CombatReport

English：Combat　·　Game Mechanics

Kenshi's melee is a contest of numbers underneath: the attack gap decides who swings next, the attack-versus-defence gap decides whether it can be blocked, armour resolves through five separate parameters layer by layer, and a surrounded character gets comboed into the ground.

Kenshi's combat looks like real-time action but is a string of dice rolls at heart. Understanding a handful of these formulas will change a fight more than buying a good blade will.

Who swings first: attack versus attack

The first roll in melee is not "who hits whom" but who earns the right to the next swing. That is decided by the gap in Melee Attack between the two sides: every 1 level of difference adds 2.5% to your odds.

At a gap of 40 levels the odds ratio is 2:1 — roughly a 66% chance of winning priority, meaning that on average you get two swings for their one. Because the calculation works on odds rather than percentages, the returns diminish: at zero gap each point of attack is worth about 1.23% more priority, at a gap of 20 only 0.79%. Past a 200-level skill gap it is fully capped.

Whether it lands: attack versus defence

Once you have priority, a different roll takes over: your Melee Attack against their Melee Defence (or Martial Arts, if they are unarmed).

• Base block rate is 70%
• For each level your attack exceeds their defence, their block rate drops 1.5%
• For each level your attack falls below their defence, their block rate rises 1.2%
• The defender's block rate caps at 95%, reached when defence exceeds the attacker's attack by 21 levels; beyond that there is no further benefit

How fast you swing: two independent speeds

The thing newcomers most often confuse is "attack speed" versus "Combat Speed". They have nothing to do with each other:

• Attack speed / block speed are set by skills, with a base of 0.765. Melee Attack adds +0.00152 per level and Dexterity adds +0.00228 per level, and the two sum. Attack speed caps at 1.2x, block speed at 4.0x.
• Combat Speed is a multiplier applied to the final speed, and is affected only by equipment, encumbrance and Strength thresholds. Assassin's Rags give 1.1x and Wooden Sandals 1.05x; Heavy Armour, chainmail, Crab Armour and backpacks all cost speed.

The Strength threshold is the harshest of the lot: each weapon's Strength requirement is the greater of "blunt damage × 40" and the weapon's weight, and being 20 or more levels short of it cuts Combat Speed by roughly 47.5%, with each level recovered returning about 2.375%. Once Strength is over the threshold there is no further speed gain.

Weapon classes and matchups

The indoor/outdoor distinction matters far more than it looks: Heavy Weapons and Polearms take attack and defence penalties indoors and may auto-swap to a secondary weapon, while Martial Arts gains +8 indoors. Sandstorms separately subtract up to -10 attack.

Damage and armour: five parameters

Damage comes in three kinds: cut (causes bleeding and wound deterioration, must be bandaged), blunt (commonly called stun damage, recovers on its own), and harpoon (used by crossbows, turrets and most animals, and it bypasses ordinary cut resistance entirely).

The mitigation formula is simple: actual damage = raw damage × (1 - armour resistance) × (1 - Toughness reduction). The complexity lives in the fact that armour itself has five independent parameters:

• Coverage: not a damage-reduction percentage but the chance that a given hit was intercepted by the armour at all. 80% coverage means 20% of attacks ignore the armour completely.
• Cut resistance / blunt resistance: capped at 90% per piece. Multiple layers resolve in the order head → body → trousers → shirt → boots, and whatever an earlier layer stops is no longer available to the next.
• Cut-into-blunt conversion efficiency: part of a blocked cut is converted into blunt damage that goes straight through, bypassing the remaining armour. The lower the efficiency, the more is converted.
• Harpoon resistance: purpose-built against harpoon damage. It is the only value that stops crossbow bolts and animal claws.

Most armour has markedly lower blunt resistance than cut resistance — the one structural advantage blunt weapons hold against heavy armour.

Group fights: why being surrounded collapses instantly

Kenshi has no "only one attacker at a time" protection. A surrounded character is fed blades in turn, and three underlying mechanisms stack the damage:

1. Stagger combos — damage above the Toughness threshold staggers the character for several seconds, during which blocking ability drops sharply, which amounts to a hitstun window of continuous attacks. The more attackers, the less chance that window ever closes.
2. Hitmult — every time a body part is struck, that part's hit weighting goes +1 (up to 5), and it decays by only 1 every 27.5 in-game minutes. In other words a wounded limb becomes the priority target, so injuries concentrate rather than spread.
3. Block rate is a probability, not invulnerability — even at 95% block, with eight people swinging at you a miss is only a matter of time.

