[crossfire] Priority feature list

[Mark Wedel]

Juha Jäykkä wrote:
>> There has been some discussion on speed/combat balance (basically:
>> reduce speed, so combats take some more time, and enable players to
>> actually flee before getting killed easily), though it isn't on the
>> page. Could this be added to the list, or is it something not everyone
>> agrees on?
> 
> I tend to disagree. Someone pointed out that reducing speed tends to turn
> the game from a "real-time" one to a turn based one, which I dislike.
> Another way of achieving the same result is to reduce the *damage* dealt
> by <whatever>. That way, monsters and players could still move
> "real-time"ish, but you could still escape.

  I think the issue is more to reduce weapon speed, and less so actual speed. 
High level characters have weapon speed 5+ - that really isn't necessarily - at 
higher levels, the characters are doing more damage just on the basis of higher 
stats and better weapons.

  Reducing weapon speed reduces damage.  I do have some seperate thoughts on 
changing speed itself - mostly to narrow the range between min and max speed - 
right now, min speed is 0.1 I think, which as you say, is pretty slow.  But max 
speed is unlimited, but effectively I think charactes can get speed 2.0+ without 
a huge amount of difficulty, and that causes problems.  Except in rare 
circumstances, speeds above 1.0 (which means 1 move/tick) shouldn't really be 
allowed.

> 
> By the way, I have rarely encountered a situation I was not able to flee
> from. Almost all places can even be solved by simply jumping back and
> forth from the map (using normal exits, no spells) to gradually wear down
> the opponent(s).

  As noted above, one reason is high player speed - certainly some monsters 
should have their speed increased, but one problem with increasing it too - 
having monsters with speed above 1.0 really isn't feasible (I think players 
would be somewhat upset if a monster effectively hopped 2 spaces to be next to 
them, which would happen with speed 1.0+).

  Note that speed is also subjective.  If, for example, you reduced the speed of 
all creatures by 50%, but also decreased the tick time by 50%, things would 
affectively appear the same, except movement would seem smoother and bandwidth 
would go up.

  Hopping between exits is a problem - it could be changed so that monsters 
follow the players, but there will always be cases where even that isn't 
foolproof (monster too big to fit in previous map).  More use of tiled maps 
would sort of fix this problem, but at some point, map hopping can be seen as a 
tactic (at higher levels, things like word of recall and town portal could 
effectively allow the same thing, and I think most people would agree that 
monsters shouldn't be able to follow that).