Unarmoured combat
- Stances – guards
Guards used in KCD are roughly correct. They are Oberhut/Vom Tag (from above/Roof – sword above your head pointing upwards), Ochs (the Ox - crossed arms above your head, pointing to opponents head), Zornhut (guard of wrath - sword angled from right or left shoulder, pointing above), Nebenhut (low guard - the opposite of Zornhut from below).
Instead of Nebenhut or the non-implemented classic Unterhut (from below straight line), which have been only rarely used in real world, I think it would be a good idea to implement the so called Alber (Fool, sword in centre pointing to the ground), which is great guard allowing many defensive techniques (fool is its name because only a fool would attack “into it”, i.e. against an opponent in the guard of Fool). Fool is actually Unterhut but with switched hands.
Also, the Fool is as close as you can get to some “neutral” guard, which multiple commentators have demanded on this forum. Although it is not neutral from the fencing point of view (it is in fact very aggressive), people might appreciate having sword in the centre for a while. A version of Fool is point of the sword pointing from below to opponents face (so called Pflug – plow).
Otherwise, I have no suggestion how to improve guards. Good job there, Warhorse.
- Strikes
Major issues. Strikes in KCD are the showcase of stage combat, unfortunately.
a. Strike with stretched arms
You would normally never strike wide with your arms stretched. It is simply too slow. The strike from a guard which involves stretched arms (such as Roof or Fool) indeed involves a combination of arms movement, but then you immediately use the leverage you have with your left hand on the pommel against your right hand and give the strike a good quick twist. Think about a golf stroke, how powerful and quick it is when you flex your wrist properly! Guards where your arms are not stretched, such as Guard of Wrath or Ox, do involve even less or no waving your hands, it’s basically all about quick wristwork.
Remember, it is preferable that your strike is rather fast than heavy. If you hit properly to the head (which is btw your primary target from any direction with any strike), even a soft but quick strike will incapacitate your unarmoured opponent. Also, late medieval longswords were very light (between 1.3-1.7 kg), so hitting hard wasn’t really your primary concern.
Carving big long cuts with your arms stretched is the domain of stage fencing where you need to create an illusion of force. It has no place in real combat, however. Quite the reverse, actually, it goes against the old German principle “to hit the other in the shortest, quickest and the most effective way”.
Implementation: this could be easily altered by different animations. The moves should be quick but I hope not impossible to motion-capture.
b. Sliding of the blade
Another aspect of stage fencing from which KCD suffers greatly is sliding of the blade. In the current build, if your opponent blocks (or doesn’t), your blade slides down (or up) from his sword or armour and you end up in the guard opposite to the one from which your cut began. The inverse physics do this beautifully, but it has little support in history or logic of fighting with longsword.
In real fencing, two scenarios are possible. You either hit your target right away (head / joint (elbow, knee, foot) and there the fight usually ends. Given the speed of a well-executed wrist slash, this is actually less improbable than you would think. Unarmoured fights could be very brief. Or, you touch opponent’s sword (so called “binding”) and then you have two basic options. If he is weak on the blade, you go strong, press forward and finish (or tweak) your original strike, and hit. If he is strong, you go weak and transition into a second strike through wristwork on his blade and then hit. If you don’t hit, you follow with 3rd strike and so on.
This is what is called roughly “work with the sword” and is the core of medieval swordplay.
Implementation: might be done by changing the mechanics just a tiny bit. When you hit opponent’s sword or armour and you do not follow-up (lets say, you click just once, or you click once and then you “unwind” by taking a step backwards), your sword would spring back to your original guard. However, if you go combo in the same way as you do successive clicks from multiple directions in Alpha 0.4, you would perform the 2nd and 3rd strikes and so on as described above until you hit or be hit by opponent’s counterstrike. It is probably more a question of different animations than adjusting the mechanics substantially.
- Counterstrikes
In my eyes the most painful issue in current KCD combat system. In German longsword school, which is the one applicable to Bohemia at the time we find ourselves at, there was no such thing as parrying and then attacking. The word “Riposta”, itself comes from much later Italian and French rapier school (French word “riposte”), that developed parrying / riposte style some 200 ± years later. Nowadays riposte, i.e. parry and attack, survives in contemporary sport fencing disciplines with foil, epée and sabre. Note that rapier fencing was rather a matter of very distinct street duels, whereas on the battlefield combatants were still using swords (even bigger than in 15th century) in parallel to civic weapons such as rapiers. Note also that one of the famous classical longsword Fechtuchücher is from as late as 1570 by Joachim Meyer, and of course does not contain any parrying in the longsword section. Just forget Riposte.
So how did 15th century combatants defend themselves if not by parrying? Simply by counterstriking directly against the attacker. The longsword has this great feature that the blade is indeed long and strong enough to provide both cover and threat to your opponent at the same instant. Technically you would strike against opponent’s attack thrusting your arms forward to cover your head (from whichever guard) and either directly hit your opponent or after binding his blade (strong or weak) push or move around accordingly and hit, just like normal sword work. The trick is that the attacker is always somewhat faster and has more control over his 2nd and the following strikes, which requires the defender to adapt his 2nd and following counterstrikes. That is why the old german fechtschule maxim states that “the best defence is offence”. It is always more advantageous to strike first than to wait, parry, and counterattack.
Implementation: I think just redesigning the parry-attack function would be fine. Lets leave Q key as master defence key. But instead of pressing Q at the right time to parry (which is very unintuitive per se), lets instead leave the player with choice to leftclick or rightclick (slash or stab) against opponent’s attack. If player does it in the right time, he parries and strikes at the same time (here a good animation for catching opponent’s blade on your strong and cutting with the weak).
The defender’s strike, if the counterstrike was successful, can be then counterstroke against in the same manner, as it is now possible with parrying in Alpha 0.4. Counter attacking might be possible from all directions as it is in reality, because any guard allows you to counterattack against any strike. This will add good variety into the fight.
Should player miss the right time to counter attack, he might be quick enough to press Q for defence (unlikely) or eat up the risk from failed counterattack and get hit (as would be the case in reality).
I see no issue with the bullet time! I think having bullet time during counterstrike would allow you to better appreciate what is actually happening in the combat. And if you ever tried fighting, you would know that often time runs in mysterious ways 
- Stabbing
I think stabbing is well done in KCD. In real fencing, you would threaten to stab your opponent straight from some guards (such as Ochs or Plow), or stab after executing a strike when binding the opponent’s blade (as it is now implemented in one of the combos, if I remember correctly). I would simply leave the choice to stab with rightmouseclick either as a part of the consecutive strikes (combo) or as a counterstrike.
To be contd with armoured and wrestling combat…
The reason is that the “swordmasters” Warhorse engaged and even mo-capped are pure stage fencers, look at their website and see the bits of video updates where the process of mo-capping can bee seen.
sorry that its off topic…
