Close Combat

[BirdyNumNum]

how exactly is close combat going to work. at worthplaying.com they mentioned cinematic quality in melee...
taken from the screenshots at worthplaying.com under features

Cinematic quality melee and ranged combat that show battle in detail never before seen in a real-time strategy game
but i was wondering if this went as far as being entirely scripted actions or something else i'm not quite sure of. for instance: will there be variety of different scripted attacks between two opposing units that are randomly chosen which they carry out? i dont know that seems a bit much, maybe i'm getting the wrong impression here because i can see how there would be a lot of work involved there. so far, in strategy games, you have a system where a unit has a constant rate of damage every time they strike, and therfore every unit has hitpoints to make the system balanced, i find this quite tiresome. a sort of mixture was made for battle realms and that turned out quite nicely, as units occasionaly parried and such. it comes down to a few questions, is the idea for close combat here to simply make the constant rate of damage system a more dynamic one? or is there really going to be scirpted events during a battle? or is it a mixture?

[Rikesgard]

The animations would have to be predone and scripted, of course. And while it will be a lot of work, as you can see from the screenshots, it looks extremely good. So depending on the progress of a melee fight one of several animations are likely executed. I'd suspect that combat won't be resolved in a single blow either, so there are probably a couple animations for the units wailing on each other, and then a couple killing blow animations.

As for the actual progress of the melee fights, who's to say? We don't know how their game will work in terms of dealing damage and soaking it, although we know it won't be identical to 40k. So I suspect that there are hitpoints in the game, but units also probably have a close combat rating too. And on top of that there is probably a damage range for close combat strikes, as there'd have to be some way for a guy with a Power Fist to kill more quickly than a standard Marine with a knife. So melee combat probably compares the weapon skills, maybe goes so far as to include hits and misses, and either way, the close combat rating in some way ends up augmenting the effectiveness of individual units to make it more than just a question of who will have more hp left if your weapon does X damage and my weapon does Y damage.

I would think, though, that close combat wouldn't last very long. Maybe 5 seconds if the targets are evenly matched? I really do hope that the melee combat doesn't drag out, as you can't have a cinematic melee system if you don't have gruesome, fast-paced, Braveheart-like deaths.

[XSKiith]

Good questions thou I doubt that you'll get any answers until the game is released. Whatever the answers judging from the screenies DoW is going to rock big time and I for one can't wait to see how units make the transition from static shooting to entering HtH. I hope that we'll get to see running charges and the like.

[Maximus Decimus]

Well we know they are characterized as units and not individuals. We also know that combat wont be very very fast like 5 seconds because you have the time to evaluate the skirmish and decide to run away or not. I would imagine it being anywhere from 20-30 seconds(squad vs squad).

[BirdyNumNum]

perhaps it is a bit too early for the answer to these questions but i feel it is a good topic for debate.
i agree with Maximus here that if combat was as fast as a few blows and you're toast, you could lose a good portion of your army while trying to macro your base.
on another note, scipted attack and basic movement animations is a given, such as firing a gun, swinging an axe, running, etc. but when it comes to close combat, i was thinking more along the lines of defense, such as the reactions units will have to certain attacks, perhaps parries or dodging, and whether these would be sequenced or scripted.

[Goallie11]

I thought that I heard somewhere that the combat wasnt scripted, but where?

[Maximus Decimus]

Yes the devs have stated that none of the combat is scripted.

[BirdyNumNum]

where? i searched the forums for a topic similar to this one, and i read the faq through again before posting this topic. :s

[Maximus Decimus]

Hmm it was too long ago around Jan when it was said so i cant remember what thread it was in but any veteran of this forum will tell you the same thing and if a dev drops by he will confirm it.