[CF-Devel] Change in equip method.

[Todd Mitchell]

Hoo hoo,
lots of messages from the equip weapon thread...I guess this is a popular
idea Mark.

>
     
      On 04-Jun-02 Mark Wedel wrote:
     
     >
     
      >   You could certainly just say that you have 2 arms, and a shield uses
     
     one
>
     
      > arm
     
     >
     
      > and a weapon uses an arm, and that you could use 2 weapons or two
     
     shields.
>
     
      > Using two shields probably isn't that much a problem, but 2 weapons
     
     certainly
>
     
      > are.
     
     >
     
     
     Tim:
>
     
      I think that can be solved by cheating on our part.  Only make the magic
     
     for
>
     
      the weapon in the right arm count, or average the two together.
     
     
This would be a kettle of fish to open I think and I believe it has been
hashed out before (before my time anyway). I don't think you want to fudge
this into existance however, it would have to be well executed.  Following
the idea of extensibility of Mark's original proposal, you would want to be
able to handle combat the same way for any number of weapons.  I would
suggest that player races shouldn't ever have more than two possible weapon
slots however.

I'm not pushing for x handed fighting, but if it were to be done I think
that you would would want to calculate seperate attacks for each weapon and
assign some penalties for the secondary weapon(s).  You could put a loop in
the attack routine, check for number of attacks and assign a penalty after
the first.  You would do seperate attacks instead of averaging the attack
since the weapons could be have very different attack effects like elemental
or slaying, and you could also have weapons that added to defense ability.
Also all the really powerful weapons would have to be made two handed to
avoid unbalancing the game too much - meaning you would loose your shield
bonuses too when you used them, which would be good I believe.
I would not really go in for allowing x handed fighting unless the monsters
were able to do this as well (especially a six armed deamon with flaming
swords).  This would indirectly encourage ranged attacks too since some
things you would not want to get close to anymore since they would really
beat on you.

>
     
      Also.. it seems to me that it would be a different skill set to learn to
     
     fight
>
     
      with two different weapons, vs a pair of identical weapons.  The motions
     
     and
>
     
      strategies would be wholly different.
     
     
  I agree that it should be a seperate skill to use two weapons, but this
should be the same case even when the two weapons are identical (even with
identical weapons the stratagies would be different - but you couldn't make
a skill for every combination).

If you have multiweapon fighting, and monsters have multiple attacks, you
might also want to give the heavy fighter classes the ability to attack
twice with a two handed weapon as well which would be a skill as well.
On a tangent note, some of these more powerful skills (two handed attacks,
use magic, praying...) you might want to make impossible to get by buying
them (with money anyway).  Maybe set up nasty quests to get them or deny
them altogether unless you are a certain class.)

Anyway, back to the main topic, you certainly would want to change the equip
method first since it would make all these other ideas more managable.