Quote Originally Posted by Zenicetus
This is the part I'm concerned about, although I'm stupid about modding, and not very familiar with how some of these stats work. If arrow damage drops below a certain threshold value, does that mean it could cause no damage at all? If everything scales to any value, this wouldn't be a problem, but I worry about threshold situations like that.
I suppose it could mean that... but more than likely, the difference between attack and defense values in combat determine the success rate of the attack, and rather than there being a threshold, the system probably just fades off to something like 5% and 95% success corresponding to maybe a difference of 10 or more in favor of defender, and 10 or more in favor of attacker. It's no fun in a game if the difference between units makes it impossible for one to ever touch the other with an attack, and 5% seems pretty usual to account for the lucky strike a totally inferior unit might be able to score, and 95% leaves 5% chance for the far superior unit to flub up and not score a hit. Each value in between might correspond to an additional 5% success for the attacker, meaning an evenly matched attack and defense would mean 50% success for the attacker. In practice this would mean that a direct ratio applied to attack would work out nearly correct, as the attack values would remain sufficiently close to the average unit's defense value not to fall off the end of the difference table. Of course this is purely speculation on my part, but I will say that systems like the one I described are commonly employed because they give each point of attack and defense a clear (and identical) meaning in combat, and are therefore intuitive for developers to balance.