.
+ Default right-to-left swing works excellently with shields, maintains cover on vulnerable side.
+ Only attack type that benefits from Remise, making it less punishing to miss with than most other attack types.
+ Only attack type to utilize both weapons when Dual-Wielding.
+ Surprisingly long hit window, can hit pretty far around the character.

- Inherently requires more momentum to do heavy damage.
- Difficult to get around shields with
- Has little to no chance of hitting short or low targets unless you manually crouch.
- Very poor performance on enemies too close to you.

The Overhead

To do an overhead swing, double-click and your character will swing their weapon down over their head to strike high-to-low.

Overhead attacks can be given extra force if you crouch in time with your downward swing (X), though this does also make maneuvering to hit your enemy difficult. The overhead can also be modified to have some sideways coverage if used creatively with mouse movement.

+ Powerful, punishing damage without any mouse manipulation
+ Most intuitive attack to use to hit downed enemies
+ Can manipulate your character facing to curve the overhead around shields.
+ Tendency to bypass initial parry reaction (which is a high block) and then hit a foe in their lower body or shins for high damage.

- Little to no benefit from moving with your attack.
- Difficult to hit with, narrow area covered
- Also easily avoided via sidestepping.
- Slow activation both inherently and with input method.
- If you miss, is very easy to punish due to leaving you with very poor weapon placement.

The Thrust

You can perform a thrust with your weapon by holding down the alt-key while pressing the LMB.

Thrust attacks will hit harder if you step forward directly in-line with your stab attack (W).

+ Can be effective at very close range.
+ Remains effective even on unexpected weapon types (such as high-impact hammers)
+ Gains bonus damage when used on weapons with a visible 'thrust' statistic.
+ Very difficult for non-shield users to properly parry.

- Longer weapons will still need space to prepare a thrust.
- Very slow attack type on specific two-handed weapons ('greatsword' style weapons.)
- Botched thrusts can easily be punished with overheads.
- Difficult to manipulate aim while trying to also build up momentum.

Game Mechanics: Damage, Stun, & Knockdown

The game mechanics that surround what would otherwise be just raw physics determine a lot about what you and enemies can and cannot do at specific times. It's best to think through this as a set of 'states' that your character can possibly be in:

Neutral State

You are treated as being in a neutral stance when in combat, and not actively attacking. You maintain neutral stance both when standing still and when moving with either dashes or steps.

While in neutral stance, your character will automatically attempt to block or parry incoming attacks from their front, though you'll still be vulnerable to attacks coming in from behind (including potential swings that might curve around you).

You can do basically anything from this stance, including initiating your attacks, which puts you into:

Attack State

While attacking, your weapons will deal damage when they make contact with opponents, given the following is true:

• The correct part of the weapon (the blade of the sword, the head of the hammer, etc) makes contact with the target.
  
• The weapon has enough momentum (a basic swing, with no mouse movement, is enough)
  
• The weapon has been swung or is in a swinging state - usually this is denoted by the sound of a 'woosh' when the attack is attempted.

Aside from this, you can be in the middle of attempting an attack, but not actually be able to execute it. There's naturally about a 1-2 second gap between swings you can attempt without skills. The rate of swinging you're capable of is largely based on the balance of your weapon. (If you have the Remise skill, you can perform two side-swings with half the wait time between the two.)

So long as you're holding the attack button down (LMB) you're treated as being in this state, even if your attacks are on cooldown. This has nasty implications, because while you're like this your parries have a much lower chance of success, particularly when attempting to do it with your main weapon.

Stunned State

If you take an attack that has sufficiently high impact compared to your armor, or dealt a big enough burst of lethal damage (of slashing, piercing, or crushing), you will be stunned. Regardless of what action you're attempting, you'll be stopped, with your upper-body locking up. While like this, you move at a reduced rate, have a poorer level of balance, and are unable to initiate an attack or parry.

Being like this can be deadly if the opponent has access to quick weapons (dual-wielding or punching). Your first priority, when struck like this, will be to back away and execute any evasive maneuvers possible to avoid further damage.

Depending on the opponent's arms, you might be able to benefit from closing in very close while stunned to potentially avoid further damage. However considering that they have the advantage when it comes to overall balance, and that they can potentially do a stab, it's probably more of a risk than it's worth.

