Kenshi Fact of the Day #16

-Martial Arts Damage-

Unlike cut/blunt damage on weapons, Martial Arts does not have a "minimum" damage value which reduces their damage they get from scaling.

A character with 0 in all stats will do 2.5 damage with Martial Arts, with all of it being blunt. (Not including animations ofc!)

Martial Arts starts out with no cut damage at all, then scales to slowly gain more and more as it levels up higher with the blunt damage gained per level starting high and progressively decreasing. At a certain point leveling up Martial Arts actually causes your total blunt damage to go down with each level.

Below is a chart showing the damage you gain from Martial Arts exclusively. (So not accounting for what animations you use or your Strength/Toughness levels) I refer to this as "base damage".

Martial Arts Level	Cut	Blunt
0	0	2.5
10	0.195	3.055
20	0.48	3.52
30	0.855	3.895
40	1.32	4.18
50	1.875	4.375
60	2.52	4.48
70	3.255	4.495
80	4.08	4.42
90	4.995	4.255
100	6	4

*The game LOVES to lie and round a full number down and sometimes up. I got these results by modding a unit to deal 100,000x damage to humans, using a 100 power attack and hit a 0% damage resist target. Even at level 100 with that mod the damage showed up as 600,000 + 399,999. But when checking the damage taken in FCS it was 600,000 + 400,000. (Cut+Blunt damage)

Sup

Without this mod this is what is the game would display at that level...

Flipping game lying to me making my testing difficult...

Complaining about the rounding for the millionth time aside, you start with 2.5 damage as I mentioned above. Then for each level of Martial Arts you gain 0.075 damage. So, your base damage can be found by entering the following,

(2.5+MA(0.075))

Your Martial Arts damage is increased further based off your Strength and Toughness.

For Strength you multiply your level by 0.1x then by the base damage.

For Toughness you multiply your level by 0.08x then by the base damage.

You then add all those together to get your total damage.

The formula for your total damage is,

Base damage+Base damage(0.1Strength)+Base damage(0.08Toughness)

Let's test it out on Tinfist while he's inside of his HQ.

• 122 Martial Arts (110 + 8 from being Indoors + 4 from his Dustcoat)
  • 2.5+122(0.075)
    • 11.65 base damage
• 90 Strength
  • 11.65(9)
    • +104.85 damage
• 100 Toughness
  • 11.65(8)
    • +93.2 damage

Add them all together and you get 209.7 damage.

If we were to check in game...

I am in danger

The damage you actually deal is based off of your total damage multiplied by the (power/100) of whatever attack you use.

*For a list of all animations check on the wiki page, it even includes animations.

For example, if Tinfist were to use Megakick (180 power) he would do a totally fair and balanced 377.46 damage. Not horrifying at all!

Bonus facts/myth correcting/hot takes

• Unarmed damage bonus on Robotic Limbs does NOT work. Imagine for a second if Lifter arms really gave you a total of +6 unarmed damage... Makes me wonder if it would be added to the base damage if it did work... Just imagine instead of dealing 10 "base damage" at 100, you'd be doing 16. Chris please never fix that. Thanks.

• Skeletons do NOT get bonus cut damage off Dexterity. Dexterity will only impact your attack speed for Martial Arts.

• Martial Arts does not have "dead zones" where you do not attack between animations. Your fists have 18 reach, not 0. That reach is included to determine if you are close enough to use an animation or not.

  • The mod which claims this just buffs Martial Arts by tripling the "attack distance" value of the incredibly fast jump kick as well as allowing you to use Jump Knee attack.

• Martial Arts does not have a "dodge lock" problem in base game. The only thing that can potentially "dodge lock" a Martial Artists is a swarm of Beakthings as their bodies are so large that you need to get closer to them and with all the dodging it can be difficult to get a hit in.

• "Matrix dodge" is actually good.

• Using Robotic Limbs on an organic unit does NOT remove the 0.6x damage multiplier they have vs robots.

• Weapons have their damage reduced by 35% due to the "damage multiplier" being set to 0.65 in FCS.... Although it claims to affect all damage calculations it does not affect Ranged weapons or Martial Arts.

• The Martial Arts formula breaks at around level 160ish. At that point your blunt damage actually dips into the negative (Which does nothing to an enemy damage wise)... Thankfully that is not obtainable in base game but just thought I'd include that! The base damage for a unit with 200 Martial Arts is 21! (21 cut and -3.5 blunt, but again negative blunt damage doesn't matter)

Wew. I really should rename these to facts of the day eh? Or maybe I should learn to just put a fact a day. I just like rambling on about Kenshi too much.

Posting this rather late as I've been hanging out with the family. Next one will be earlier tomorrow for sure.

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays all!

-FrankieWuzHere