Genuine choice is a very important factor to me when I’m trying to create rules. It might seem like playing with words, but Options and Choices are not equal. An example:
Let’s pretend we are playing a game like AHQ, but much simpler. Lets call it Simple Peasant Quest (SPQ). (not selling hamburgers)
Much like AHQ, In SPQ player Peasants move about a board and kill monsters. The combat in SPQ is very simple. If your Peasant finishes their move next to an enemy monster, you may attack it. No dice are rolled, the opposing monster just suffers a number of wounds equal to the damage of the weapon your Peasant is carrying.
To equip your peasant, you have three weapons to choose from:
Spear – Damage 2
Sword – Damage 2
Axe – Damage 3
Which do you choose?
This is an example of options, but not choices. Yes there are options, a spear, a sword and an Axe. But there is really only one choice: The Axe does 3 damage, so is objectively the best choice. (yes, some players may take the other weapons for aesthetic or role-playing reasons, but we are trying to be objective here).
In original AHQ, there are 8 weapons available to purchase. However, the sword, axe and warhammer are identical, and the double-handed sword and double handed axe are also identical. The dagger is objectively the worst of the lot, and the spear is worse than the halberd. For a hero who has at least strength 6, there are 8 options, but only 3 genuine choices: A sword/axe/Warhammer, a halberd, or a two-handed sword/axe. As RECIVS said: “…more variety is needed in the vanilla game.” Very true!
In Reforged, Slev attempted to improve the variety of weapons by adding a huge amount of new weapons and rules but, in my opinion, has confused players and not added a great deal of genuine choices.
Let’s look at an example of swords from his weapon list, using a hero with Strength 5.
Arming Sword: Range M / DamageDice 3 / Fum 1 / Crit11-12 /
Estoc: Range R / DamageDice 3 / Fum 1 / Crit12 /
Falchion: Range M / DamageDice 3 / Fum 1 / Crit12 / Cleaving (brutal at roll 11)
Foil: Range M / DamageDice 3 / Fum 1 / Crit12 / Blade Fury (attack twice if don’t move)
Rapier: Range M / DamageDice 2 / Fum 1 / Crit11-12 / Cleaving (brutal at roll 11)
This looks like an interesting array of weapons that would give any player pause to think about which their hero should take.
RECIVS wrote:When I saw your charts I thought this was going to be a discussion about facts and math,
Ok, lets get mathy.
Using my AHQ attack simulator python script, we can have a look at how each weapon performs. I can graph the average number of wounds caused against a target with toughness from 3-10, in a single turn. (This factors a 50% hit rate on the to hit roll, as if the attacker and target have the same WS, and is using the original AHQ “free attack on” critical hits)
From this graph we can draw some conclusions.
1. The Rapier is clearly the worst. Lowest damage and no reach.
2. The Estoc does very slightly less damage than the Arming Sword & Falchion, but has the advantage of reach. (note that this makes it still better than most of the spears)
3. The Arming Sword & Falchion, despite having two different rules, (cleaving on one and crit 11 on the other), do exactly the same damage.
4. The Foil is clearly the best. Because of the two attacks granted from Blade Fury, its damage output is almost double that of all the other swords. Yes it becomes a “regular” sword when the model moves, but the double damage output easily outclasses the minor drop in effectiveness.
This is a rather long-winded way of showing that Reforged, despite it’s extra rules and dozens of extra weapons, has many options, but still few genuine choices.
Specifically Cleaving vs improving the chance of a critical both function virtually identically in their damage improvement. Cleaving is an entirely redundant rule, its effects can be 99.5% replicated by improving the critical chance. 1 point of Cleaving = reducing the critical value by 1. I can show you the data and graphs if you want.
Reforged does have other extra rules that are harder to quantify, such as Bash and Block, but we are not considering these here.
As I have written before in this thread, I was attempting to make all the existing weapons in AHQ into being genuine choices for the player. As I explain in the methodology text following the rules, I picked the idea of halving toughness on crits (taken from Reforged) as a way of allowing weapons to function differently against high and low toughness targets. Thus allowing more useful variation in weapons.
As I have also said before, halving toughness on crits cannot be removed from my weapons, or they then just fall back into some weapons being objectively better than others.
updated to fix an mistype of strength 3 when it should read strength 6.
