How does 'choking' damage work?

[karadoc]

I'm a confused about how choking damage works. Weapons which list their damage type as "choking" seem to do all sorts of different things. I'd like to get a better understanding of what's going on so that I can decide if the choking-type ammo for grenade launchers and mortars are worth building...

Smoke grenades are listed as 60 choking damage - but they apparently don't take away any health, and they have a relatively small stun effect.
Poison gas grenades are listed as 50 choking damage; but the description also mentions that they do damage. I'm not sure if the damage mentioned in the description is additional damage, or just the damage from the choking part.
Tear gas is listed as 50-choking, but the description also talks about a heap of other special effects; again, I'm not sure how the 50 power choking damage is related to all the rest of the effects.
Rope does some about of choking damage, and the description doesn't mention stunning... but apparently the 'damage' done by ropes does in fact stun enemies. Sometimes enemies die from rope, but I suppose that's due to the special effect mentioned in the description.


In short, I basically have no idea what choking damage does, or what it means. With other damage types I feel like I can do a few easy calculations to work out if it is going to be effective; but with choking damage I have no idea what any weapon will do until I try it. For example, will the choking ammo for the mortar kill my enemies, or stun them, or just make a huge cloud of smoke which doesn't significantly damage or stun anything?

[legionof1]

At the most basic choking is merely a damage type like laser or plasma. If something does choking dmg it will check against choking resistance(usually 400% or 4X for unsuited organics).  Choking is used to manage the stun from a smoke grenade's clouds. This mod however has much more then just smoke. There are several weapons that have a multitude of effects that use choking as there base dmg type. The poison gas grenade first checks its dmg vs choke resist. Then if it does damage it calculates out its extra hp damage effect. A gas grenade is therefor ineffective against something with choking 0% like say a tank.

[karadoc]

So resistance affects choking effects in much the same way as other damage types. Fair enough. I assume that armour affects it as well.

But how can I tell which choking weapons are going to do damage (ie. remove health points) and which are going to stun? Apparently smoke only stuns, but poison gas does damage. What about the choking ammo for other weapons? Is there any way to tell what is going to happen without trying out every weapon?

[Solarius Scorch]

I guess the only way, apart from testing, is the Bootypedia.

[Eddie]

Choking damage is complicated, because the number displayed for area weapons (grenades) is not related to damage most of the time but is the radius. It's a bit like incendary in vanilla.
The problem with Piratez is, everything about a weapon can be customized so there is no general formula I can tell you. But I can tell you what the numbers in the ruleset mean. Normally choking (as in normal smoke grenade) does 5-10 stun damage per round and ignores armor.

Example: gas grenade

- Damage 50 with damage type 9
This would just be smoke, like a regular smoke grenade. And this will create a smoke cloud like a normal smoke grenade. The damage amount defines how big the cloud is and is not related to damage.

-   damageAlter:
      RandomType: 4
      FixRadius: 4
      ToHealth: 1.6
      ToStun: 0.8
      ToEnergy: 4.0
      ToMorale: 3.0

This is where things get complicated.
RandomType: 4 means the damage rolled is 5-10. This is then modified by the resistance value of the armor which can be up to 4x. But we haven't done any damage yet, there are still more parameters. This is just the number from which actual damage is calculated. Also, this damage is the same no matter the distance from the blast center.
FixRadius: 4 limits the size of the smoke cloud.
ToHealth: 1.6 means for every point of damage rolled, 1.6 points will be substracted from health. The default value of this parameter for damage type 9 (choking) is 0.
ToStun: 0.8 means for every point of damage rolled, 0.8 points will be added to stun. The default value of this parameter for damage type 9 (choking) is 1.
ToEnergy: 4.0 and ToMorale: 3.0 work in the same way. Default values of both are 0.

It should be noted that these values just apply to units in the blast area upon detonation. After detonation this is just normal smoke.

So you see, any damage type can be converted to anything. You can design a weapon where bootypaedia says it does 1 damage but it kills everything in one shot. Bootypaedia is not made to handle the things that OXCE allows.

