Very nice, your grounded mods make combat look a lot better. I think the original Kenshi devs had absolutelly no idea how armed combat works or looks like in real life. I notice that AI fighters tend to get too close to opponents while fighting, instead of using the reach of their weapons as advantage. Katana and polearms look great overall! These are some suggestions (based on my own taste):
-Make blunts block with two hands, the left hand holds the top of the weapon, blocking is done with the mid of the handle: it's hard to use top heavy weapons to parry, in real life they were used either with shield or didn't parry at all and relied on heavy armor. Watch some HEMA content for references. It will look more natural and less janky, specially for the heavy weapons.
-Sabres are moving like ridiculously short katanas with not thrust, the animations look bad for the weapon design. Blunt animations actually would make more sense on sabres! Make them one handed nimble swords. More like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5w2Mh6CyXo
- Make heavies more AOE oriented, with more circling motion attacks or 8 shaped continous attacks. They should be hard to move, hard to stop weapons because of all the inertia. Like real zweihanders. The attacker is vulnerable at the start and end of the move but is a death whirlwind in the midst of the attack, hitting several opponents more than once.
-It would be nice if polearms attack tried to keep distance with the opponent , they should aways be trying to mantain the long distance against the opponent, not walk into their attack range. Pehaps if they did a one step forward followed by one step back move, back and forth, instead of just one step forward. With some step back moves. I noticed that heavy weapons do it already. They should either push away the opponent or move away from him, polearms suck at close range. This should match well with 5x slots and several polearm attackers against the same target, keeping it at bay. I think very small or no forward steps during most of the attacks would benefit all weapon classes and make reach more tactically relevant to the game. Rotating hips in place would make it still look dynamic, even if the attacker is not moving in relation to the ground. The way it is, they just keep walking into enemy attacks and turning their backs to other enemies during group fights, because they keep rotating so they can walk forward some more against the opponent. It makes the fights micro intensive to prevent the fighters from getting bogged in the middle of more numerous enemy.
-The overly dramatic long range downward swings that make the attacker stop for ages at the end look well in anime, but awfull in a real fight, make them shorter, don't let them sleep with their swords in the ground in the middle of the fight. Some animations are ridiculously slow. Downward attacks are no slower than any other attack. Anything too slow just looks awfull and out of place.
-Martial arts still looks ridiculously flashy and impractical. Not your fault, it's just the original design. They should look more like wrestling and less like modern flashy wushu kung-fu but I don't think the game can handle this well. Less flying moves. They should never be able to compete toe to toe with weapons to be honest, but that's just my taste.
One thing that still bothers me is how the weapon classes in the game make little sense and are just heavier versions of the same weapons. Actually most weapons are essentially the same one edge beefy two handed sword with a different art. Katanas and sabres are essentially the same thing: single edged curved swords. Hackers are single edged big swords. And Heavy Swords are just very big... singled edged swords. Only blunts and polearms are somewhat different. Essentialy bigger and heavier = better weapon is the predominant logic of the game. The animations could be used to make the classes more different. Like one class being faster than the others.
2 comments
-Make blunts block with two hands, the left hand holds the top of the weapon, blocking is done with the mid of the handle: it's hard to use top heavy weapons to parry, in real life they were used either with shield or didn't parry at all and relied on heavy armor. Watch some HEMA content for references. It will look more natural and less janky, specially for the heavy weapons.
-Sabres are moving like ridiculously short katanas with not thrust, the animations look bad for the weapon design. Blunt animations actually would make more sense on sabres! Make them one handed nimble swords. More like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5w2Mh6CyXo
- Make heavies more AOE oriented, with more circling motion attacks or 8 shaped continous attacks. They should be hard to move, hard to stop weapons because of all the inertia. Like real zweihanders. The attacker is vulnerable at the start and end of the move but is a death whirlwind in the midst of the attack, hitting several opponents more than once.
See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpq1kvy0lTA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7cYdaQW8lk
-It would be nice if polearms attack tried to keep distance with the opponent , they should aways be trying to mantain the long distance against the opponent, not walk into their attack range. Pehaps if they did a one step forward followed by one step back move, back and forth, instead of just one step forward. With some step back moves. I noticed that heavy weapons do it already. They should either push away the opponent or move away from him, polearms suck at close range. This should match well with 5x slots and several polearm attackers against the same target, keeping it at bay. I think very small or no forward steps during most of the attacks would benefit all weapon classes and make reach more tactically relevant to the game. Rotating hips in place would make it still look dynamic, even if the attacker is not moving in relation to the ground. The way it is, they just keep walking into enemy attacks and turning their backs to other enemies during group fights, because they keep rotating so they can walk forward some more against the opponent. It makes the fights micro intensive to prevent the fighters from getting bogged in the middle of more numerous enemy.
-The overly dramatic long range downward swings that make the attacker stop for ages at the end look well in anime, but awfull in a real fight, make them shorter, don't let them sleep with their swords in the ground in the middle of the fight. Some animations are ridiculously slow. Downward attacks are no slower than any other attack. Anything too slow just looks awfull and out of place.
-Martial arts still looks ridiculously flashy and impractical. Not your fault, it's just the original design. They should look more like wrestling and less like modern flashy wushu kung-fu but I don't think the game can handle this well. Less flying moves. They should never be able to compete toe to toe with weapons to be honest, but that's just my taste.
One thing that still bothers me is how the weapon classes in the game make little sense and are just heavier versions of the same weapons. Actually most weapons are essentially the same one edge beefy two handed sword with a different art. Katanas and sabres are essentially the same thing: single edged curved swords. Hackers are single edged big swords. And Heavy Swords are just very big... singled edged swords. Only blunts and polearms are somewhat different. Essentialy bigger and heavier = better weapon is the predominant logic of the game. The animations could be used to make the classes more different. Like one class being faster than the others.
I guess some of the races cant use those animations and/or they cant attack gates and buildings