I've just started reading the manual of the game and I noticed this section
The key word, however, is better: If a player is wearing plate armor with a defense value of 8 that provides protection against cutting weapons, and that unit is struck by a sword that does 12 damage (of type cutting), then the player will definitely roll an 8 on their defense. By contrast, if it was an iron spear that does 12 damage (of type piercing) then the player would roll a value between 1 and 8 for their defense.
Now obviously this is quite important to know, especially when you try to get information about the unit composition of your opponent, or when building your own units. However this information is not only not presented when looking at the enemy units, but it's very hard to see when even looking at your own units.
What we really need to be able to see when looking at a unit, so that I know in tactical battles whom to send against my enemy is what kind of damage my weapons do, and what kind of armor I have. While the short display should stay displaying total damage and armor as it is, each unit detailed display should show something like this:
- 9 DMG (Slashing)
- 3 Armor (Anti-Bludgeon)
- 5 Armor (Anti-Cutting)
- 4 Armor (Anti-Arcane)
Perhaps these could have some simple icons that we could then learn to understand. Then similarly, I should be able to see what kind of weapons an invading army is using and send/build the correct counters to block them.
Furthermore, the game should provide a pop-up display on our screen showing us the kind of damage we will be doing to our opponent. For example, If I have a unit with a cutting weapon which does 12 damage in total and I'm hovering my attack cursor over a unit with 8 plate armor (which is good against cutting damage), a pop up window (or some kind of information window on the top right) should display the range of damage I'm about to do. In this case it would be displaying: 0-4 Damage. This is because in the background, it calculated that
1-12 (from my attack type) minus 8 (from the armor) = 0-4 Damage.
Then I know that this kind of attack is not going to be very effective.
However if I hover over a unit with 8 leather armor, which is not so effective against cutting damage, I would see: 0-11 Damage
1-12 (from my attack type) minus 1-8 (from the leather armor) = 0-11
This information will help a lot to make tactical battle actually tactical, rather than the exercise in randomness it is now :-/
