Plant health is ridiculous

[Darker]

Human has 100 health. Grass has 85 health.

When some damage is happening, this results in quite unrealistic behavior. I think plant's shouldn't go above 30 health.

[palandus]

Can be done by modding the plants.xml file.

[Darker]

I know, however this won't fix it for others, will it?

[StorymasterQ]

Then again, realistically, if you burn a tree and a person next to each other, surely the person would die way before the tree burn to the ground. Of course, it would be longer to then burn the corpse to ash.

Effectively, humans in the game have 200HP, though only half of it will matter. If a fire on a tree is extinguished when the tree is at 1HP, the tree would still live (wouldn't it?), instead of effectively being charcoal.

[Darker]

You're talking about trees. I'm talking about grass. I think that these are two different things.

[StorymasterQ]

Ah, I missed that, sorry
Then I'd agree with you, grass shouldn't go over 30HP. In fact, perhaps even 10HP.
Although, if the HP is too low, I'd think fires wouldn't have enough time to spread to other patches of grass. Not sure if it's a GoodThingâ,,¢ or not.

[Bunnie]

I'd think fires wouldn't have enough time to spread to other patches of grass.

I was thinking the same thing on that one, from my limited knowledge it looks to me fire spreads the same way as plants breed. You can see the particles float off to the new tile.

Whilst I agree that grass has high health, without changing the fire spread mechanic not much can be done. Going on the OPs topic of realism reducing the plants health would lead to the fires burning out quickly and not burning much of an area at all. Which isn't that realistic as it would /realistically/ spread over a wide area.

[Tynan]

There is a lot of ambiguity in what health means.

I can shoot a clump of grass with a pistol and not much will happen. A person will die.

You can cut a lump of grass in half. Person? Maybe not.

Really, the idea of using the same health variable for both makes no sense. But until I get time to do a body part health system, this'll be the case.

[Bunnie]

Really, the idea of using the same health variable for both makes no sense.

Maybe for grass/structures change it to Damage rather than a Health? I can't imagine that being too hard to implement just reversing it to go from, by example "100/100 Health" to "0/100 Damage" or even "0% Damage"

I'm no coder so this may be harder than I make it out But its a suggestion none the less.

[Tynan]

That doesn't really address the issue, which is that the amount of physical distress a person can take to death is not the same concept as the amount of physical distress some grass can take until it is... gone, or something.

[Bunnie]

Ahh okay I see the angle you're coming from now. People can be dead for a long time before the distress is enough to remove them from existence completely.

But also different types of stress will have different affect on the two respectively, like you said,

I can shoot a clump of grass with a pistol and not much will happen. A person will die.

However this is due to the fact that when you shoot grass you probably wont hit it where as if you shoot a muffalo you'll struggle to miss

As for solutions your body part health system sounds very intriguing, so people could say get a "Shot in the arm" debuff, which in turn could reduce their accuracy by a ton.
Implementation like that could lead to a whole world of interesting situations. I can't wait to see it, but I can imagine it being troublesome to initially code it into the game.

[Darker]

Well, applying damage types properly and creating more damage types would also help a lot. (e.g. fire*10, bullet*0.5)

[Untrustedlife]

There is a lot of ambiguity in what health means.

I can shoot a clump of grass with a pistol and not much will happen. A person will die.

You can cut a lump of grass in half. Person? Maybe not.

Really, the idea of using the same health variable for both makes no sense. But until I get time to do a body part health system, this'll be the case.

Body part health system? sweet.