Combat system revamp discussion - part 1

[kicking jay]

You know? Screw it, I'm going to apply to ProgD.

[AniCator]

Be very careful, jay. t is a scary place.

[Uma]

What do you want to accomplish by changing the combat system (or, don't you want to change it?)
- What do you consider wrong, in the current system?
"Stab! Drag! Drive/Sail off!" scenario. as well as "stab-drag-lock door. take over the onion room. own the town."

Item 1. Stab! Drag! Drive/Sail off!
I think this really harms the game because it allows some one to coordinate abducting some one in minutes, when the game 'can be played once per day'. It wins unless some one is ready and notices and / or pursues right away and immediately gets a coordinated radio effort.

Item 2. "stab-drag-lock door. take over the onion room. own the town."
two people can stab some one, drag them into a room they have access to. and potentially murder them before anyone can open the door with a crowbar. if it's a town elder, they have all the keys. it's now their town, they then go hang out in the food storage and just trade rooms anytime anyone tries to get them, squatting in a pile of onions. This one is cheap because you can't stop them from wizzing by and changing rooms. no one can prevent the quick-kidnap and it ruins countless hours of the towns effort. not just to fix, but also all their healing food they stockpiled, locks, etc.

- Do you want it more realistic?
I don't think so. the game has a lot of 'survival' mechanics that need to be more realistic before we worry with realistic battle. I'd like infection, bleeding, and armors, but they would add a layer of complication so I'd just as soon hold off on any attempts to be realistic

plus our people appear out of thin air and heal by eating onions. super non realistic.no need to undo what's nice in the world to favor the gritty.

- Would you like a difference between ranged and melee weapons, a different hit/miss system, etc.?
I think maybe attacks should have a build up time. like you charge some one in melee battle. it starts an hour project that you harm them at the end. bows don't have this. they have a reloading 2 hours at the end. changes the dynamic a little because you could see an axe wielding maniac coming at you and shoot them on their way in. or get the jump on some one.

maybe once you're 'in melee' it becomes the job you do and some one has to spend an hour withdrawing from the melee.

anyway. that's the sort of dynamics I like. I think shooting from buildings would break the game.

- Would you like the system to be slower or quicker?

I'd like once a day to hold true. if not for every action in battle, but to the idea that a town can possibly defend itself from the stab-drag. possible fixes are to make non-friendly drags take 4 hours to do. every. single. time. so some one can wake up.

My preferred fix is that some one in town can take up 'guard duty' with a 'guard post' machine or some such. it would automaticallyattempt intercept any melee, attack anyone who fought who isn't flagged as a friendly. oppose all drag attempts. shield people (try to take hits for them) and other such things.

Then a large enough town would have dedicated guards who could insure the safety of roleplay oriented people.

being a guard would be a fun social dynamic because....some one has to pay you, you produce nothing from your day of work (horrified gasp)

I also think you should be able to 'bar a doorway' and no one could leave or pass through it without first harming you. that would limit the 'steal your onion room' strategy from destroying a town.


- How do you feel about the current dragging system?
I feel that its bad in all sorts of ways.

you should be able to spend an hour dragging any body out of any place with any character. right now? if you get to 99%, you can never move it. you now have a corpse friend forever.

offensive dragging should be an hour (or 4 hour) job. assisting either side of the drag helps them avoid it. at the end of the hour (or four) the victor moves or doesn't move, and you can't try again for a day.

dragging should alert the town like breaking a lock so that people can hear your struggle and try to help.

- Is there anything else I forgot? (probably, and I hope so)
the game is a social game. it's designed to stimulate roleplay, trade, economy, building up of social practices and towns. that means lots of people.

the combat system favors 1-2 people who coordinate perfectly to drag people into buildings or vehicles, so they can murder them and take their keys.

no amount of roleplay, alliance, love, or hatred can change it. if some one gets a friend or two and does a coordinated stab-drag, your favorite roleplay person is forfeit.

[Uma]

Which is why I support a distinction between fighting and sparring, and a possible "equipment" system (because honestly that should be no more difficult than the "wear clothes" function).

I do think a 'sparring project' would be nice. instead of watching people learn to crossbow fight with pillows and spoons all day, instead we could just see them doing a project in the background.

[kicking jay]

I think combat should be instantaneous. I fully support the (accepted!?) suggestion to be able to trade blows: if you hit somebody, and they hit you back, you can hit them again without waiting a day, so battles can be decided quickly.

