[crossfire] Project: Slow down combat

[Mark Wedel]

  One thought I just had about this is changing weapon speed vs normal speed.

  Right now, normal speed is used for movement, and if you attack something, 
what is currently your weapon speed gets moved into speed left for those extra 
attacks.  This also creates other odd effects, as now it is also movement speed.

  My thought is to completely separate them.  speed (and speed_left) is only 
used for movement, and is used like things are now.

  weapon_speed (& weapon_speed_left- abbreviated wsl) work like the speed ones - 
each tick, wsl is increased by weap_sp, not to exceed it.

  If moving onto a space would result in an attack, an attack is made so long as 
wsl>0.  For the attack, wsl is decreased by one.  speed_left is not modified, or 
perhaps decreased by some amount so that it becomes difficult to do a 'move, 
attack, move' in same tick.  I'd say that weapon_speed itself doesn't get 
directly changed by this, but it may be reasonable that if advanced combat 
options are added, some actions take more time than other (disarm maybe 
decreases wsl by 2 for example).

  Now what I thought would make this interesting is instead of weapon_speed 
being just a player attributed, make it an object/monster attribute.

  This gives another way to tune monsters.  Now you can have monsters that move 
really quickly, but perhaps don't attack very fast - things that are hard to run 
from.  And you could have other monsters that move slowly, but attack fast if 
nearby.  In a sense, this could be used to mimic creatures that should get 
multiple attacks (think something like a squid with multiple tentacles).

  the default behavior for monsters would be weapon_speed = speed, so that every 
monster does not need to be modified.

  Thoughts/comments?