[crossfire] Project: Slow down combat

[Juha Jäykkä]

Hi!

I'm going to reply to multiple emails in one mail, so please bear with me
if I seem to jump from thing to thing rather incoherently.

First, Mark did nothing to monsters and spells; what he did was a start,
not the whole thing. And I think his approach is good: first make
fighters work in melee like we want them to. After that, adjust
everything else. We have a clear (well, -ish) goal: to make a balanced
combat system, where every class and race stands (relatively) equal
chance of staying alive (on average - some class/race combos will
naturally fare better against certain adversaries and worse against
others), gaining levels etc; plus we want to have a system where battles
happen slowly enough to make it possible to use tactics and even teamwork.

I think the best way of doing this is to first get a baseline, like 1st
level fighter battling against newbie tower and beginners places #1 and
#2. We can then proceed to other 1st level classes while fighters go up
to 2nd level (or fifth or whatever small number) to fix the baseline
there.

But what Kevin did with the priest, is very important as well; although
it may have been a little premature at this point. Later on, though, that
kind of testing will be paramount.

The idea of mana/grace regeneration needing rest is, again, one thing
that has been used a lot in pen-and-paper RPG's over the time. I think it
has proven itself a good solution. *BUT* in order to keep the magic users
comparable to warriors in this kind of system, the magic users must be
able to do a lot more damage than warriors per unit time. This is because
the magic user can only cast a certain number of spells before retreating
to regenerate the mana/grace while the warrior can keep up hacking and
slashing. (Note that some systems have some kind of exhaustion or
endurance for warriors as well, which means they need to rest as well. In
that case the amount of damage/time may be closer to same.)

>   But this does lead to an interesting question - how do we deal with
> classes that are not good at melee, especially hybrid classes?

Do we need to handle them any differently from basic classes? I do not
think 50/50 fighter/mage has to be able to finish off a 80th level
monster - the character is just 50th level, after all. In practise, this
means twice the work for the dual-class character to reach 50/50 level
when compared to a single-classer, but is that a problem? The
dual-classer is basically playing two single class characters.

Paladins, rogues (do we have them?-o) and such are a more difficult
question. They need careful balancing.

> monster.  The simplest fix would just can't use a bow if next to
> monster (and vice versa) whether it is attacking you or not.

I have a different idea about this. How about if arrows never hit a
monster/*player* next to the archer? This should be easy enough to
implement for single-square monsters, but how about bigger beasts, like
dragons, I do not know. The nice thing about this is that it gives
possibility of teamwork: put a fighter in front of the archer to keep the
orcs from hitting the archer... and the archer won't hit the fighter
either.

I am a little confused about the talk about buffering keystrokes. Do we
need to buffer them at all? What advantage does it give anyway? It seems
to mostly make people die; have died many times myself casting a few too
many spells in a row... Personally I hate it and use running all the time
because it does not buffer (why?).

As what comes to the speed of the battle, I do not think it matters is
clearing the newbie tower takes some time. I do not care if getting to
level 2 takes a while etc. What I crave for is a sense of going forward,
gaining something. This can be loot, levels, skills, spells; sometimes it
can even be a piece of information eventually leading to some quest or
just the history of the place. Slow pace is ok, I do not need to be 100th
level in a couple of days.

Mark mentioned he needed to use tactics in the newbie tower - I think
this is a good sign! We are definitely moving in the right direction.

Generators, of course, are a bit of a problem if killing monsters takes
too long, but generators spawn-rate can be adjusted down accordingly
(without need to remove the generators at all). I do not like generators
but I do not think we should get rid of them - yet. They are too
essential (they provide the challenge) in too many maps.

As what comes to spells, I am against big, medium and small versions of
the same spells; just having the effect increase by caster level is
enough. I also favour area effect spells and big numbers of monsters - in
certain situations. This has to do with the above mention of spellcasters
needing a higher kills/second ratio than fighters because their
"resources" run out. (BTW spells like fireball are useless even now, they
can kill nothing except critter: at low levels not even a fireborn can
cast enough of them to kill any relevant number of orcs and when the
caster has leveled up the player no longer wants to even hear the mention
of an orc, which is not about the toughest monster one's fireballs can
kill.)

High level spells need a lot of thought. Things like frost nova should
definitely be very high level or quest-spells. On the other hand,
destruction is nearly useless at the moment but it is currently the
highest-level spell there is... strange. I think some of the very highest
level spells might not be combat-related at all, but this needs a little
more dynamical playing world. (Thinking of combat spells one thought
appeals a lot to me: earthquake... think of what that could do in a
dungeon!)

That's it this time; this has been written during a couple of evenings so
if it is incoherent in places, please bear with me!

-Juha

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		| Juha Jäykkä, juolja at utu.fi			|
		| home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/		|
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