Medieval tactics – in theory and in practice

Welcome, lords and ladies!

The Zodiac Legion team wishes you all the best in this auspicious new year, and we’d like to celebrate this occasion by once again focusing on one of the primary aspects of our game – translating medieval warfare conventions into actual gameplay.

You may remember our previous updates on the subject, such as To Kill a Knight or the Knight Tactics presentation we did at Tacticon. This article is largely a textual recap of the latter, for those of you who prefer to read rather than listen. It will touch on what we know about armoured fighting, and how carrying a full suit of plate mail influences your odds of getting mortally stabbed, in a duel or in a group.

Let’s dive right into it!

As we mentioned many times before, we want to make our armour feel “real” by leveraging a complex paperdolling system to obtain the desired gameplay effects when faced with a multitude of different weaponry. If you consider an account of a duel fought between Jean de Villeneuve and Jacques de Lalaing in the early 15th century, you will learn that the two exchanged a total of 55 blows (!) with real poleaxes as used in battle, while “sparing nothing” in the fight before it was stopped by the “referee”. This alone should give you an idea just how impervious plate armour could be. Jean and Jacques were more than just big HP bars with a damage reduction of 5 vs slashing.

The reality is that it simply could not be cut, was very difficult to pierce in a way causing serious damage, and bashing it relied more on the sheer force of the blow reaching the man inside rather than damaging the armour itself. And even if you got through the steel plates, there was a layer of chainmail underneath. Before the advent of gunpowder, you could not hope for a better way of achieving invincibility.

Of course, it is absurd to think that in practice the two valiant knights smashed each other until one passed out of exhaustion – this would also take a while to happen, as a knight’s gear was comparable to a contemporary soldier’s or firefighter’s in weight and had to let you stay on your feet in prolonged conflicts. Still, the armour had weaknesses, particularly in the unprotected parts around the hands and rear, the helmet (a visor is very inviting for a dagger), and the less thick joints.

These considerations have influenced a significant part of our combat mechanics, including the basic attack formula. A successful attack first determines the struck body part, then checks its protection (armour type), coverage (whether you hit a less-protected spot), and finally the penetration against what you really ended up hitting, followed by damage. Translated into a real world scenario, a high attack roll lets you stab through an unprotected joint to only be stopped by a thinner layer of chainmail underneath, piercing it right into the inside of your opponent’s elbow.

Furthermore, much like in contemporary martial arts, knightly duels involved plenty of interesting techniques, both utilising the protection of plate armour and serving to circumvent it. The choice of weapon was already a major factor, as different weapons gave you different ways of keeping your foe at bay, disarming him or bringing him to the ground. Two-handed weapons such as poleaxes and swords were the king here, since one-handers lacked the force and length required to penetrate armour or gain an advantage otherwise.

In Zodiac Legion, we tried to abstract this by assigning different properties to weapon types. The poleaxe is the offensive choice for its shock damage, the sword is more defensively flexible thanks to manoeuvres such as half-swording, while the halberd primarily makes use of its long reach to act as the best supportive weapon in formation fighting.

As provided in the above account, our friend Jacques de Lalaing used his pointy bits to prevent Jean de Boniface from closing the distance. With good reason! Once you went past the danger zone of your opponent’s weapon, either by disarming him or moving closer, you could immobilise him in an iron grip or wrestle him to the ground. After that he’d become a largely powerless and very vulnerable prey to precise strikes where his armour didn’t reach.

Grappling is unfortunately a very complex mechanic to add to a game, as most of you who’ve ever played pen-and-paper can probably confirm, and it only gets worse when considering video games. Not only does it require a lot of abstraction, it’s also very troublesome to animate without looking silly. We absolutely want to have grappling in Zodiac Legion given its prominence in medieval combat, but we’re still looking for a good way of representing it.

However, all of this pertains to tidy one-on-one duels. What happens once we enter group fights or even large battles between entire armies? Plenty of things going wrong, that’s what!

In groups, all the fancy techniques and grappling manoeuvres become a lot more hazardous to perform, as you may expose yourself to the enemy mob. Numerical advantage in smaller skirmishes was extremely important, as anyone facing multiple enemies alone would quickly become overwhelmed. Thus it was important to stay in formation, support one another and try to break up the enemy’s “squad coherence” in an attempt to fish out single combatants or divide a group into smaller ones. All of this served to overcome the enemy through the combination of attrition, exhaustion and morale loss, which were incidentally also the primary factors determining the outcomes of big battles.

During a famous episode of the Hundred Years’ War known as the Combat of the Thirty, after half a day of fighting that resulted in just 6 casualties out of 60, the decisive event that won the fight for the French was when after a gentlemanly arranged break, a French squire caught the English completely off-guard by charging into the ranks on a horse, breaking their formation and letting his comrades mop up the resulting chaos.

Therefore melee support is a central part of the gameplay in Zodiac Legion, both on the offence and defence, as we’ve mentioned many times before in these updates. An isolated character won’t last long in a melee, but a coherent unit of footmen and halberdiers will be much harder to dislodge. Furthermore, while we mentioned two-handed weapons ruling the metagame in duels, shields become very attractive in group fights, as not all of your characters are fully armoured. Thus a poor footman equipped with nothing but gambeson not only significantly increases his own chances of survival when packing a tower shield, he can also use it to protect vulnerable party members such as mages from enemy arrows.

Finally, attrition and exhaustion are reflected in the way we approach dungeon-delving. Rather than a series of smaller engagements, we try to treat our levels as single protracted battles, where you have to be constantly on the move. The world does not stop to let you rest, and wasting time might give your enemies the opportunity to prepare themselves or seek you out.

Nevertheless, with all the knowledge available to us, there are also plenty of limitations that we have to work around. There is unfortunately very little reliable information about formation combat in armour, as chroniclers who wrote about the battles weren’t there to witness them, while the knights who did take part probably weren’t as interested in the tactical considerations as we are today.

Still, we can supplement a lot of the gaps by considering modern research, the “reverse-engineering” of fencing manuals, and the evolution of warfare in general. Not to mention the flexibility granted to us by introducing magic powers and monsters.

A shiny suit of plate armour suddenly becomes a lot less effective when facing a dragon the size of an elephant, which can also breathe acid upon you. But at the same time, a lot of its drawbacks are removed if you can teleport at will.

The valiant Jacques de Lalaing met his untimely demise at the age of 32 in the year of our Lord 1453, when a cannonball tore through him near Ghent, signalling the coming end of the supremacy of plate armour on the battlefield. Is that truly so different from being struck by a blazing fireball?