Knocked Down State

If you manage to lose balance, you will be knocked flat on your back. This is the most vulnerable position you can be in, and you cannot control your character while like this. You cannot parry, are forced to stand up slowly over time, and are susceptible to hits from overheads. Avoid falling or getting knocked down if you can.

For defense, the general steps you can take to avoid being knocked down include:

• Don't fight in areas with lots of debris on the ground - this is prime fodder for you to end up tripping on, though if careful you can use this to make your foes fall down instead.
  
• Avoid battles with very large monsters - either fight/dodge outside of their effective range, or just run and look for an alternative solution.
  
• As per the basic tips, don't over-react with your mouse movements. You're more likely to fall over if you're constantly spinning around.

At the highest level of execution, most advanced techniques in Exanima focus on using your weapon's physics creatively to force your opponent into this position, usually by executing hooks or trips, or knocking your opponent down with sheer velocity of your weapons.

Damage

Damage you take is broken down into two major categories:
Impact Damage - This is shown as emptied space from your yellow health bar. Impact damage will recover over time when you're out of combat.
Lethal Damage - Lethal damage is shown as red on your health bar, and does not regenerate over time unless you either drink a healing potion (in campaign) or take some time off from battles (in arena).
Your character will die if they have taken enough lethal damage (usually death occurs if about 90%+ of your HP has been taken by Lethal Damage). Regardless of damage source, being knocked unconscious also will always incur a small amount of Lethal Damage.

Equipment: Weaponry Stats

The information here is a combination of content from the game's Manual (shown in italics) combined with more detailed descriptions of how these affect gameplay.

Weapon stats are divided into Four basic stats, along with a configuration of up to four possible damage types the weapon can deal when it lands its hits:

Length
This stat isn't documented anywhere in the game's ingame manual or on the weapon-stat page, but it's once again the most important to notice and use - as it, as usual, determines how the weapon spaces itself out. The only way to really perform this comparison is to just eyeball how large the weapon is while it's in your hands or in the game world (as the inventory icons for weapons aren't always to-scale.)

Longer weapons generally correlate to having more weight and less balance, and very long weapons can swing their tips with great speed simply due to the sheer leverage their size offers. Of course, long weapons also will suffer if the user gets cornered, and there's generally a negative correlation between overall stats and length as well (or in other words, weapons that appear to have good balance and impact combinations usually are also fairly short.)

Weight
The overall weight of a weapon. Heavier weapons typically deliver blows with greater force but are slower.

Weight is the only stat that's shown as a continuous dial rather than a set of pips. Weight tends to correlate extremely strongly with balance and impact, with impact rising as you get heavier, and balance falling in return.

Using heavy weapons often results in potentially more devastating hits, with a higher chance of stunning enemies or knocking them down, and less hits required to kill. Inversely, light weapons often have greater flexibility in use, and can potentially offset a lighter weight with how quickly the weapon can move while attacking (faster weapon swing equates to roughly equal levels of force delivered) and defending (higher chance of successful parrying.)

Balance
How well balanced a weapon is. Better balanced weapons are more responsive allowing attacks to be initiated and recovered from more quickly.

In physical terms, balance generally will refer to how well centered the weapon's center-of-balance is in relative to your grip, with optimal balance often achieved on daggers or swords where the hilt can carry the most weight. Inversely, many bludgeoning weapons load most of their mass into the head of the weapon, which can result in poor balance.

Balance can overall be thought of as an indicator of handling difficulty of the weapon, independent from the weapon's size or weight. It affects the same things that weight would determine, but puts it in a more game-objective light than weight can since it takes the length of the weapon's model out of context.

Impact
How well a weapon transfers the force of a blow to its target. Top heavy weapons typically feature higher impact values. Impact is primarily a source of non lethal damage but sufficiently large impacts can cause lethal injury. The force a weapon is capable of delivering will influence the effectiveness of other damage types.

Impact tends to be inversely proportional to Balance, and the two stats tend to equally add up to around 5 or 6 pips at best. Plenty of much longer weapons exist where the balance and impact stats will add up to less however, usually exchanging balance for a much further reach.

As per weight, high-impact weapons will be much more likely to knock targets off-balance and interrupt attacks when they hit, and the damage that impact can impart is strongly affected by how much movement or force you put into the attack, even if no other damage types are involved. All weapons have a degree of impact damage, and it's the most global way to determine how much damage the weapon can do. However, independent of impact are the four different damage types that layer on top of it:

Slash
The sharpness of an edged weapon and its cutting power. Slash damage can be effective even when applied with relatively little force, it can cut and slice as well as chop. It is however easily mitigated by armour.

