every time I read threads like this I find myself wishing we were playing different games. a major of ST, 3s, CVS2, MVC2, KOF 98, Guilty Gear would be the best thing.
Shao Kahn spear juggle:
Motaro fireball juggle:
Do this same exercise for Alpha 3 and post your findings.
edit: You should also take into consideration the true average health in games. In AE for example the average life is less than 1000, which what Ryu and Ken have. Different games also have different scaling mechanisms (or per-char defense ratings eg. SFII), so a projectile might do more damage in one game, but it also has more severe guts scaling which would affect all attacks, not just projectiles.
Got a response from one of the local vets. While Spiral/Sent and Strider/Doom do last longer, in the long run, they still suffer from lack of solid damage from clean hits. All in all, this ends up meaning that you have to play them differently in a way that doesn’t benefit them in the long run.
I’m not sure about other games, but when comparing the older Street Fighter with AE. You have to take into account the presence of the Super or Ultra meter. I could be wrong, but I believe that the damage of projectiles and subsequently other and all moves, would have to be adjusted with respect to how damaging and how often one has access to the more powerful meter attacks - with the key view of offering a well rounded gaming experience. For example, you don’t want matches to end too quickly, if you had supers AND projectiles or moves in general that did more damage then they do. And conversely, matches that went too long.
I just tested in SFII: The World Warriors (arcade version, on an emulator).
It takes 8 Ryu FBs to kill Ken. I tested with both Fierce and Jab fireballs and the result was the same
Of course we all know that the damage on WW was way higher than ST.
For Champion Edition (CE), the number was 12 HP and 15 LP Ryu FBs against Ken
For the Street Fighter Alpha series, using Ryu’s Fierce FB against Ken the numbers were:
SFA1: 11
SFA2: 12
SFA3: 18
Who is “we”? GGXXAC and MBAACC are my main games ATM.
Yes, that’s exactly what happened. It’s called “changing the game to justify our new fancy gimmick”. Probably every game series in existence made a bad design choice for this very reason.
Like for example when they added forcebreaks to Accent Core and didn’t know what to do with Sol, so they took out his regular fafnir and made it a forcebreak… which ended up a move that’s not worth the meter AKA useless. But now 6 years later they are finally fixing this and many other AC mistakes in +R.
I’m sure you’ll need to test again for SFA3, because in that lulz game, fireballs get weaker the longer they travel… Test from point blank range, and test again from full screen.
I was an avid SFA1 and 2 player back in the days, but barely touched Alpha 3 so I didn’t know that… but I was surprised at how little damage they were causing…
I’ll try to test it again and post the results.
Ok, so I tested again using Ryu vs Ken on Alpha3
15 HP FBs from point blank
27 HP FBs from full screen
This is true.
I recall, Guile’s Sonic Boom does absolute minimum damage ON HIT from full screen, meaning it does the same damage as a blocked Sonic Boom, meaning you might be better off taking the hit since it gives you more meter than blocking it (I think).
6 yrs too late buddy
I just tested that and it’s really true.
Charlie vs Charlie, P1 hit P2 with a full screen sonic boom and then P1 blocked a full screen sonic boom from P2.
Then I let the time ran out and the result was a draw!
Once GameSharked the PS1 Alpha 3 to make Dan’s projectiles full screen. At that distance I sometimes couldn’t perceive the change to the opponent’s lifebar…
The logistics of that is so broken, yet from full screen, one would have to be brain dead to not neutral jump it, and end up on top.
I’m not sure if I understood you correctly, but the purpose of my test was to confirm if the damage from a full screen Sonic Boom is the same on hit and on block.
The only way to really confirm this was to let the time ran out.
I guess there was a time when Capcom really was against “fireball spamming”, as people like to say. This scaling mechanic in Alpha3 and parry on SF3 was their way to make fireballs less efective, as it seems.
Preemptive response: yeah, I know parry is much more than FB counters, but the result was the end of FB zoning in SF3
FB zoning sucked anyway in 3s. if you took out parry, fireballs would still be ass.
