Are arrows not effective in TDM?

[bobber1]

I don't care much for ghosting at all since my style in playing a mission is basically leaving no one standing. I prefer clearing an area first if possible then doing a careful search. If I can't knock someone out I'll take them down with an arrow. No apologies there. Anyway, I've noticed that in the few TDM missions I've played so far my broadhead arrows have little effect really. Is this by design? It seems people recover quickly from an arrow instead of dropping. 

[wesp5]

This might be true and I know that some missions added head shots to arrows for instant kills. Maybe this should be included as a feature in the core game? At least for undead this would be a welcome addition!

[stgatilov]

I think headshot to unaware enemy kills instantly.
If you hit another part or guard is already alert or he wears a face grill, then it won't work.

Undead don't have any brain left, why would headshot do anything special?
Basically, you should not try to "kill" undead.

[Wellingtoncrab]

The damage model on ai is exposed mostly through spawn arguments - by default stealth damage to the head is a kill provided the material doesn’t get in the way (so no plate helmets).

Not trying to promote my own mission - but if that is your play style I opened up the lethality of arrows in Iris significantly and find it rather satisfying. A well placed head shot will stop a charging guard in its tracks and stealth damage to non metallic material is lethal on both the chest and head. I am sure other authors may have done similarly but it’s hard to say as I think it’s an underrepresented play style.

Regarding head shots killing undead -

Spoiler

Hazard Pay features this and I think it is quite an improvement personally 

 

[wesp5]

So shooting guards in the head has some kind of alert-immunity like the blackjack? @stgatilov, can you please point me to where this is set so I can at least remove this in my patch? As for killing undead, it was indeed Hazard Pay that made me aware of this and somehow headshots are a typical way to stop zombies in many games so I would like to have this in TDM too. @Wellingtoncrab, do you know how this is done in Hazard Pay?

[Wellingtoncrab]

@wesp5if you look in the weapon def for broadhead arrows there is an undead specific damage multiplier.

you may find on the zombie def itself you have to tweak the “damage_scale head”spawn arg on the zombie ai itself.

You may also want to adjust sneak_attack_mult depending on what you want the damage model to be for stealth vs alert states

[kingsal]

Yeah TDM arrows aren’t very effective unless you get a head shot when the AI is unaware  

Ive upped the damage in my missions as well, but its a balance. If arrows are too effective than the player can easily avoid any situation where they might have used other tools or strategies. 

The damage model is pretty complicated. It takes the base damage of an arrow ( i think its 30 or something) and then factors in the material it hit (cloth, chain, metal) and then the AI altert level and THEN it adds a chest or head multiplier. I like to tweak the chest and head multipliers which can be done in the spawn args on the AI or their def files or in the DR difficulty settings. 

I think headshots on humans regardless of alertness makes sense to be an instant kill. In hazard the zombies can be killed instantly with headshots while unaware but if you disturb them, it takes multiple shots (depending on difficulty)

[kingsal]

@Wellingtoncrab @wesp5Yep! Thats what I would do. Find the base definitions I think its ai_humanoid.def and ai_undead.def and change the head and chest damage multipliers. 

I would not mess with the arrow damage in the weapon def itself. They’re fairly sensitive and might lead to problems. 

EDIT: @wesp5 Just a heads up you might have to update those defs anytime we push out a new update and change base files and there is some chance this could change authors intent (although it pretty small). 

[Wellingtoncrab]

@kingsalone thing I can’t quite recall without access to the defs right in front of me is the damage multiplier on broadhead arrows for undead actually 0? In this case the arrow defs might have to be tweaked to get a damage response at all?

Edited March 9, 2022 by Wellingtoncrab

[kingsal]

57 minutes ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

@kingsalone thing I can’t quite recall without access to the defs right in front of me is the damage multiplier on broadhead arrows for undead actually 0? In this case the arrow defs might have to be tweaked to get a damage response at all?

Interesting, that might be in the base arrow def to allow for the holy water damage multiplier? Im curious, I'll look when I get home but I don't think that spawnarg is used.

[wesp5]

I have tried what you suggested and raised the tdm_ai_humanoid head multiplier by ten and then by hundred without result. Once the AI is alerted I can shoot them right into the eye without them even flinching! I think there must be an immune flag somewhere like with the blackjack. For undead damage_mult_undeadflesh of the arrow is indeed 0 so that might need to be changed once the other problem has been fixed. It's 0 in Hazard Pay so maybe there is another way...