Strong slashing weapons will easily draw blood and deal grievous damage on lightly-armored targets, often quickly racking up lethal damage. As per the description, slash damage doesn't require much extra weapon manipulation to land a strong hit, but it's also the damage type that armor builds up resistances to fastest against.

Pierce
The piercing potential of a weapon when swung. Piercing damage is particularly effective at exploiting gaps in armour.

Piercing damage is an all-around effective damage type that stands between Slash and Crush in terms of base effectiveness versus armor countering. It's not an inherently common damage type to see on most weapons however.

Crush
The crushing power of a weapon. Crushing weapons are potentially capable of bending the strongest armour and delivering damage through it however rely heavily on a strong force being applied to the impact.

Bludgeoning weapons are perhaps the most consistent of the damage types in terms of delivering hits: the strongest armor sets cover this damage type the least, part of the reason why padded clothing is often worn with platemail sets. Crush damage takes the level of impact delivered from your weapon into account very strongly, and will require the most physics manipulation of the weapons used to deliver their maximal damage. Then again, many weapons that deal crush damage will tend to have inherently high impact levels as-is.

Thrust
Piercing damage delivered via thrusts. Weapons with sharp points will features a higher thrust rating, however impact damage may still be delivered with a thrust.

This is the only damage type stat specific to one attack type (thrusting), and should essentially be treated as a damage bonus for landing a hit using that attack type, particularly at the furthest tip of the weapon.

That said, thrust attacks are shockingly effective even on weapons without this stat if they have enough impact (i.e. it's pretty easy to land a finishing blow with a thrust with a sledgehammer.) Inversely, this also means that weapons that specialize in thrust generally won't have that much of a problem attacking with other damage types either (you can still swing a spear and expect a decent amount of damage).

Equipment: Weaponry Types

Weaponry (which in this case I'll cover any handheld equipment including shields) falls into three basic categories, with a small set of sub-categories in some of them, which are worth discussing.

• One-Handed Weapons
  
  • Flails
• Shields
  
• Two-Handed Weapons
  
  • Close-Grip two-handers
    
  • Polearm-Grip two-handers

One-Handed Weapons

Most of the first weapons you'll find are one-handed weapons, which usually have a moderate combination of impact and balance, and rarely go over the halfway point in terms of weight. One-handers globally will be smaller than two-handers, which overall makes them better suited to closer-distance brawling.

Using any weapon without a shield (including wielding only a single one-handed weapon) will use your weapon to attempt parries automatically. Weapon Parries don't seem to have an intrinsic limit to how often they're attempted by the player, but they overall seem less reliable than using shields. Following suit, parrying with the two-handed weapons also tends to cover a lot more ground than the single-handed ones do.

The biggest advantages you'll be able to leverage by focusing on using a single-handed weapon is that you can either gear up to use a shield for a greater guarantee of safety in brawls, or to use the dual-wield skill to pair up weapons and essentially let each arm act as a parrying implement on its own.

Special Note: The Flail
version 0.8 of Exanima introduced the unique Flail weapon (also known as a ball-and-chain or morning star). Essentially, the handle of the weapon and its spiked head, where the attack is meant to land, are joined by a flexible chain, which will affect the momentum the Flail builds up, the damage it's capable of, and effectively extends its range. This is another weapon type that takes some practicing to get a handle on.

From my experience, the Flail's unique traits make it serviceable, if not excellent, at using swings and overheads, and its chain's variability means it has a pretty good shot of curving itself around shields as well. Its biggest weakness is when attempting to use it with thrusts, as what normally would be an attack that can work at extreme close-range with no momentum buildup, now needs a fair amount of distance to make the thrust extend the weapon's chain and head properly.

Shields

Shields are off-handed pieces of equipment that bolster your armor. Hits that collide with your shield will absorb all damage taken - unless your shield arm has tired, in which case the attack will still be stopped and not stagger your character, but it will deal damage. Shields have their own entire skill tree devoted to them, which is largely the only way you'll be able to make heavy usage of the benefits that shields can truly offer.

Shields are simplified and break down into three (four) stats:

• Weight: similar to weapons, this is shown as a sliding bar. Heavier Shields are more difficult to maneuver into place.
  
