Talk:Special weapon event odds

Attack events

I'm confused about the cumulative weapon damage column on Special weapon event odds. The killing blow awards full xp, so if you had a bodybuilder machete against a 2 hp parrot, you still cause 3 damage with the killing blow (for all practical purposes). 24 machete hits (with all combat skills) should cause 72 damage (without weapon criticals). But is the cumulative damage column even needed? On the other hand, a cumulative attempts column would probably be useful, because the critical hit & critical fumble probabilities most likely depend on total swings rather than on total hits. --Tycho44 21:32, 21 May 2006 (BST)

With all due respect, I'm fairly sure you're wrong; killing a 2 HP parrot should give you 2 XP for the damage in addition to the parrot's 5 XP kill bonus. The way to test this would be to punch a nearly-dead animal and see what XP you get when it dies; I'm out of AP at the moment, so maybe you could do it. The reason my damage column is 2 short is that I killed a 10 HP monkey with four machete blows, meaning the last blow dealt 1 HP of damage, not 3. That said, I strongly suspect that damage dealt is irrelevant, but I'm tallying it anyway. Perhaps you'd like to mark it as an optional column? — Elembis 21:45, 21 May 2006 (BST)

If you don't get XP for full damage on every weapon strike, that would be a new change to the game. Throughout February and March, animals gave full XP for overspill damage, and then gave half rounded up of (5 + Max HP) as a bonus. See XP and its talk page. Try using a knife or punch to kill a monkey exactly; in the past the bonus for a monkey was 8xp plus all damage. I'll head out into the jungle and see what I can verify about the current situation. --Tycho44 22:04, 21 May 2006 (BST)

You're right, I was wrong. The numbers at Talk:XP agree with your theory and prove me wrong. I'll remove the damage column, since it's apparently redundant. — Elembis 22:16, 21 May 2006 (BST)

No probs, some of the information on the animals page is out of date and is probably wrong. (For example, alligator bonus xp is now 15 not 10, or alligator is another exception to (max_hp+5)/2 formula.) It helps to have multiple investigators to verify things as they change. Also, is the critical hit always 5 damage, or is it +2 damage, or something else?

Appended note: if you have room for an optional column, I'd recommend total swings, since it could well be the case that Criticals are a percentage of total attacks, rather than a percentage of successful hits. (You could leave that blank on your current entry, or you could back-substitute to 53 swings without much error since your %-to-hit was always 45%.) --Tycho44 05:52, 22 May 2006 (BST)

Good idea. I've added a "Swings" column and inserted "?" in my current row. I'll start a new row when I have anything new to add. — Elembis 17:18, 22 May 2006 (BST)

Blade dulling

Likewise, the blade dulling & XP tallies might benefit from logging jungle density being chopped, or simply limit your tally to d10 (adjacent square) jungle chops. --Tycho44 21:35, 21 May 2006 (BST)

My thought is that it would be quite tedious to chart chops by jungle density. It would also seem unnecessary for three reasons:

1. People usually chop a single square several times, meaning many entries would have to be changed in a more detailed chart.
2. I suspect that density has nothing to do with it; chopping wood is chopping wood, and Simon isn't the type to introduce complexity without reason.
3. Blade dulling percentages for jungle of various densities will hardly be more helpful than a single percentage for jungle in general. (I don't expect anyone to think "Hmm, now that I've got the jungle down to d6, do I really want to take it to d5 given that I have a 5% greater chance of dulling my blade?").

I'm not saying we can't log data for specific jungle densities (it's not like the project is underway yet), I just doubt it's worth it. — Elembis 22:01, 21 May 2006 (BST)

I've added room for optional density detail. Again, I doubt we'll find that density matters, but contributors will at least be able to add such information now if they wish. — Elembis 22:54, 21 May 2006 (BST)

I've been told that you can now gain XP from chopping non-d10 jungle -- is this true? --Tycho44 05:47, 22 May 2006 (BST)