Edited March 9, 2022 by wesp5

[Springheel]

It's trivially easy to shoot charging guards in the face, so if you let arrows kill alerted AI, the player never has to worry about them.  They can even take the arrow back and do the same thing on the next one.  Originally I wanted to have AI shield their face with their arm when the player aimed in their direction, but that was too challenging at the time.

[HMart]

8 hours ago, stgatilov said:

I think headshot to unaware enemy kills instantly.
If you hit another part or guard is already alert or he wears a face grill, then it won't work.

Undead don't have any brain left, why would headshot do anything special?
Basically, you should not try to "kill" undead.

In pretty much all zombi movies, undead are "killed" with a shot in the head or by cutting the head entirely off. 

I seam to recall some that made the undead indestructible, even cut limbs move alone but those are the exception not the rule and most movies that use such "unkillable" undead, invent stupid reasons for why humanity was able to survive.

[wesp5]

Update: It seems it does work as suggested, only I tested it in the Noble Affairs mission which probably uses it's own guard defs which overruled my changes. When I tested it in the Bakery Shop it worked just fine! Any mission with easy access to zombies to test it on them? Because the undead in Hazard Pay have other defs themselves already.

Also about this being too easy, I died dozends of times testing this because if you can't get to a position where the guard can't reach you, a charging guard will get too close for a head shot most of the time! And I noticed that when the shot is aborted, you can see through the arm model so this might be a problem that should be fixed as well.

Another bug that happened while testing this is that if you load a quick save where you had the bow active, you can not fire it unless you switch to another weapon and then back. It will automatically play the abort shot animation and again you can see right through the arm model...

Edited March 9, 2022 by wesp5

[Wellingtoncrab]

I think with zombies it could be a balance issue for some missions which were designed around the player needing to scrounge up holy water or flame arrows to contend with the obstacle but I found the tension created by trying (and often failing) to land that crucial headshot on the undead in hazard pay resulted in some of my all time favorite moments in the mission.

Speaking more broadly about the damage model of arrows/sword vs human AI I think the assumption players will all change their play style because lethal options are easier is probably wrong. If you watch interviews with Warren Spector about his role in the development of thief he brings up over and over again his disagreement with the devs about how concerns about making the game’s combat too viable would make it too easy and no one would engage in the stealth aspect. 

There may have been something to that at the time, as since thief was in effect a new type of game even teaching players stealth was an option might of been a challenge in itself. Deus Ex is an interesting counter example as he basically did what he thought the thief devs should have done and supported a variety of play styles - still when given the option many players, perhaps even most, would engage in stealth and non lethal options because in effect having the option was all we needed to restrain ourselves.

When discussing whether it is realistic for a head shot to kill a zombie which has no brain matter it can easily also be framed as how realistic it is for a human head or velvet draped torso to deflect 4-5 arrows. The basis for all these mechanics seems to me to be more how they were originally in Thief than what is necessarily reasonable to expect.

I personally think not being precious about thief mechanics may be as important as honoring the legacy there, and I like that mappers were given so much flexibility to adjust these things - though probably hard to notice as realistically how many well conditioned thief players would even try?

[wesp5]

Personally I don't kill anybody when I play TDM unless it is needed, but it looks completely unrealistic if you can shoot an attacking guard or zombie in the head and they don't react at all! My patch is most of all more about being realistic, see also the extinguishable oil lamps ;). For now I made head shots do ten times the old damage which is lower for zombies anyway. It shouldn't unbalance any missions with my patch because I replaced the weird timed-holy-water-arrows with throwing the water bottles which normally makes fighting the undead much harder because you have only one attempt per bottle. Making head shots easier will help :)! But speaking of arrows, making the fire arrows set targets on fire like in Hazard Pay would be much harder than just editing two or three def files. Could this be considered for the core game?

Edited March 9, 2022 by wesp5

[Xolvix]

I never really thought about this. From memory I seem to recall arrows being ineffective against human targets once they are in their combat state, but I'm the kind of player that treats combat state as a failure state with a few exceptions.

As for zombies and the undead, their immunity to anything other than holy water-buffed water arrows and fire arrows resulted in me just ghosting around them. I always assumed this was a deliberate gameplay choice to make them immune to standard arrows and didn't even know mappers could change this.