• Size: also similar to weapons this is a trait of shields that isn't explicitly shown as a stat and instead is just appraised by the visible size of the shield's model in the game world. Once again, the inventory icons for shields usually aren't shown to-scale to how large they truly are.
  The larger a shield is, the less movement that's necessary by its user to maneuver it to block an attack, though the blocking stanima for larger shields does seem to drain much faster.
  
• Impact: Impact generally acts like Armor Impact (explained in the armor section), and is a reduction of nonlethal damage dealt. In the case of shields this can be treated as the efficiency at which the shield operates in terms of stanima lost per hit.
  
• Encumbrance: Directly tied to weight and armor, Encumbrance represents the added encumbrance on your character the shield will impose. It tends to directly correlate with added size and weight of a shield, but high encumbrance can be counterbalanced when used with the Mobility skill.

Two-Handed Weapons

Two-Handers benefit from overall higher reach and impact than one-handed weapons do, with fairly effective parries to make up for the fact that shields aren't usable with them. Of all the melee weapon choices, two-handed weapons require the least number of skills to reach maximum effectiveness, but as a result, gain less benefits in the long run for how they can play offensively or defensively. Their general unwieldiness means they are also more vulnerable when cornered.

Two-handed weapons are broken down into two general subtypes: polearm-style weapons, and bat/greatsword-style weapons. Which classification of two-hander your weapon is can be seen on the inventory screen based on the stance your character has while idle, with polearms held in the left hand and hammers, greatswords, and other weapons held in the right hand.

The two weapon variants reflect a different grip that's used on each one, with polearm-grip weapons having a wide amount of space between the hands, and the greatsword grip putting the hands close together (as if holding a bat - or a two-handed sword.) Polearm-grip weapons tend to be longer than most other weapons, but aren't as high-impact due to less leverage the grip stance offers. Fitting for holding a polearm, though, this weapon type has fairly quick thrust attacks.
greatsword-grip weapons tend to have disproportionately high impact versus balance, owing to many of these weapons being brutally top-heavy. The swings of such weapons usually do excellent damage, but this is offset by the extended windup required when trying to use a thrust - the user needs to alter their grip in these cases to hold the weapon further down the haft, or on the blade (a technique when using greatswords known as Half-Swording), which takes about a second extra to set up. This aside, the thrusts from these weapons can still be highly damaging, you just need to account for the extra windup period the thrust has.

Equipment: Armor Stats

Armor is far and away the most in-depth part of your character you can modify, with the potential to compare, layer, and position armor. Unlike many weapons which can easily have their merits measured by their stats, armor has more variety and even includes degrees of quality variance between identical pieces.
Armor Stats can be thought of as an inversion of weapon stats, with pieces having the core traits of Coverage, Impact, and Encumbrance, combined with up to three damage-resistance types.

Impact
How much of the force of an impact the armour can absorb and redistribute. Impact mitigation is effective against all types of contact damage and layering armour is very effective in increasing this protection. Rigid and padded armours typically offer the best impact protection.

Impact offers the most basic, pragmatic damage reduction of the stats, lowering the amount of non-lethal damage taken per hit. Impact tends to build up heavily on your character's body parts as you gain more armor, and the impact stat is often very common.

Slash
A rating for protection against slashing damage. Even slight protection can effectively prevent a sharp edge from cutting through.

As per the description, slash damage resistance is a resistance type that builds up fast on armor, with even pieces of everyday clothing providing a small degree of resistance. Slash damage develops to eventually become a near non-issue, as you obtain access to chainmail and padded cloth.

Because the effectiveness of slash damage resistance tends to build up so fast, you'll eventually find it beneficial to ration out your armoring pieces more carefully to mitigate encumbrance instead. The fact about damage types such as these is that they can all hit a practical 'maximum', at which point the incoming attack won't deal any lethal (red) damage unless combined with significant impact.

Pierce
A rating for protection against piercing damage. Thick and dense armour typically offers the best protection against piercing damage.

Pierce protection builds up at a moderate rate. When it comes to proper plate armor, pierce damage has a moderate amount of reduction, and is only somewhat common on different pieces of padding.

Crush
A rating for protection against crushing damage. Rigid armours protect best against crushing damage but a very strong blow may still cause the armour to bend or flex and fail to entirely protect the wearer.

