Since I'm waiting for last CGs for After Midnight I've resumed coding this.
In practice decided to find a fix for this issue:
in Loren and SOTW I used to have a base damage, like 50 hp, to which the attack vs defense was multiplied. Which was a fine solution, the problem was that wasn't really intuitive and couldn't easily be explained with maths.
In Cursed Lands (or maybe was already Queen Of Thieves? don't remember) I introduced this new system of attack-defense, with defense slowly going down as target gets hit. So even if initially it wouldn't do much damage, as the target is hit would lower defense.
That worked too, but in the cases like the one above, if the target have really high defense, the resulting damage was 1, which was rather bad to look at. In PS2 that sort of worked fine because we had machineguns which could shot 3-5 times, so even if each shot was doing 1-3dmg, the cumulative damage was acceptable. Then there were the big weapons like cannons which had no such issues since they'd always do a lot of damage
In this game though I am trying to fix it by simply using the defense to reduce the "bonus damage". Before it was all summed together:
Base weapon damage + attacker's attack value - target's defense
I liked this since different weapons would do different damage, we could have slow but powerful weapons, heavy but slow armors etc but there still was the 1-2 dmg issue.
Now I've simply split damage in two parts:
base weapon damage + skill bonus (like some skill say "deal 250% base damage" = base damage
bonus damage: attacker's attack value - target's defense = bonus damage
if bonus damage is 0 or less, simply doesn't get added at all. An example of the difference:
Before:
Weapon 10 + 5 atk - 12 def = 3 dmg
Now:
Weapon 10 + (5 atk - 12 def) = 10 dmg
Also this way there's more strategy since having spells/skills that raise defense or attack will work up to a certain point but never make the target completely immune to damage. This makes the fights also go faster which I think is better. Of course I'll need to test everything well...
This is one quest in which you'll be able to kill A, kill B, or kill A+B!