Are Shields Worthless against AN Attacks

[JonBrave]

Thanks a lot, guys, for making it yet more complicated...

For those who feel like being kind enough to answer (please don't refer me to another thread):

1. Shield has (a) defence and (b) protection
2. There is (a) melee and (b) missile combat

I make that 4 combinations. Which ones do/don't work against AN damage (weapon?). I'll even accept "Mostly"/"Hardly" for "Yes"/"No", if required.....

[Corinthian]

In practice none of those 4 combinations will stop AN attacks. And a shield dont provide defense. It provide Block. Its often the same, but not always. If it had actually been defense then it would indeed have worked.

As for Sombre's comment, he was saying that from a theoretical coding perspective, it is not necessarily true that an AN projectile will always pierce a shield. But in practice it will.

His comment is only relevant to modders.

[rdonj]

To be specific with regards to shields, they have two seperate values, parry and defense. In general, shields lower your defense and grant you a greater level of parry. A successful parry check means that any missile weapon that hits it is negated outright (though as we can see there are certain ranged weapons that bypass shields altogether). Parry works differently with melee combat, instead causing a successful parry check to add the protection of the shield to a unit's listed protection. Since this is still just protection an AN melee weapon benefits from attacking most shielded targets. There's only a very few shields in the game that don't lower your defense. You need actual defense value in order to avoid getting hit, so you are better off with a second weapon that adds to defense, cat charm, etc.

[JonBrave]

LOL, you guys are priceless! I guess my bad for even assuming it would be that simple

Here's a grid:

Armor-Negating attack, does Shield help with:

                   Parry         Protection

Melee...           Yes/No?       Yes/No?

Ranged...          Yes/No?       Yes/No?

[JonBrave]

Originally Posted by Corinthian

In practice none of those 4 combinations will stop AN attacks. And a shield dont provide defense. It provide Block. Its often the same, but not always. If it had actually been defense then it would indeed have worked.

Ummm, so the precise difference between Block and Defense is... ?

Originally Posted by Corinthian

As for Sombre's comment, he was saying that from a theoretical coding perspective, it is not necessarily true that an AN projectile will always pierce a shield. But in practice it will.

The difference between the "theoretical coding perspective" and "in practice" being what... ?

[Amorphous]

Let me see if I can make it a bit clearer. I will, however, not provide the answer in your grid, because it seems to me that you are not that clear about the difference between defence and parry.

Mêlée:

A unit with a shield has a defence and a parry value; the parry value is added on top of the defence. An example would be an arcoscephalian peltast which has a base defence score of 10 and a standard shield (protection 15, defence -1, parry 4, encumbrance 1). The peltast so has a defence score of 9 and a combined defence and parry score of 13. The latter is what you see in the unit information window; if you click on the defence skill you will see it broken down in defence and parry values.

In case of an mêlée attack against our shielded unit, there are 3 different possibilities: 1) the attack beats the combined defence and parry score (13), 2) the attack beats the defence score (9) but not the combined defence and parry score (13), 3) the attack does not even beat the defence score.

In case 1 it is the question of a clean hit. Damage will be rolled against the protection of the hit area (which for the peltast is 6, wherever the attack hits).

In case 2 it is the question of a shield hit. Damage will be rolled against the protection of the hit area (6) and the protection of the shield (15) added together, resulting in an effective protection of 21.

In case 3 it is the question of a miss. No damage will be rolled.

AN damage ignores protection which means that for such weapons 1 and 2 are effectively the same. Against an AN weapon our peltast would be better off without his shield.


Ranged:

Shield protection never matters when determining what happens in a ranged attack. The shields parry value adds to the chance of not getting hit at all. If the hit gets through, damage is calculated against protection at hit location - shield protection is not added.

As far as I know, all AN ranged weapons in the game also disregard the parry part of the ranged hit calculation. Whether this is a necessary result from the armour negating property or not, I could not say. The documentation is, as far as I can see, not entirely unambigous in this case and I have not experimented with ranged AN attacks.

[Fantomen]

Originally Posted by Amorphous

As far as I know, all AN ranged weapons in the game also disregard the parry part of the ranged hit calculation. Whether this is a necessary result from the armour negating property or not, I could not say. The documentation is, as far as I can see, not entirely unambigous in this case and I have not experimented with ranged AN attacks.

Sombre posted this on dom3mods:

Can someone go and correct the people in this thread on Crapnel please?

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=47910

Whether or not a ranged weapon is AN has nothing to do with whether it ignores shields and shield prot values are never factored in against missile weapons. That said in the vanilla game I think every AN missile weapon does ignore shields.

So AN and ignoring shields are sparate properties for ranged weapons, but all vanilla AN ranged weapons seem have them both, which is why they seem to be linked. But if you mod a ranged weapon to do AN damage it will not ignore shields unless you set that as well.

[Knai]

Originally Posted by Fantomen

So AN and ignoring shields are separate properties for ranged weapons, but all vanilla AN ranged weapons seem have them both, which is why they seem to be linked. But if you mod a ranged weapon to do AN damage it will not ignore shields unless you set that as well.

Exactly. Which, in practicality, means two things.
1) Shields are more or less worthless against AN attacks outside of special effects (Awe, Entanglement, Fire Shield, whatever).
2) The spaghetti code mess that is Dominions 3 is messy even in this area.

[Olive]

Against ranged AN weapons, a Shield of Valor is a good choice.

[Knai]

Originally Posted by Olive

Against ranged AN weapons, a Shield of Valor is a good choice.

I prefer the lantern shield. If the ranged AN weapons are pointed at some fuzzy green ball off to the side of the map instead of the shield wielder, it is serving its purpose. Plus, the lantern shield is wonderful for ruining battle orders to begin with.