Crush resistance remains the biggest damage gap regardless of what kind of armor you gravitate towards, and while plenty of padded clothing offers extra resistance to it, the overall sum of pieces will never get anywhere as high as it will for Slash resistance. Thankfully, crush damage still can build up a fair amount, to the point where it does become more difficult to land significant impact with a crushing attack.

Coverage
Coverage is a rough estimate of how effectively a piece of armour covers the body part it is worn over compared to an equivalent item.

Coverage could be treated as a 'chance to apply' modifier of sorts, or often where or how often the defenses of a piece of armor will apply when landing a glancing blow, or potentially hitting an edge-area nearby the armor piece. Coverage can be treated as a combination both of the actual space the piece of armor covers on your body (a closed-face helm usually has higher coverage than an open-faced one), but in specific cases, can be bolstered without any visible variation (an exceptional open helm has better coverage than a normal open helm, despite using the same model...)

Encumbrance
Not directly listed in the manual, but extremely important: Encumbrance is how much the armor weighs down your character. The amount this encumbrance value influences you comes from a combination of the armor's location and its size, as well as the skills you have (moving in Armor will reduce the encumbrance induced by all armor pieces aside from shields).

For game mechanics, each point of encumbrance you build up will reduce all your movement speeds by around 7% per dot. The most noticeable difference is going from no encumbrance to 1 point, as this immediately influences how quickly your character is capable of starting to walk.

Its most insidious long-term effect, especially at very high encumbrance levels, is how it slows your attack speed. Having strong armor is important, but at a point it becomes much more effective to lose a small degree of protection, in exchange for being able to fight back or escape more effectively.

Equipment: Armor Parts

Armor and protection is strictly based on where you're wearing the armor. You can stack protection on your chest all day but it won't make a difference if you're nailed in the head with a greatsword without any helmet for head protection. That point out of the way, armor pieces can vary widely on what parts of the body they occupy: for example some leather coats only cover the torso, while others are short-sleeved and cover the shoulders as well. The armor pieces also are broken down into several layers. In general though, there's 5 major areas of the body that armor includes, each with several minor areas it can entail separately:

• Head (cranium, face, mask)
  
• Upper Body (torso, shoulders, elbows, wrists)
  
• Lower Body (thighs, shins)
  
• Hands
  
• Feet

The head, upper, and lower body areas have three or four separate layers you can build armor on top of:

• Base Clothing Layer (shirt, pants, cap) - This layer offers only basic protection, usually only 0-1 points of resistance to damage types, but often without any kind of encumbrance induced either.
  
• Mail Layer (chain shirt, chain leggings, chain coifs) - Chainmail is close-fitting and offers excellent slashing damage resistance without much encumbrance.
  
  • Coat layer (upper body only, worn above chain shirts. Anything identified as a 'coat' or tunic goes here.) - Coats usually offer extra crushing damage to the user versus the slashing damage chainmail could offer, and often is worn with pieces of platemail to back up their comparative weakness to crushing damage.
• Armor/Jacket Layer (includes most of what you'd consider to be body armor, and contains the heaviest padded leather armors, splint mail, and plate armors. This layer often has the most piecemeal segments of armor parts such as bracers, greaves, cuisses, pauldrons...) - The defenses offered by parts on these layers varies the widest, but globally you'll find most of the high-encumbrance parts in this layer.

The exception to these separate layers are the hands and feet - you can only wear one pair of gloves or gauntlets, and depending on the piece used, it can also occupy a specific layer traveling up the wrists and legs as well (i.e. wearing leather thigh-high boots stops you from wearing greaves, as it occupies shin and thigh slots for armor).

Skill Selections

As of version 0.8, these are all the combat-oriented skills in the game with direct effects on how your character handles in fights.

Melee Skills

Remise
Immediately follow a swing with another in the opposite direction
Remise is a common and accessible skill with some immediately noticeable effects. On your sideways swings, this will enable you to immediately follow up a missed swing with another in the opposite direction, generally making missed attacks less risky.

Remise can potentially enable you to land two hits in short succession, but don't count on it - the weapon's first hit needs to strike at just the right angle, with minimal resistance, to enable you to activate a second attack. More often than not, the attack will just be halted as usual. On higher-balance weapons which move faster, however, Remise seems to have a higher chance of succeeding even when landing a hit.

