I actually really like this idea. or maybe just give brawling at Melee Combat 0. Everyone can brawl at a basic level, you don’t generally get through grade school without at least seeing a real fight and picking something up.
Lol, nah, I’m 46 and fat now. I probably get hit extra now. My comment was really about trying to have a ‘realism’ argument in a game of moving into squares to hit zombies.
There is no realism. It’s ALL abstraction. If you want to change something to make it HARDER, fine. If you want to change something to make it MORE REALISTIC, you’ve already lost the plot, sorry to have to be the one to tell you that.
Having an avenue where people lead their characters down a path of “not getting hit” as opposed to “mitigating incoming damage” is a good and great thing to have in a game of standing in squares and moving into another square to ‘hit’ a zombie. There’s a LOT of tropes in the zombie oeuvre about quick characters that pull off amazing feats of “Nyah, nyah! You can’t hit me you lumbering brute!” and denying that avenue makes the game objectively worse for denying access to those tropes.
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Sorry if I expressed myself badly (English is not my first language) what I do meant by using this miss placed and rather exaggerated hyperbole is that you can’t expect be good and survive fighting monsters and foes alike, without proper or any martial arts knowledge at all.
But I recognize my fault, because I forgot you can learn martial art with books (something I never tried before, because I generally don’t live enough to read complex books) that’s why I used the word “need”, but we all know this is a sandbox game, that means that it rarely imposes rules and limitations at you.
Anyway, I apologize if I gave an wrong idea of what you need to do or not.
Thank you. Now that’s a good alternative to retreat, a.k.a. brave sir Robin technique.
The problem is that dodging isn’t about Martial Arts - evading people trying to punch you in the face is literally the first thing you need to know about any form of melee combat at all, followed by how to actually punch someone. It’s very nearly an instinct level skill, definitely NOT some exotic talent discovered by monks in the Far East.
I still don’t understand what the goal of such an oddly structured change is to the way dodging functions. In this system a Green Beret who could trivially avoid the hapless attacks of one completely untrained child is suddenly helpless to evade the attacks from a second child - its just dumb, and it feels dumb.
Can you have a functional survivor in this system? Yes. Just ignore the stats on your character sheet and never fight more than one target at a time, because that number next to dodge doesn’t actually mean anything under any circumstance but a one-on-one fight - and against an enemy with rapid attacks, it becomes nearly useless regardless.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is just awful for a game where you are in an eternal One-Against-The-World scenario.
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Agree pretty much 100% with your post here Unstable.
Too many odd assumptions being made about the ‘exotic’ nature of martial arts and hand to hand combat, without a grasp of what melee is and how it actually plays out - either in the real world or in a game trying to create a reasonable turn based abstraction of it.
And yes, the ‘can’t dodge projectiles’ comment was particularly infuriating.
No humans can’t re-actively dodge bullets - but yes you absolutely CAN AND MUST attempt to pro-actively dodge incoming fire, and that is a learnable skill. Low profile, move quickly and unpredictably, never directly towards or away, etc.
The idea that ‘dodging’ shouldn’t apply to ranged fire is just painfully misguided. The difference between melee dodge and ranged dodge is this:
As speed of weapons increases, dodge shifts from a potentially very reliable responsive defense, to a less reliable - but not less important - pre-emptive defense.
If your attacker is slow or badly telegraphs their attacks, a skilled fighter with decent reaction times has plenty of time to actively defend, and should only get hit if they are careless or disadvantaged in some manner.
If your attacker is fast and gives little warning, you can no longer rely entirely on your limited reflex response time, and must start pre-emptively evading, choosing an angle of defense and avoidance that necessarily relies on a moment’s educated guess-work about your enemy’s attack - this can never be wholly reliable, even if your attacker isn’t necessarily as skilled as you.
Gunfire is the ultimate fast attack. All you can do is pre-emptive evasion. This still makes you much harder to hit, but you can never be guaranteed of success no matter how fast you are, or how bad the shooter is - they can always get lucky and there’s nothing you can do about that.
