[crossfire] Project: Slow down combat

[Mark Wedel]

  The results of the vote were pretty overwhelming for this, so going to start 
some discussions.

  I'm also going to include the #2 point - "Balance magic & combat skills so 
they are more equal" a little bit - I don't think slowing down combat is going 
to make that all work out, but it does seem to me that if the speed of combat is 
radically changed, that is likely to have some effects in that balance, either 
for better or worse (seems unlikely it would remain completely the same).

  there is also this point on the TODO list 
(http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/dev_todo:change_player_speed_ - change 
player speed, but that is more related to movement speed, not combat speed.  I 
think that helps/contributes to the combat speed problem, but isn't the only fix.

  I'm going to formalize this a bit.  I'll also note that when talking about 
these things, everything should really be on the table - things should not be 
excluded because it is different than it is now, would result in incompatible 
characters (while this change could probably be made without requiring fresh 
characters, some of the other big points can't be), etc.  I think if we try to 
focus too narrowly we won't be able to find good solutions.

PROBLEM:
Combats in crossfire right now are generally very fast - less than a second to 
kill most any monster.  This is too fast to really react in much of any way, 
think tactically, etc.

SOLUTION (from a very high level fiew):
Combat should take a real amount of time.  30 seconds to kill high level boss 
monsters does not seem unreasonable to me.  I think at lower levels, this time 
will be less (maybe a few seconds for most monsters?).  I don't think there 
should ever be case (except with maybe things like rats) that a player actually 
mows through creatures.

PLAN/DETAILS:
This is the hard part.  Just slowing down the character really isn't sufficient 
unless they were made painfully slow.

  Just for reference, I decided to quickly create a starting human warrior. 
With his chain armor and long sword equipped, his movement speed is 1.0, weapon 
speed  is 1.60.  When he got second level, weapon speed went to 1.68.  Third 
level it was 1.74.

  So one thing I quickly see is that perhaps starting weapon speed is just too 
fast, and goes up too fast.  If that got reduced to say .8 at first level, that 
quickly doubles time it takes to kill things.  Maybe even a lower weapon speed - 
if you look at some games, you can move quite a bit, but get limited attacks - 
so a weapon_speed of .2 could be interesting (if this was done, then 
weapon_speed_left would need to be added, and it get added up separately to see 
if the player can attack, etc).  And interesting thing here is that this may 
open up new tactics - fire a bow, run away for a bit, fire bow again, etc.  Or 
in party player, characters swapping position based on when their next attack 
happens.

The characters damage was 9, which means that pretty much every kobold (2 hp) is 
killed in one blow, on average, orcs (4 hp) get killed in one blow, and gnolls 
(8 hp) need 2 blows.  The starting character WC was 16.  This means that the 
character will basically hit every time (mechanism is basically ac + d20 > wc 
means a hit, so tuning wc would also help.  Or maybe tuning creature AC.  If 
instead of hitting every time, the character hit only 25% of the time, that 
slows things down by a factor of 4.

  I realize that my basic test here was just at low level, but I would think the 
correct approach would be to try and tune low level combat and then adjust the 
upper level combat, and not try to get level 100 combat balance then figure out 
how to do it at level 1.

  I think stat bonuses may also need to be tuned.  But I doubt adjusting this 
will still be enough.  It would also be nice to try to reduce the hp disparity 
some, but not sure how to do that.

  It seems to me that adjusting base weapon damage isn't really a fix - most 
starting weapons go from 1->10 damage, which seems reasonable to me - you can't 
reduce that too much without loosing meaning of weapons (if a dagger does 2 
damage and sword 3, that would seem fairly meaningless).  Perhaps a lot more 
lower monsters should have better armor values, so not all the damage goes through.

  But adjusting monster kill rate from players is really only half the problem. 
  The other problem is rate of damage that monsters do to players.  It may be 
that if it now takes several seconds for me to kill a monsters, I'll be able to 
watch my HP more closely, but there are lots of attacks that can kill players 
quick quickly - especially bolt spells if the player doesn't move out of the way 
quickly.  I suspect if that player to monster hp disparity is reduced, then the 
damage that things like bolts do to players would effectively be reduced.

  One idea, which is probably controversial, is to increase player HP.  Rather 
than trying to adjust all the monster HP, maybe we give players more HP.

  For example, if players (and monsters) had 50 HP at first level, but damage 
and other things were unchanged, that effectively slows things down by a factor 
of 5 (5 times more hp than before).  It also means that unlike right now, where 
basically 2 hits may kill the player (which if player just gets unlucky and they 
happen right at the same time and not far apart, player can't do much about it), 
it would take many hits.

  I think under this system, the number of hp gained after first would still be 
more modest, like in the range of 10.  But maybe also remove the cap, which 
right now at level 10 or so, means hp rate goes way down - maybe the level 110 
people should have 2000 hp instead of the 500 they have now.

  Anyways, got a bit off topic, and don't have real solutions.  Relative easy 
first steps might be:

1) Reduce player speed & weapon speed.
2) Increase creature AC
3) Increase armor value of creatures

  But before starting work, I'd like to see other peoples thoughts and ideas.  I 
think this may actually be a very good starting one, as at some point, I don't 
think doing the solution will be that hard - the harder part will be finding the 
solution.  This may also branch off into other areas, like if the stat 
adjustments are redone, we'd need to think about how that works if that stat 
range itself is redone.