Overall, Remise helps a lot in maintaining offensive pressure to dissuade your opponents from closing in. It's not used heavily in the long run, especially in situations where you're pushing an offensive and your foe isn't able to fight back, but the ease it offers in gameplay is undeniable.

Feint
Cease a feiened attack to quickly renew it
Feint enables you to pause your attack at just about any stage of your windup, while not losing progress on your attack windup. This essentially means more combat flexibility with increased timing on when you can let loose an attack, as well as potentially greater defenses, and most importantly, the ability to prepare attack windups on low-balance weapons in advance.

Feint is more difficult to utilize than Remise is, but it can have some use for manipulating your opponent to block in the wrong way if you're clever in how you use it.

Fend
Abandon your attack to quickly parry
A useful defensive measure, fend will increase the reactivity of your parry movements when you cease an attack, making it much more likely you'll succeed your parry. This only affects parries made with weapons - shield parries only will benefit from the skills from the shield tree. This isn't to say that it won't see use on a one-handed shield build however, as it is still possible to execute parries with your main-hand weapon.

Riposte
After a parry, rapidly follow with an attack
When you succeed in doing a parry, Riposte can activate and cause your next attack to come out much faster than usual. Riposte outspeeds the repeat-strike speed of Remise, but its execution window is fairly narrow in my experience, meaning you'll likely need some practice in order to get it to fire off reliably.

Most damning however is that usually, after having an attack parried, most enemies usually don't have their weapons in an inherently vulnerable spot (usually the weapon's stopped right in front of them so that's prime defensive positioning) so the openings that Riposte offers usually don't come into play as often as you might want.

Dual Wield
Use two weapons to attack and defend simultaneously
Requires both Remise and Riposte
Dual Wield serves as one of the three chief melee combat styles, aside from sword-and-board and two-handing. Dual-wielding grants you the ability to reliably utilize Remise's double-swing advantages, as the second swing isn't contingent on the momentum of the first weapon's swing. True to its description, you also will attempt parries with both of your weapons, giving you a great degree of both offense and defense.

Dual Wielding's benefits only really come into play if you are using weapon types that can benefit strongly off of the basic swings. If you are heavily relying on overheads or thrusts, you usually will only be able to do these attacks with your main-hand weapon. As a result, dual-wielding styles tend to favor fair-ranged weapons with good balance. Very close-ranged weapons such as daggers or thrust-centric ones such as spears are often difficult to use to their fullest while dual-wielded.

Armor Skills

Maneuvering in Armor (1-3)
Move more swiftly under the weight of your armor
Coming in three separate ranks, each of which has the requirement for its previous ranks, Maneuvering In Armor reduces the encumbrance induced by all worn pieces of armor (but not shields). This skill is almost certainly a necessity both for campaign and arena play.

In the case of Arena, the usefulness of this skill only begins to come to light around the Novice rank, where leather armor begins to appear often. The armor pieces from then on continue to only get heavier and thicker, lending to more benefits gained by taking the ranks of this skill.

Deflection
Actively protect gaps and weak areas in your armor
Deflection will simply passively improve the coverage of your armor pieces, making it less likely you'll take massive bursts of damage from unlucky hits. While nice to have, deflection is far from a necessity, and once you get high-tier armor that encompasses most of your body, deflection's benefits will drop off.

Security
Confidence in your armor enables you to continue attacks while receiving blows
A must-have for any high-impact, low-balance weapon users, Security essentially grants you super-armor as you swing your attacks, meaning even if you take a hit while winding up, your attack will still have the opportunity to connect and deal damage to your foe. Security allows you to make riskier trades where, even if you take damage, you ensure your foe is also going to pay as well.

Note that sufficiently damaging attacks will still stun you and prevent you from completing your attacks. Leveraging security requires a fair amount of proper armor to be equipped for it to truly be effective. Otherwise, sufficiently large amounts of impact or injury will still interrupt you. Even with all this in mind, however, Security is perhaps the best skill to invest in if you're planning to do a non-shield based build.

---Shield skills

Counter
Rapidly counter with an attack after a block
This is Riposte, but for shields, and will trigger when an attack connects with your shield. It suffers from similar downsides as Riposte does, mainly in its difficulty of activation.

Even so, Counter is a prerequisite for some of the other most noteworthy shield skills...