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Again, I expressed myself badly. I meant you can’t expect to survive melee combat with monsters, without knowledge of martial arts in game, in the game mechanics, while playing the game, etc…
But I do, in fact, agree with you and @Unstable, that If we use the dodging mechanic of the game right now, in real life, the logic and realism is going to be inaccurate, because that’s not how dodge works in real life.
(Now I want to make this clear: I do know that this game is turn based, so is not that simple to port real-time events to turn based events. I really appreciate all the devs work, and the point of this discussion, in fact any discussion, is to make the game better and pleasant even more and more, always keeping in mind the balance, realism and the fun.)
Yeah, in general I think the devs do a bang up job with the game as a whole.
This is just one of the rare cases I vehemently disagree with a particular design decision because it seems to fly in the face of realism, intuition, and good game-play, and it does so at a pretty fundamental level of the game, at the base of its core combat loop.
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I endorse this statement, along with what Unstable added. They described what I was trying to say from the beginning. Also, armor was always better if you weren’t cheesing with techniques.
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Martial Arts in CDDA are specifically meant to represent specific exotic styles of combat, which is cool. But that’s NOT what dodging is.
I’m 100% self taught in sword fighting. Never picked up a book or received a single minute of professional training. Am I a sword fighting god? No, especially not now that I’m older. 
Will I wreck two or three novices at once based solely on many years of self-training and pick up fighting - the sword fighting equivalent of CDDA’s ‘Brawler’ skill?
Yes. Yes I will. And I’ll do it mostly by dodging several attacks in the ‘same round’ on a routine basis - because that concept is fundamental to melee combat, you don’t have to know how to read or be taught how to ‘dodge’. You can benefit from teaching, but you can also just learn it on the playground, and get very, very good at it.
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- adding stamina loss to dodging (equal to an unarmed stike?, above?)
- adding a penalty to effective dodge level witch scales up the less stamina the character has (up to 99% at 0 stamina)
would have solved the raised issues with the old way
it seems does not raise the issues opposing the new way
dont think anyone has a problem with dodging being tiring
this would, intead of killing it outright, put a stamina based-scailing “clock” on the power of dodge
If one of the main points really is to make dodging less OP and more realistic (no dodging 4 enemies at once) than we could have a trade off where you get more dodge attampts for higher skill and maybe stats but everytime you dodge you have a small chance of moving too a adjesent square to simulate that you sometimes have to move around and change position to dodge effectively.
One of several reasons for the change is that when you can’t choose whether or not to dodge or take multiple dodges, and they are associated with costs and possible penalties (stamina loss, involuntary movement, etc), then you can find yourself forced into critically dangerous situations. We will at some point add more complex threat assessment tools based on your skill and perception so your character can judge on the fly if it’s worth trying to dodge more attacks. In the meantime, turning off multidodge was the right way to go, especially since it was way too accessible and led to characters with no reason to be Naruto-ing their way through crowds being untouchable.
After analyzing all this thread and the discussion about the topic, I will put my humble analysis about the dodge mechanic and this thread.
1°- Dodge was OP. We all know that the old mechanic was very OP, in a way that one may think it was the most powerful skill that you could train. That takes us to the second point:
2°- It needed to be reworked. Again we all know that it needed to be remake or reworked as soon as possible, in a way that it would possibly be either realistic and balanced. So it have get updated to what we have now. Less OP? yes, of course. More realistic and balanced? One may think not at all. But that take us to the third point:
3°- It is going to be further developed into a more realistic and balanced mechanic. As @Erk already said, the devs are working to implement better dodge mechanic, taking in consideration realism but also balance, in a way that we will not end up with the same thing that was before.
My conclusion is, we need to wait (and maybe even contribute, if possible?) to see what is improvement we will get when the dodge update come, and when it comes, give our feedback, and then making this amazingly crafted game even better.