[kingsal]

@Wellingtoncrab  @wesp5 The multipliers might bug out at 10, thats 10x times more damage. Try something like 1.8 to 2.0. I looked into the following spawnarg in tdm_weapon_broadhead.def

    "damage_mult_undeadflesh"           "0"

I wouldn't change this tbh. Im not sure if our models are even set up with undeadflesh materials args.

@Wellingtoncrab
Thats a good point.

Making combat viable, but still challenging is always a win in my book. I love the feeling of dropping a guard with a headshot or a couple shots when they're alerted and charging at me. Or if I'm faced with a difficult problem, having the option to take a piece off the board before I sneak in is great and broadens the possibility space.  In my opinion, those two power fantasies (deadly and sneaky) compliment each other and I dig games that do it well. Hard to say if Thief is successful in that, but its definitely novel in its presentation of those things. I still think they could have had broadheads pack more punch without disrupting the balance.

 

[wesp5]

2 hours ago, kingsal said:

@Wellingtoncrab  @wesp5 The multipliers might bug out at 10, thats 10x times more damage. Try something like 1.8 to 2.0.

The original multiplier for humans was already at 2.0 which is completely compensated to nothing by the alert state. The original multiplier for undead was at 1.2. Maybe 10 is enough, but in my first experiments I just increased both tenfold.

Edited March 10, 2022 by wesp5

[zergrush]

14 hours ago, kingsal said:

The damage model is pretty complicated. It takes the base damage of an arrow ( i think its 30 or something) and then factors in the material it hit (cloth, chain, metal) and then the AI altert level and THEN it adds a chest or head multiplier. I like to tweak the chest and head multipliers which can be done in the spawn args on the AI or their def files or in the DR difficulty settings. 

I think headshots on humans regardless of alertness makes sense to be an instant kill. In hazard the zombies can be killed instantly with headshots while unaware but if you disturb them, it takes multiple shots (depending on difficulty)

I agree. It's a bit silly alertness level affects damage. Can't we ditch that while boosting arrow damage a bit? This can also be compensated by making broadheads more expensive.

[wesp5]

1 hour ago, zergrush said:

It's a bit silly alertness level affects damage. Can't we ditch that while boosting arrow damage a bit?

This should be possible if somebody could point me to the def script where this is set. I only found the limb damages, in comparison it was much easier to disable the alert-based ko immunity which has it's own variable...

Edited March 10, 2022 by wesp5

[Wellingtoncrab]

I think it’s not damage is decreased when enemies are alerted but rather increased when the player is not detected by the sneak_attack_mult spawnarg on the ai.

[wesp5]

21 minutes ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

I think it’s not damage is decreased when enemies are alerted but rather increased when the player is not detected by the sneak_attack_mult spawnarg on the ai.

If that is that case my current solution should work fine in all missions that use the default ais :)!

[Wellingtoncrab]

I do think you want to be cautious about how high you set the damage multipliers though - I cannot recall what I landed on - but I think it was around 3 for head and I found this was plenty. 

I bring it up because you don’t want any of your damage multipliers to potentially negate the cool underlying system of material based “defense” multipliers on the arrows themselves.

One of the reasons I got into tweaking the arrows at all is I wanted to make stealth kills more viable and the distinction between cloth/chain/plate armored foes greater so this system could shine a little more. Currently the arrows do so little damage this system might as well be invisible practically speaking, but take your multipliers too high and this too also becomes invisible as the base damage overwhelms all armor types. I never quite got what I wanted with the chain mail (almost seems like this needs a chance to deflect lethal arrow damage, but doesn’t quite feel right that a stealth kill is impossible) but you are welcome to look at the spawnargs I applied to the AI, as I imagine they would be visible if you opened the .map file in a text editor.

It’s your mod, but I also don’t think you should completely flatten the damage model between stealth/alerted as I do think it’s quite fair the player get a damage boost when they are undetected - in fact I think I probably landed on increasing this advantage when I was attempting to balance it all out.

[wesp5]

57 minutes ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

I do think you want to be cautious about how high you set the damage multipliers though - I cannot recall what I landed on - but I think it was around 3 for head and I found this was plenty. 

I bring it up because you don’t want any of your damage multipliers to potentially negate the cool underlying system of material based “defense” multipliers on the arrows themselves.

You mean an arrow to the back of a head of a guard with a helmet on should not be an instant kill. I'll do some tests...

Edited March 10, 2022 by wesp5