Yeah, we discovered that fs_slow_whatever is the same as fs_whatever, fs_semi_fast_whatever, etc a few days ago throught extensive testing. I tried comparing animation to animation but my head started to hurt :)

but what we are having trouble with is the difference between skeletons for different weapons (for example: fs_dagger and fs_spearman).

We make the units clones of each other except for the skeleton and suddenly fs_dagger gets obliterated. If we give them the same skeleton or just differ the speed of the skeleton, we get, as expected, 50% victories and 50% losses for both units. And I don't think it is JUST the animation speed of the attacks. Because according to Jerome,

"as the animation influence was largely eliminated from actual fought battles through the use of time-to-next-attack penalties"
Thus, setting all min_delays to 25 as CA did *should* make two skeletons of different types equivalent, but again, extensive testing has showed that while they are closer than before, they are still not equal.

It is my current belief (though I readily admit I have no proof) that the impact deltas of the attack animations as defined in skeleton.txt somehow determine the range of the attacks. This gives a combat edge to units with large impact delta-zs, like spearmen and to a lesser extent, 2handed. Units with smaller delta-zs, like dagger, are at a disadvantage even if their attack animations are *supposedly* normalized to 2.5 seconds between attacks.

Wles..you haven't figured out a trick for editing the impact frame of an animation without compiling skeleton.txt have you? Our mumakil's impact frame needs editing :)

I don't know what to say about the shrinking thing. If there is a combat effect due to that, we haven't detected it empirically yet as fs_swordsman and fs_slow_swordsman appear equal once battle is joined.