Was dodge OP with no styles other than brawling? Because I’ve haven’t use any styles that altered dodge skill. It was a good skill, as it helped in most combat scenarios, maybe it was the best but it seem arguable vs armor which needs no skill.
Also, how do people here think of adding armor skill in the game? The skill would make the percent of coverage of armour higher at higher level 5< indicating that you’ve moved your body to pervert getting hit in your unarmed spots. While at lower skill level 5> armour would have lower coverage than default game. Armor encumbrance could also change a little too with this skill and maybe something else too? And dex could increase armour coverage like the skill does to make that stat less useless. Also, I played low dex characters, weapon durable isn’t much lower with low dex.
Also this off-topic, but how do players learn crafted items that you only can learn from books? Like glassblowing, if can’t read books due to trait or int. Because if you can’t then I think int is a great stat then. especially with mods like magic and nanotech.
Yes, it was very OP. Even without any martial arts styles (that gives a huge bonus to dodge) you could pretty much be almost (if not ever) untouchable, and it was far better than armor, because armor is heavy, bulk (cumbersome) and warm. Also you would prefer not being hit at all than tanking hits and getting eventually worn out.
I could pass hours here saying how better dodge was compared to armor but I think you already got it.
My opinion is that armor is already very balanced by encumbrance and warm penalties, but I support any ideas that have the intention to improve the game. So keep thinking out of the box like that, and I’m pretty sure you will help improve this amazing game.
Was it OP only with high skill because with a normal character it was fine. Also, getting one shot without armor is worst than 100% coverage survivor armor.
Frankly, I think the Dodge skill should be like the other melee skills, in how it provides very minor benefits at low levels instead of doing OP things like negate all damage. Make it so that, instead of a dodge always completely negating enemy attacks, it instead reduces the severity of a hit due to being able to better react to the strike. With a successful dodge, a critical hit becomes a normal hit, a normal hit becomes a graze, and a graze becomes a miss. This way masses of zombies can still do cumulative damage to even the greatest dodger, via multiple graze attacks that add up to eventually wear down the dodger until they start suffering penalties that make dodging difficult or impossible.
Yes, I love systems like that they work really well to in practice to reduce weird black and white randomness as the Disgaea games had a stat that worked just like that called hit and it would result in how easy it is to hit a target. Graze does almost no damage (~20%<) and would happen when fighting an opponent that is much higher level than you, or had much better dodge stat. Think of it as the opposite of a critical hit. A normal hit would happen when your both evenly matched and did normal damage. And a bulls-eye was that’s the game’s version of a crit which is what I would call a realistic crit or like Dwarf Fortress Adventurer mode square strike and Simple strike, direct hit. and would happen very easily when fighting and low-level adversary or poor dodging character.
Dwarf Fortress Adventurer mod had a good combat mechanic that was much better than CDDA with their targeted attacks. I felt that they were balanced with the fact that hit chance was in a constant flux of chance to hit to simulate what part of their body was exposed to a hit. Making to can’t force focus one part as the head. That’s because they could then move that part of their body away from you and you can’t connect the strike even if you could easily hit it.
The problem with this system was it was really, really slow, but you could also do auto attacks which I think balances it out. But CDDA is better in terms of exploration and crafting which like better. Plus really unrealistic things like 20 bolts weighing as much as a full suit of plate armor is ridiculous along with whips being one of the best weapons in the game.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Combat#Wrestling
Overall I feel that CDDA should get a system like these games in the dodge rework.
Yes, you are right. At normal levels dodge was ok, but after some time in the game (like some months or so) you could become very strong, in a way that it pretty much have taken most of the fun and difficulty of the game, eventually rendering it boring.
(I say that because is very probably that you would fight a ton of monster in melee, and your wanting or not, training the dodge skill to high levels, thus leading to this situation).
Yes, that is true. I just said that before dodge>armor. In now days updates I don’t know yet.