[crossfire] Attacktypes

[Mark Wedel]

  I was thinking over attacktypes some, and while I do not have any plans to 
work on this, thought I'd at least record these thoughts before I forget :)

  The general basis here is to make attacktypes that are somewhat balanced, that 
will be used by both players and monsters, that are used somewhat frequently (an 
attacktype that only 2 monsters use isn't all that interesting) and are not 
really annoying.  Some was to also clean up some of the attacktypes.

  I'm only going to include attacktypes which I think need changing.

Confusion:  Problem with this attacktype is that you don't want to use it on 
monsters, because it makes them move in random ways, making them _harder_ to 
kill.  If a player gets hit with it, same thing happens, but player can 
generally eliminate the effects with spell, scroll or potion.  My thought for 
this one is to change it so that confused creatures can not do actions that 
require thought, eg, cast spells, use scrolls (and maybe wands) - this makes it 
less powerful than now, but does make this a bit of a counter for mages.

Fear: Not as bad as confusion, but it makes monsters run away, which makes them 
harder to chase down and kill.  As a player, fairly annoying in that it takes 
the control of the character away from the player (character will move for X 
time running away).  Thought here is to change it so recipient suffers AC/WC 
penalties (eg, easier to hit feared creature, and harder for feared creature to 
hit you).  This is sort of the counter for fighters, so something that does fear 
+ confusion would counter most classes.

Paralyzation: Problem is if characters get affected, they just have to hope they 
survive - there is nothing they can do until it runs out.  The result of this is 
that most characters will have a immunity to paralyzation item, which sort of 
makes this attacktype meaningless.  I don't have a good solution hear, but given 
how little this is used, it could probably just get removed all together.

Drain: Like paralyzation, more annoying - once you are hit and lose exp, other 
than killing stuff, no way to get it back, so once again, most characters just 
get some immunity item.  Players having drain attacks are not that useful, 
because the character will get the exp if they kill the creature - only real use 
is against other players.  Thought here is to perhaps merge it/replace it with 
life stealing, so that drain also drains sp and grace.  This makes it a fairly 
nasty attack if you are losing hp/sp/grace while fighting a creature, but not so 
nasty that immunity items need to exist.

Poison: While good now, this could be extended in many ways.  AD&Dv3 made an 
interesting change in that most poisons don't do hp damage, but instead damage 
stats for a while.  So in crossfire, one could have poisons that drain con by 5 
points until cured, or drain pow by 10 points, etc.  Makes poisons fairly nasty, 
and fact that there are multiple poisons makes things more interesting.  I think 
one way to do this is that items with a poison attacktype also have an inventory 
of the poison they do.  This then means that for characters, you could have 
bottles of poison about you could apply to your sword (sword gets additional 
poison attacktype, and poison effect is moved from bottle inventory to sword 
inventory) - when you hit, the code finds the poison in the inventory of the 
sword, and removes it, and there is some mechanism which says how many 
doses/what chance of poison wearing off the blade is.

Ghosthit: Should be removed, replaced by revised drain/life stealing, and a flag 
added to note creature only survives some number of hits.

Turn undead: Should perhaps get renamed since I think this operates on the gods 
enemies, and not just undead.

Depletion: no real problems, just not anything all that terrible either.  You 
may fight some creatures that has it, realize a few stats are depleted and go 
get a potion of life.  Probably more interesting to replace creatures that use 
this with life stealing/revised dragin.

Death: Generally not useful, should probably get removed (not used many places) 
- the all or nothing death approach just doesn't work very well in a game like 
crossfire.

Chaos: Not really an attacktype - this is just a special attacktype which then 
hits with a random elemental attacktype.

Cancellation - maybe gets removed - this non hp damaging attacktype just removes 
+magic from items, but is not used much.

counterspell: another one that does no damage, and probably should not be an 
attacktype- IIRC what this is really used for is that if a spell hits a space 
with this attacktype, the spell doesn't go any further.  Than in itself is a 
neat feature, but using an attacktype probably is not the right approach.

Blind: with fog of war, I'm not sure how relevant this really is, plus it seems 
to be used in very few places/monsters.