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Based on the primary attributes section on page 5 of the manual, it sounds like there is no attribute that influences damage for range weapons. Does anyone know if that is accurate? (I'm playing the GOG version not Exult)

It seems a bit odd to me since there is an attribute (strength) which influences damage on hand-to-hand weapons so I thought I'd ask. Unless "hand-to-hand" is intended to mean include range and melee weapons.

The broader context is that my archers have 30 COMBAT skill, so I'm trying to decide how much STR vs. DEX training to do on them.

Thanks much for any advice anyone has!

From the manual:

STR

"strength determines several things, including how much (if any) additional damage you do with a hand-to-hand weapon and how many hits you can take before dying"

DEX

"Dexterity affects such things as how fast you are and how well you pick locks. Faster characters can move and attack more often than slower ones. Dexterity determines you combat skill"

COMBAT

"Your base combat skill is derived directly from your dexterity. It determines how likely you are to hit in combat with normal weapons"
Post edited February 17, 2021 by 6502_Workshop
This question / problem has been solved by Gotchaimage
As far as I know the only attributes that matter are the arrow type and (cross))bow type.
As an example: A normal bow does 8 damage in The Black Gate, and normal arrows do 0 damage, so the total damage remains 8.
Grab magic arrows, which are +4 damage, and the total damage would be 12.

Other than that, some weapons and arrows have a bonus to hit, namely the magic bow, triple crossbow, magic arrows, magic bolts, and the rare Lucky arrows, which should always hit.

I'm not sure if dexterity/combat influences hit chances in any way. I'll try to do some testing later today, trying to fire a bow with a dex rating of 1 vs a dex rating of 30.
Just tried it out:

When using regular bows and arrows and an Avatar with Dex/Com/Str @ 10 vs Dex/Com/Str @ 30:
She fires the bow just as fast, kept hitting almost every time, even with low stats.
Damage-wise, I couldn't see any noticeable differences, since the damage numbers were everywhere: Low and high damage numbers with low stats, and low and high damage numbers with high stats.
So I'm getting the feeling that the manual is accurate.

Disclaimer: I used Exult, so I'm not sure how things are in the vanilla game engine.

Would love to hear what people with know-how about the game's internal workings know about it.
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Gotcha: Disclaimer: I used Exult, so I'm not sure how things are in the vanilla game engine.
That's a significant enough disclaimer to make your conclusions not valid.

Thing is, Exult is not an accurate recreation of the original mechanics. When I checked the source code at one point, they had the HP/MP regen mechanics wrong.
* In the original, you would regenerate 1 HP and half your used MP (round up IIRC) every hour.
* In Exult, each hour you regenerate random amounts up to 1/3 your maximum HP and MP each hour.

So, I would not trust Exult's combat mechanics to be close enough to the original to be used as a reference.

Please re-do your tests in the original game engine.
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Gotcha: Disclaimer: I used Exult, so I'm not sure how things are in the vanilla game engine.
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dtgreene: That's a significant enough disclaimer to make your conclusions not valid.
Unless you're playing Exult. Anyway, it's why I mentioned it. 6502 is free to take or leave this info as it is.
I'll leave testing in a vanilla environment to someone else: I have Exult and save games ready to test things, but I don't have it set up in DOSBox.