Slow Down Combat

[jmordetsky]

Taking off from another post, and from my feelings on the brawl code. I've found the level of interaction between an RPed brawl to be much cooler then a normal fight where the hit, miss text just scrolls on by.

Brawls are usually a few hits, tit for tat with some cool emoting inbetween.

There are several reasons why the brawl code wouldn't work as the default combat engine, but what about slowing the current combat engine down, and increasing the amount of damage done from hits.

This would give alot more room to emote, and allow us to spend less time watching the intense scrawl of matrix like text flowing down the screen.

Thoughts?

Edit:

Oh and implement brawl globally!

[Quirk]

I voted for increasing damage, but then swiftly rethought it once I'd clicked.

There would be a number of real repercussions as a result of this.

1) Advantaging magickers in combat.

Magickers are frequently vulnerable if caught unprepared. Unless you also increased casting time, with that little bit more time available to them they would become correspondingly more potent. A Krathi too weak to kill with one spell might still actually be able to stand toe to toe with an opponent and slug it out, magick against weapons. A Rukkian could throw up a serious defensive spell before too much damage came to her; a Whiran caught unable to flee on foot would have time to cast himself a magickal escape. I don't think this would necessarily be a bad thing, I'm merely pointing it out as an issue.

2) Making it possibly easier to flee.

Unless flee lag was likewise increased, people would have more chances to flee between hits and hence be more likely to get away.

3) Bash and charge would become less powerful, and kick more powerful.

Again, unless you increased the amount of time spent on the ground, slower hits would mean less blows landing while the opponent was downed, and weaken bash somewhat; the number of kicks possible for someone to get off vs the number of hits would proportionately increase. People may not spam kick, but given two minutes of fighting to do the same damage as previously would have taken one minute, if they emote and perform their kicks at the same rate they did before they will do a correspondingly higher proportion of the damage.

4) Related combat skills would increase more slowly, possibly considerably more slowly if more damage was done.

Imagine Joe Runner the Bynner currently takes five minutes of sparring against Sergeant Hardarse to reduce his health to a point at which he flees. If we halve the speed of combat, he now takes ten minutes to reach the same point. In both cases he has undergone the same number of hits and skill checks, but he's more likely to be interrupted by meal-time or latrine-cleaning in the latter case. If we adjust the damage so he is ready to sit down in five minutes again, he's undergoing half the number of skill checks and failures each sparring round - hence he advances at half the speed.

The number of things this would unsettle is, I suspect, too large to make it a feasible change for the near future.

Quirk

[EvilRoeSlade]

And make combat even less lethal?  Please don't.

[Cenghiz]

Damn.. Some of us are non-warrior classes who act like hunters because of IC reasons.. I had a fight which lasted nearly half a day... Please don't.

[Mexie]

*deleted*

[slipshod]

I voted to slow it down, and just for the halibut, instead of giving my reason here, I'll just refer you all to a very similar thread I started long ago, once upon a red moon....

http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5142

[Stroker]

How about speed it up and increase the damage?

[Angela Christine]

Damn.. Some of us are non-warrior classes who act like hunters because of IC reasons.. I had a fight which lasted nearly half a day... Please don't.

Me too!  As a newbie half-elven ranger with high agility, one afternoon I attacked a jozhal on foot.  Dusk comes, damn, I missed the gates.  Nightfall comes, argh, well, I can't flee from a damned jozhal in the dark.  DAWN comes and I'm still fighting the jozhal, though it is looking pretty unhealthy by now.  I don't remember if I finished that time, but I have fled from fights I was winning just because it was taking too damned long, and it was hard to justify fighing a vestric for three hours.  :roll:  When you are evenly matched with your opponant fights can go on for days.

On the other hand when a big beastie or a few gith surprise you, then you can be dead before you've even had a chance to get past your movement delay.  So I wouldn't speed up combat either.  


AC

[Meatwad]

The question is -why- we would want to slow down combat.  Is it to get more emotes in?  Is it because one npc can kill you before you type flee or remember nosave?  There are other solutions, then, than simply slowing down combat.

[Callisto]

And make combat even less lethal?  Please don't.

[Tamarin]

Well...ok.  Here's my two cents.

I don't think we should necessarily slow down combat, but it should be more interactive.  Right now, it goes (more or less):

kill person

(occasionally) disarm/kick/bash person

wait wait wait wait wait

person dies, or person flees, or you flee.

simple enough.

What I wish there would be is more interactive maneuver commands, that let you actually -circle- the person...aim for body parts...tell your character to take a defensive position...tell your character to take an offensive position...tell your chracter to look for an opening to flee...

etc.

All these things I think should be added to combat, with of course, hits being made significantly more critical in nature.  So if you land a head shot, that's pretty much going to end the fight.  If not, very close to that.  So it should go like this. (commands in [])

[kill person]

you have engaged in combat with person.

[circle person]

you begin to circle person, looking for an opening.

(person sees) attacker has begun circling you.

person takes a defensive stance

[aim head]

You viciously slash person's head (or however you manage to land the blow).

OR

The person parries your attack, noticing the oncoming headshot.

The person begins to circle you.

[defend person]

You begin defending against person.

See where I'm going with this?

[UnderSeven]

I'm also wondering how this might affect npcs with kick and bash.  Since they currently are on a randomization thing since they don't recieve delay.  Would this mean they could do it even MORE often?  