I think dragging should *always* take [EDIT: at least] an hour. If the drag tick is right after the travel tick, you'll have three IRL hours to mobilize, assuming that the other person had a party large enough to be able to drag somebody in an hour. Normally, it'd take longer, but IT WOULD ACTUALLY FINISH.

What if you had to open and close doors to get in - an idea I've been thinking about for a while? All current buildings would be given -wooden?- doors, but new buildings would have to get them installed. I could come up with something like that mega window suggestion for doors.
Normally, it'd automatically open doors for you and close them after a Cantr minute (five IRL minutes), but you could open and close them manually. It'd be a very little thing, but it'd give you at least a slim chance to get into a place after somebody. If the locations JS menu is implemented and you could enter a location from it, it'd probably be rather easy to follow somebody dashing between buildings if you're active when they do so. oh gosh i really really want this

[Ericis]

Energy restoration used to be much more effective, leading into a group of four people massacring two towns. Several people died. It was deemed the game wasn't supposed to be played that way and people got their characters revived unless they specifically said they wanted to remain dead.

That sounds crazy to me that you can just get rid of rules simply because the game "shouldn't" be played a certain way. I thought anyone could be anything in this game?

Instead of taking away something that is useful in restoring tiredness, why not look at what could be added in the game that people could do to protect themselves? Small groups of people can massacre large groups of people. The Spanish conquered the Incas with only hundreds of men for example. Massacres can unite a people and force them to work together for their own security.

Don't discourage people role playing raiders. Let people do whatever they want, but know that since this is a society simulator, security must be a concern.

[kicking jay]

Be very careful, jay. t is a scary place. ;)

Applied. We'll see how it goes. :P

[SekoETC]

Energy restoration used to be much more effective, leading into a group of four people massacring two towns. Several people died. It was deemed the game wasn't supposed to be played that way and people got their characters revived unless they specifically said they wanted to remain dead.

That sounds crazy to me that you can just get rid of rules simply because the game "shouldn't" be played a certain way. I thought anyone could be anything in this game?

Instead of taking away something that is useful in restoring tiredness, why not look at what could be added in the game that people could do to protect themselves? Small groups of people can massacre large groups of people. The Spanish conquered the Incas with only hundreds of men for example. Massacres can unite a people and force them to work together for their own security.

Don't discourage people role playing raiders. Let people do whatever they want, but know that since this is a society simulator, security must be a concern.

It's a good point that people should be able to play who ever they want, even if it upsets other people. It seems like the game tries to please the majority of people and if a minority upsets other people up to a point that some people are threatening to quit because the game is no longer enjoyable, it leads into addressing the issue, either by changing the code or resource attributes, or in rare cases, reviving the dead. One might argue it goes against the permadeath spirit of the game. I think in every system, some people are going to figure out how to play it to their advantage.

[*Wiro]

Powergaming has no place in Cantr. That has always been something the creators have tried to prevent.

[Otherside]

If enough of our beloved leaders and pinnacles of communities get dragged off for keys and plunder then Cantr dies... Pirates plunder the heart of this game. Fact.

[SekoETC]

If the goal of the combat system is that only insignificant characters will die, unless the player agrees to it, we might as well change the combat system so that the game will only give a suggestion about what the likely outcome of a combat would be, but characters could only kill each other if the players agreed it was fair, or by default, the richer or older person would win. Not entirely a serious suggestion, but might make people think. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and threatening to quit over it isn't necessarily the healthiest option. Not saying anybody here had threatened to quit but it has happened in the past.

[Ericis]

Powergaming has no place in Cantr. That has always been something the creators have tried to prevent.

What exactly is power gaming? If a person wants to conquer the world whats wrong with that?

[SekoETC]

If a person wants to conquer the world and make some characters their slaves, some characters their generals and lackeys, that's productive. If the character wants to kill everybody and destroy everything, that's not productive. Also if the one person conquered the whole gameworld, several players would end up as slaves to the same high lord and you're not allowed to have several characters in the same organization, so at most you could enslave one character from each account, and the rest would have to die because they couldn't join you.

[*Wiro]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powergaming

This explains it better than I could.

[Uma]

The combat isn't bad. the murder mongering and piracy isn't bad. what's bad is that there's no reasonable defense against it. some one can wait till just before a tick, and stab-drag-zoom off and that character is going to die unless they're lucky. if they had keys, they compromised the work of a lot of players. It just seems counter intuitive to the rest of the game to put in a fast action that undoes so very much work.