Synchrony
Continue to block even as you initiate an attack
Requires Counter.
If your shield arm is in the right spot, Synchrony will keep the shield in defensive position as you initiate an attack, making you harder to punish. However, even if you do block the attack, synchrony won't allow your attack to carry through necessarily - this is just added defensive insurance in case a botched attack would leave you vulnerable.

Ward
Perform attacks from behind the cover of your shield.
Requires Synchrony
The final stage of this lineage of shield skills upgrades the shield's actions even further, and essentially leaves no defensive gaps as you wind up attacks, provided you're facing your shield towards your opponent while preparing.

A fighter with all the performance-improving shield skills will be a force to reckoned with in point-blank range, making shieldbearers the optimal users of extremely close-ranged weapons such as daggers.

Persist
Continue attacks while receiving blows to your shield
Now hits taken to your shield while attacking won't even stop you, or prevent you from preparing a new attack. This essentially acts as the shield mirror of the Security Skill, but with the added benefit of the shield halting all the incoming damage instead of you potentially eating a damaging hit.

Endure
Withstand more attacks before your shield arm tires
The most straightforward and honestly most underwhelming shield skill, just makes it so that you can take more hits before damage begins to transfer through your blocks. If you're playing effectively and are comfortable in backing off to recover stamina, endure is far from a requirement.

Mobility
Wield Cumbersome shields with greater ease and speed
This is the Maneuvering in Armor mirror for shields, reducing the encumbrance impact of shields. If you're using especially large shields (such as a kite shield) this is a necessity.

Fighting Styles: How to use and counter each.

At the end of the day the fighting styles of you and your opponents break down into a set of generic archetypes:

One-Handers

Fighters who use only a single-handed weapon without a shield are essentially just an excuse to have easy enemies used by the AI. There should be little to no circumstance as to why a player would use a one-handed weapon, alone, without a shield.

A one-handed weapon user without a shield is basically a two-handed weapon user defensively, but with less range and damage output, and the off-hand is usually only left open because of the lack of an appropriate shield to equip, or because of the lack of extra encumbrance capability to hold a shield.

Nonetheless, this will be the fighting style you'll likely start out with, both in Arena as an inept combatant (no shields in this tier) and in the campaign, where you often will be fighting with a torch in your off-hand. Some key tips to keep in mind here:

• Play cautiously, as botched weapon swings (especially with few skills) will leave your flank wide open for a counterattack. This same principle can be used against NPC fighters who don't have a shield as well.
  
• While obviously not optimal, keep in mind your weapon can still parry if need be. You can optimally keep your defenses up by facing your opponent, or aiming slightly to your left to keep your weapon hand near your enemy.
  
• Spacing is extremely important at this stage: footwork is really the only reliable way to bait out a swing and then punish with your own after they miss. For very small arms (daggers), it can inversely be beneficial to stay as close as possible to prevent your opponent from swinging at all, and repeatedly attempting thrusts.

Two-Handers

A small step up from one-handed users, two-handed fighting requires relatively few skills to reach full effectiveness, and benefits from granting you attacks that are long-ranged and often high-impact. The size and central position of the weapon also makes it a bit easier to parry with.

• Spacing is just as important here, as two-handers don't have the same kind of defensive benefits dual-wielders or shieldbearers do. In addition, many two-handed weapons aren't that effective at very close range, so giving yourself space to wind up attacks is key.
  
• Keep your aim centered on your foe for maximal defenses. Two-handers also inherently suffer from switching stances from attack and defense, so good awareness of where your weapon is and where it's heading is quite important. Globally-useful skills such as Fend and Security come into play in spades for two-handed fighters.
  
• For enemies who are keen on invading your personal space to make attacking difficult (demonspawn) consider using thrusts to both deal an attack in close-quarters and punish the momentum of their approach - a stab will do grievous damage if the foe has accidentally run into your blade.

Shieldbearers

Using a one-handed weapon and shield makes you a tough nut to crack, capable of using the traits of your weapon to its fullest while maintaining a high level of defense passively, with the right skill layout. Shield usage, thanks to its reliable defense it offers alongside the nature of one-handed weapons, owes itself to very close-ranged combat.

Tips for fighting with your shield:

• For defensive stance, keep your left flank towards your foe. This not only keeps your shield in a convenient spot, but also gives you extra space to wind up your swings for more damage.
  
• The shield is excellent for stopping unpredictable chip damage, so closing in on your foe and tripping them up is entirely a viable tactic for a shieldbearer. Up against two-handed weapon users, this is in fact an optimal plan as it allows you to deny them the ability to wind up any impactful attacks as well.