I tested out some stuff again in ST because the numbers that I remembered gathering for myself in the past did not agree at all with the numbers that Tataki got in HDR.
(He is right, and I have the worst memory ever. The numbers I had in my head were soooo far from being correct, I can barely believe myself. Hahaha.)
This is all from arcade ST (emulated), n.Ryu mirror, using only fierce blue fireballs.
(I’m a little wary of trusting my memory now for any of this, but I thiiiink that SF2 characters all have the same amount of life anyway, and I beliiieve that Ryu’s blue and red fireballs do the same amount of damage as each other for a given button strength.)
Correct me if I’m wrong: an attack’s damage table is a list of possible damage values, each one coupled with a probability of that value being used, right? (I remember reading this in a post somewhere and I thought it was by either you or Pasky.) And together it would form a bell curve? That is to say: there is a center value that occurs more frequently than any of the other damage values, right? (This would agree with how I’ve seen the game behave.)
Anyhow, in every case here, I just repeated it a whole number of times (9+) and took the most common value, which always ended up being the center value and the average value as well.
(ST’s secret-secret comeback mechanic only boosts damage for the player who’s down a round, right? In other words, it doesn’t lower damage for the player who’s up a round, riiiight? Because I definitely did some of my testing in round 2.)
I know, I know, but it’s what I have to work with. It’s close [enough to the truth, though, isn’t it?? I mean, is the lifebar ever that inaccurate???
ST’s lifebar is 144 pixels long, but I don’t know what its under-the-hood numbers are like, and I don’t know how it deals with rounding (whether for damage reduction or for HUD display purposes).
Everything I tested here was based on visual inspection of the lifebar or full KO’s.
DAMAGE ON HIT
I got the same result. Random damage and all, it took me 10 fierce blue fireballs to KO, every time.
DAMAGE ON BLOCK
Goal: determine how chip damage compares to regular (on-hit) damage.
First thing to note:
Chip damage is also subject to ST’s randomized damage.
Test #1 – count how many blocked fireballs it takes to deal the same amount of damage as one fireball hit
The regular damage from one fireball is equal to the chip damage for about 4.4 blocked fierce fierce fireballs; it’s a couple of slivers less than 4.5, definitely between 4 and 5. This suggests that chip damage is between 20% and 25% of regular damage; probably around 22% or 23%. Let’s say 22.5%. So brutal!
Test #2 – count how many blocked fireballs it takes to KO
It usually takes 42 fireballs to KO, and almost always 42 ±1. The randomized damage should theoretically grant a very large range of possibilities here, so I repeated this 20 times. It actually turned out to be fairly consistent.
I learned some other things too, but I suspect that Test #1 gives a more applicable chip-damage-to-regular-damage ratio than what we get from Test #2.
Spoiler
Because 10 fireball hits is a KO (but not 9 or 11), those 10 fireballs are dealing damage between exactly 100 percent-of-a-full-lifebar and 109.999 percent-of-a-full-lifebar.
Taking 42 fireballs as the standard number required for an all-chip KO, this suggests that chip damage is between 23.7% and 26.2% of regular damage. This does not match what we found in Test #1; blocked fireballs are KO’ing a little faster than what our Test #1 results would have predicted (44 blocked fireballs to KO). My guess is that ST’s not-as-secret comeback mechanic (having lower life gives you higher defense) applies only to regular (on hit) damage, and not to chip damage. Therefore, I assume that Test #1 is to be trusted on this matter, and that Test #2 is not.
DETAILED ANALYSIS
Examining all of the data together, the most interesting thing I noticed is that I’ve thrown over a thousand fireballs today.
I feel pretty good.
I wonder how many St. HP Volleys it takes to kill someone with Cable.
Fireball zoning was weak in SFIII due to more than just parries. Even without parries, fireballs in that series controlled less space and did less damage overall. SFIV shows that you can have a parry-like mechanic without necessarily weakening fireball zoning.