[Dioxine]

Well, yes. It's quite embarrassing, but damage value is purely arbitrary for fire and smoke weapons. Not sure how it should be really displayed. A gas grenade would inflict about 50 HP damage on average to an unprotected target (4*7.5*1.6). Also the blast radius = 4, which is 40/10... (in the OG, the damage rating was tied to blast radius).  If someone has a proposition how damage should be displayed on incendiary and smoke weapons, I'll gladly listen.

[Loengrinn]

So, the answer is not only complicated, but not even really an answer? Or maybe I just misunderstood it.

But one premise that I don't think anyone actually answered is how you can tell which choking weapons only stun and which ones do actual health dmg.

[legionof1]

I would check the wiki for more exact information. To my knowledge only 4 weapons coded as choking do real dmg. The rope, the poison gas grenade, the mortar gas rounds, and the auto cannon gas rounds. All the rest are non lethal. 

[Dioxine]

It's in the description, no other way to convey such information. If you think the descriptions are lacking, point out how they can be improved.

[karadoc]

I don't feel like there is any particular description lacking, but I do think that inconsistency between descriptions leads to uncertainty in the player (for me at least). Some items explicitly talk about how much health they'll take off, and some don't. The smoke bomb and the grenade launcher both have choking type damage, and neither description explicitly mentions how much health damage that will translate to; but I presume that the smoke bomb does zero and the grenade launcher does roughly 50 minus armour.

I didn't know that damage type is what determines the smoke radius. That explains why some of the numbers are weird and inconsistent.

For me I think the ideal situation would be that any weapon which doesn't simply do 100% health damage should automatically list it's damage breakdown. (eg. spike mace does 100% health, 50% stun. Rope does 100% stun, 20% health, or whatever it is.)   -- However, that's probably too much stuff to type manually; and having it in the description text would probably get a bit messy. So I suppose the best option would be to further modify the game code itself to automatically include that stuff in the Bootypedia. I'm not sure how much work that would be. (I'd volunteer to look into it, but I don't expect to have enough time for that in the foreseeable future; and I'm not sure it's even something people would want.) Of course, if we're changing code it would probably be even easier to change what determines the gas radius...

[Dioxine]

Smoke ammo deals smoke damage (stun) in low numbers, which shouldn't be surprising to the player who is using smoke grenades. Poison gas kills. Knockout grenades stun. If you don't believe the names, color codes and descriptions, experiment. Is knowing all the exact numbers (of which most you DO know anyway, since they're written down, except those which are hardly relevant) that all-important?

[yrizoud]

Sorry but I don't find things so evident (ex: I was surprised that acid flask was not area-of-effect) and experimenting is very limited by the huge variability of targets, and limited access to mind probe to see if a specific attack had any effect.

[Dioxine]

Depends what you want to be evident. If you want the exact workings to be evident, then no, obviously it wasn't what I meant. What I meant was that the general function should be evident; and experimenting does indeed favor players who are crazy experimenters. What's wrong with that? Is the game unwinnable without mastering the use of more obscure weapons? Is all that information imperative for survival? No. But I feel that inquisitive players should be rewarded in small ways. If there was a tutorial on everything, there would be no space for discovery (not even mentioning that the game would be deadly boring). So please, normal player, accept the fact that there are areas of the game meant only for hardcore gamers. And if it irks you that you don't have the Total Information Mastery, there's always Ivan and his Bootypedia for you

[ivandogovich]

... there's always Ivan and his Bootypedia for you

LOL... and his never-ending hamster wheel to try to keep up with all the awesome new content and verify all the old stuffs.  Seriously, can't wait for Draco to get back.   And yeah, if any of you fine players want to jump in, feel free!  The most glaring deficiency that I see right now, is the staleness of the equipment pages.  I'm pretty sure we are several versions out of date, missing new items, as well as some item stats have been changed.

But that aside, there are still some aspects of "choking" damage on some items that still blow my mind.  The ability to mix and match damages hurts my brain!  But I've got to hand it to Dioxine: he is unbelievably creative when it comes to implementing this stuff!