Tips for fighting against a shield:

• Shields cannot last forever. You can feasibly take an opponent down just by repeatedly hammering their shield, as once their stamina runs out the damage you deal will transfer to the person behind. Granted, hits to the shield won't apparently stun or faze the defender, but the damage still goes through and can absolutely finish the target.
  
• Await openings. Specific types of swings (particularly a left-to-right swing) can leave the shieldbearer ripe for landing an attack.
  
• Curve your attacks creatively. Specific maneuvers such as a curved overhead can bypass the opponent's block attempt. These maneuvers are often finnicky, nearing advanced techniques, and can in of themselves be punished badly, but mastering these moves can enable you to get through shield-using enemies faster than other methods.

Dual-Wielders

Dual Wielding essentially turns you into an ambidextrous slicing machine. Your passive parrying is effective at a much wider angle than usual, you can naturally follow up your own attacks, and you get similar defensive benefits to a shield-user, without any concern for encumbrance or stamina. That said, the traits of dual-wielding combat favors pretty specific equipment setups:

• You'll likely have the most success in utilizing your dual-wielding attacks when using two high balance, decently long weapons of around the same size. Optimally you'd want to perhaps have two copies of the same weapon, though playing and planning your approach around varying weapon sizes can potentially be achieved with careful maneuvering.
  
• Remember your dual-wielding techniques don't do much to benefit overheads or thrusts, so picking a weapon that excels in this category is also key. In the case of differing weapons, this also means you absolutely won't want a thrusting weapon in your off-hand as there's no way to naturally make said weapon perform the thrust!
  
• Your biggest edge over most other fighters is your follow-up potential. Once you land a hit, push the offensive. Dual-Wielding naturally favors mid-to-high balance weapons.
  
• Defense-wise, you can work best when generally facing your opponent, as both of your arms can potentially deflect attacks. The success of this though is contingent on whether the weapon closest to an incoming attack is busy or not.

Unarmed

For Pugilism matches in Arena or up against Demonspawn, you'll want to be prepared for extremely close-up, messy, all-out chaos.

• Don't approach unless you're sure you'll land a hit. Blocks aren't that effective when unarmed.
  
• Unlike every other weapon in the game, unarmed punches basically require no space to wind up at all. You can do full unarmed damage just by ramming your body and fists into your opponent, and in the case your foe is using a long weapon, this honestly works to your benefit.
  
• Both in pugilism matches and up against demons, stunning is very important to prevent becoming cornered or comboed to death. Once you've stopped an incoming attack, try and back up to avoid a retaliation (assuming you're using a longer weapon than them of course).
  
• Doing an 'overhead' while unarmed executes an uppercut. There's no difference in animation/effect between 'swinging' or 'thrusting', both throw the same kinds of jabs.

Going Forward: Food for thought

Exanima combat is procedural, open-ended, and above all, usable in creative ways. Combatants can interact in physical ways that aren't possible in other games thanks to the physics simulations involved. This said, consider the applications of physics interactions that these actions might allow:

• Feint manipulation - Consider that using feints will temporarily position your weapon in specific ways upon release. Try examining the positions that certain windups induce, and see how and if they could be used to your advantage either defensively or offensively.
  
• Weapon/shield pinning - Once an enemy is down, it could be possible to place an overhead attack or shield on the enemy to prevent them from standing back up. In simpler terms/in non-arena settings this theoretically could be achieved through manipulating physics objects to bury the opponent, rather than through direct contact with your foe.
  
• Ramming - Depending on how large and massive your character is, it can be possible to start sprinting directly at your opponent in the middle of a fight to force them off balance. Then again, this is one of those situations where it might be just as much of a risk to you as it is to the opponent...

[MichaeLarkey]

Thank you! Very helpful.

[M1Combat]

Very nice thanks :)

[League Disliker]

Nicely structured and educational guide. Thanks op

[ColdRamen]

This is very well put together, thanks for the info.

[Summoner000]

Wonderfully put together guide. Great work.

[Scarred]

thx

[Codabear]

Thanks for the guide, super useful. One thing I love about this game, is how intuitive it is for me to pick up since I have a very basic training and understanding in fencing.

[ambit3d]

Great Guide

[F.U.D.F.]

Boss guide, thanks.