The hidden beast known as Aikido

Game Talk The Bunker
1

Aikido? That does half damage to enemies! Why not boxing, or scorpion, or tiger?

Well, it has a throw attack that functions as a counter like fencing’s stop thrust.

Unlike fencing, it happens far more often than the stop thrust.

It can also stun enemies, and knocks them back.

And one throw counter hits pretty much all the enemies next to your survivor. Debugged 8 tough zombies surrounding my survivor to test. Pressed 5 to wait; all tough zombies get damaged, unlike fencing’s stop thrust which only hits one and might take a few turns waiting.

With a punch dagger, it can do respectable damage. 50 to tough zombies on a crit, 25 to zombie hulks.

Again, it’s counter throw happens far more often. Used fencing and a rapier, debugged a hulk, mashed on 5. Ten in-game minutes, nothing. With Aikido, it’s either dodge sometimes, or throw most of the time. Either way, I was treated to the sight of a hulk getting thrown back, moving back to my survivor only to get thrown back again, like an undead paddleball.

And I tried, it’s entirely possible to surround your survivor with 8 hulks and counter them all to death. 8 jabberwocks as well. Will take damage though on both.

2

That’s great discovery!

3

My mental image of it is my survivor catching one of the zombies lunging for her, then using the momentum to swing and club the rest away. Probably not what exactly happens, but it’s a cool mental image.

4

And dodging definitely seems to play a role in Aikido’s counter, since one of the listed moves is called dodge and throw. Even with torso and leg encumbrance reducing dodge by about 1.6 levels, 17 dodge minus 1.6 is still a ton of dodging.

5

Are you sure?

Maybe it depends on how many points you put into melee skills.

I just tried a normal black belt, he could barely beat one hulk, let alone 8.

6

Ahh, true. Seems like 8 dodge isn’t enough. You’ll be needing like more than 10, maybe 13 and above, in dodge to reliably throw around a hulk with little risk of getting hit.

So, Aikido is a beast, but only if you got a survivor who can pretty much dodge most attacks in the first place. Whoops, haha…

7

Well, in that case, Dragon Kung Fu is more powerful. It is ridiculously strong without even decent dodge skills.

Similar tech is Zui Quan from Self-Defense Classes, but I don’t know how efficient it is comparing to Aikido but consider it is a less powerful version of Dragon Kung Fu.

8

True enough. Just mentioning the fact that Aikido has some surprising benefit when it’s generally considered to be not worth the points in character generation, or using in general when a training manual of it is found.

You’ll need massive amounts of effort to get the skills that’ll make it amazing, but it’s there.

9

Trying it out on a small town. My survivor’s god-like dodge skill pretty much maximizes the killing potential of Aikido.

Like, got surrounded by several zombies. Killed them with Aikido. Proceed to smash the bodies, but there’s two necromancers around.

What happens next is my survivor very slowly pulping a zombie hulk corpse, while other zombies get revived only to die again due to counter throws.

It’s like fencings stop thrust on steroids. Partially because my survivor is dodging every attack thrown at her, and mainly because even at half damage the counter throw hits everything next to my survivor.

10

That said, Aikido ain’t got nothing on Zui Quan.

So, to test the counter attacks of the three styles that have it, I debugged some tough zombies. On the spawn monster screen, pressed i three times to increase the numbers, creating a 7x7 mass of tough zombies with my survivor at the center.

Also, where my survivor stood was a zombie hulk. Plan was to butcher the hulk and see if the counter attacks will kill the group of tough zombies before my survivor finishes butchering the hulk.

Aikido up first, tough zombies all dead with some time to spare before the hulk was butchered. That said, one of the zombies did land a hit with some damage. Perhaps only a point since the full ||||| on one leg became ||||.

Fencing performed kinda worse. One small hit again, but when the hulk was butchered there was still five that remained.

Now, for Zui Quan, I debugged the training manual for it (no plans on saving the game since this was just a test). It seemed to perform a bit faster than Aikido, and definitely hit a lot harder.

Furthermore, one curious thing seems to happen. I tried Zui Quan’s counter a second time, but instead of butchering a hulk I just pressed 5 to wait. The game seemed to go on autopilot, as Zui Quan countered tough zombies one at a time, until every one was dead. Like I really only pressed 5 once. So I tested it again, and pressed 5 while a 7x7 mass of tough zombies surrounded my survivor.

Just one press of 5, and the game just progressed for two minutes and everyone was dead. Aikido did a similar thing though that one period of waiting took five minutes of killing.

Also tried bionic combatives with the monomolecular blade. In general, it performed as well as fencing with a rapier did.

So, for counter moves in the game, Zui Quan takes the first, and Aikido is second place, kinda. You need massive amounts of skills in dodge and perhaps the other melee moves to really turn Aikido into a very strong style, so in general Zui Quan is far superior since it’ll probably need far less skill to reach its full potential, as well as a passive effect of increasing dodge from intelligence.

In terms of counter attacks, fencing and bionic combatives are a distant third, though they offer far more damage that’s not a counter attack compared to the two.

Basically, Aikido falls into awesome but impractical, while Zui Quan is awesome and practical. Wish I gave my survivor a trait that would have given her Zui Quan at the start, but oh well.

11

That’s interesting !!science!!.

I wonder which is essier between finding fencing manual and getting 15 dodge. Probably the former. One needs fencing to clear 2 necropoli anyway!

12

Former, definitely. Not so sure about needing it anymore. Second necropolis I cleared I noticed that the stop thrust didn’t happen as often as it used to, so I resorted to other melee weapons to do the job.

That said, a necropolis is probably the only fast way to train dodge. It comes naturally as you melee the horde of wanderers.

13

I agree with akido and zui quan being sleeper hits…but dragon style with max starting int and the post threshold slime mental mutation (Doubled Int) and a smattering of mind enhancing ones turns you into something out of fist of the north star. Been awhile since I played, but it did a good deal of the pulping for me…

14

I really want to try aikido now… but the nearest city doesn’t have a dojo so I’m stuck with brawling. I have 6 unarmed combat skill though, so at this point I can instakill zombie children with critical hits. Brawling counter attack doesn’t happen too often and it only stuns and knocks back on a critical hit.

15

To be honest I was going to come on and say ‘but fencing’s worked for me, I can take not a single scratch against the entire Vault’, but you’re right in that for me, it still took several hours to do what amounted to waiting for a long time while things died around me.
The fastest method is the best, at high levels like that.

16

Muay thai, boxing, Karate and Taekwondo are good main skills, I got a character with 6+ unarmed and around 7 dodge and he can just destroy everything in one or two hits. Muay thai is a good all-around skill, especially if you have high strength.