Conversely, getting mobbed is good for training: each additional attacker adds +0.1x to combat skill experience, capping at roughly 1.667x for a 1v8 (see Statistics and Skills).

Why ranged combat cannot hold its ground

Crossbows and turrets do not look weak in the formulas above, but ranged play in the first game has a structural flaw: there is no cover system. Characters cannot crouch, cannot use a wall, cannot take advantage of terrain, so when two ranged squads meet in the open all they can do is line up and shoot at each other, turning the fight into a contest of taking turns being executed — the single most common criticism commentators level at ranged combat in the first game^{[V2 0:02:09]}. Chris Hunt has said that ranged combat will carry considerably more weight in Kenshi 2, from which some infer that the sequel more or less has to add cover mechanics, since otherwise the same problem will only be magnified^{[V2 0:02:09]}.

But shifting the weight toward ranged has a cost too. One channel takes an explicit position: melee is the soul of Kenshi — the player gets to watch a character go from useless to able to cut through an entire bandit army, and that growth curve belongs to melee alone; if combat pivoted wholesale to ranged, this post-apocalyptic sandbox would degrade into an open-world real-time strategy game^{[V3 0:02:13]}. All of the above is commentators' positions and inference, not settled design for the sequel.

Combat stance buttons

The seven toggles on the right of the interface directly change combat behaviour, and three of them matter most:

• BLOCK — never swings at all, in exchange for +20 Melee Defence and Dodge. Standard setup for a tank.
• TAUNT — raises threat to draw enemies in. In practice it is still affected by output and distance; it is not a guaranteed taunt.
• PASSIVE / SNEAK — when the whole squad is down, switching the survivor to passive plus sneak stops a high-Toughness character from standing back up and feeding themselves to the enemy again.

Day and night shifts

Some opponents only work certain hours, and scheduling beats gearing up.

Skimmer spawned from nests and large squads bury themselves and sleep from 06:00 to 23:00. Waking one by accident during the day does not commit you to a fight — break off, put distance between you, and after roughly 140 game minutes it buries itself again. Cross sand slowly and watch the ground for the white fan of jawbone breaking the surface; that is not a rock.

Skimsands gives wandering wilderness squads a 2.2x spawn bonus, and within that the nocturnal patrol carries weight 100 against 50 for the round-the-clock singles — together they outweigh every humanoid faction patrol in the region. That is the leg to walk in daylight. The Bonedog packs of Stormgap Coast, Hidden Forest and Northern Coast are nocturnal too; same rule.

The one place the rule inverts is Venge: the orbital lasers only fire in daylight, so enter at 23:00 and be under cover by 05:00. That window overlaps almost exactly with the Skimmers' hunting hours, so those two legs have to be walked on separate days.

Common beginner misconceptions

• "Heavy armour is always better" — heavy armour costs Combat Speed, Athletics and Stealth, turning a character into a target that cannot run. Early on the stat bonuses of light armour are usually worth more.
• "Dexterity increases Martial Arts damage" — it does not. Dexterity only adds attack speed, block speed and weapon cut damage; Martial Arts damage runs off Martial Arts, Strength and Toughness.
• "Katanas are the all-purpose weapon" — katanas gain damage against humans, but are especially feeble against armour and robotic bodies, and will do nothing at all against a heavily armoured legion or Skeletons.
• "Unarmed is the weakest" — Martial Arts is the highest-output "weapon" in the game, but its reach is extremely short, and non-Skeleton characters striking metal armour damage themselves; immunity requires Martial Arts + Toughness totalling 200, or robotic limbs.

See also

• Statistics and Skills
• Knockout and Death
• Game Mechanics
• Items
• Races

Video citations

1. Kenshi | WE ARE DWARVES!! | Let's Play Kenshi Genesis (Ep. 1)HeroInHisHead
2. 5 Things I Want To See In Kenshi 2HeroInHisHead
3. 5 Things I DON'T Want To See In Kenshi 2HeroInHisHead