I just think all things considered the code isn't ready for this addition.

[Cenghiz]

Yes... Most of us want more control over battles I guess. For example, a char of mine had to fight with creatures with nasty teeth. It was something like that;

The nasty creature bites your leg.
>think I need to keep away from those jaws..
>emote Eyebrows inclined, me swings from a distance; keeping away from ~teethy.

I would love it if there were the commands to behave offensive or defensive in combat.  Then I would add the command "defense" to the end of these emotes and my char would act accordingly.

I don't want a large pile of new commands causing me to type one command in every five seconds. It's already hard to emote when you become a little succesful in hunting. OK. I didn't know (shame on me) that there was a basic offense skill increasing. It increases fine, enough to show your experience in fighting. So even with a character with no battling talent, the combats will speed up. The first long-lasting battles are just for you to have time to try new kinds of emotes for fast future battles. Slowing down a little more? *shrug* I won't care much.

Most of the time I kept ducking from a body's pinches, flanking the bleeding pulp of meat with a swift manuevver bla bla... because of a kick lag. The best correction to the code, if possible, would be making emoting possible in command lags.

I worked with C/C++/Visual C etc. for some time, so I know if delay's implemented similar to a MUD code I examined, the last change would be nearly impossible, but adding an "offense/defense/balanced" command wouldn't be that hard. Am I right?

[Carnage]

I say slow it down, but more than proportionally put the damage up so the fight ends just as early. Make every single hit count and inject things with a better dose of realism.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

I would like to see combat slowed down, command lag replaced with specific-command lag (ie: if input "flee"; count 15; Do_flee:), and hits mean more. Much more. For any of you who have read me for some time, I have always advocated making combat more deadly. By slowing it down and then making hits twice or three times more deadly, combat would become much more realistic, since it's nearly impossible to simply "nick" someone forty times in real combat until that fortieth nick kills them.

Additionally, and perhaps this is a sidebar, but I'd like to see last hit kills that do astounding things have effects. If I hit a elf with a horrendous blow to the neck and they die, their head should simply come off. Once day, I was having to fight many gith, and with four out of five of them, I struck with unspeakable damage to the wrist. What I should have seen was...

You do unspeakable damage to a gith's wrist with your slash.
A crude bone club falls to the ground, as you cut off the gith's hand.

That's what I should have seen.

[Forest Junkie]

That would def. make the game far more interesting 7DV. Something we may see in the future perhaps.

[Meatwad]

I think hit should be seperate from kill.  If I attempt to hit someone in real life, I don't beat them to death, I just punch them perhaps.  If attempting to kill, then I'd keep attacking.  So in game I think hit should just be a single attack, and the defending player would only defend once.  That way I bash my waiter over the head with the tasteless wine bottle he brought me, instead of killing him with it.

[Anonymous]

7DV champions the cause that I championed in another thread.

I /really/ like hitloc specific things, and hands/heads/legs MEANING something..

[bioproject]

Damn.. Some of us are non-warrior classes who act like hunters because of IC reasons.. I had a fight which lasted nearly half a day... Please don't.

Me too!  As a newbie half-elven ranger with high agility, one afternoon I attacked a jozhal on foot.  Dusk comes, damn, I missed the gates.  Nightfall comes, argh, well, I can't flee from a damned jozhal in the dark.  DAWN comes and I'm still fighting the jozhal, though it is looking pretty unhealthy by now.  I don't remember if I finished that time, but I have fled from fights I was winning just because it was taking too damned long, and it was hard to justify fighing a vestric for three hours.  :roll:  When you are evenly matched with your opponant fights can go on for days.

On the other hand when a big beastie or a few gith surprise you, then you can be dead before you've even had a chance to get past your movement delay.  So I wouldn't speed up combat either.  


AC

I totally agree, if you're a newbie with high agility, its a bitch becasue you'll get like five minutes worth of misses before somebody hits something.

[Cuusardo]

I think that slowing combat down would give time for emotes and thinking.  Granted it is pretty easy to do this if you're sparring, but if you're in a fight for your life, it's a bit more difficult.

I think I've said this before in a previous thread....

[bioproject]

Was combat slowed down, yesterday.  It seemed a good deal slower, today, during sparring.

[Geekfreak]

The speed's fine with combat, my 34k modem is just so slow, it makes combat for me in slo mo.

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-GF

[Vettrock]

Something on another mud that I thought was interesting is you could set your fighting mood ie

Berserk (totally focused on attacking and you can't flee)
Aggressive: focus on attack and less on defense
normal: balanced attack and defense
defensive: shifted to denfense less offensive
wimpy: almost totally defensive and very little offense.

We wouldn't nessisary have all of those level or anything but I think allowing your character to take a more defensive posture and concentrating on defending himself rather than attacking, a balanced "mood" and an aggressive mood where you put all your effort into attacking, even if it means you get hit a few more times.

[Meatwad]

Well with skills such as parry and shield use I don't really see how this would be needed.  After all, if your defensive skills are awesome then whenever the enemy attacks you will probably not take damage.  And whenever you attack, given your awesome attack skills, you'll hit and do damage.  In other words, with practice you get the benifits of an offensive and defensive style.

[Agent_137]

ah, but how do you practice only one?

you can't, unless you fight with just a shield, which is bad RP in most cases.