Fighting system

[CrashBlizz]

Same as said about page 4 in the now locked tea topic.

-Increase the number of attacks per day from 1 to 4(?), one attack per 6 hours
-Decrease the damage done by each attack but allow them to add up to the daily total we have now
-Decrease the tiredness caused per attack

Result:
-Killing people takes longer or requires more people online at once. 'Instant' deaths are far more unlikely, giving players at least 6 hours to get online.
-This will allow whole fights to be RP'd eg. He swings, she ducks and thrusts up, he gets hit in the arm and stumbles backward...etc.

(if you want to discuss healing food caps or any other rubbish then go make your own suggestion!)

[Cogliostro]

An immediate big problem with this line of thought is that all this increases the amount annoying micromanagement that players have to do. Now you must keep track of not just one "combat tick", but 4, and sit around "with a stopwatch" babying your characters moves in and out of shelters to coincide with the right times to attack.

We all hate that stuff, because the clickfest approach is against Cantr's basic principles of a slowpaced, asynchronous game. But nice work trying to come up with something reasonable to face the problem.

[Rumaan]

I second this suggestion. Seems to be the easiest to implement. And brings a little more balance to combat. I am also posting my asynchronous combat idea from the same Tea thread in case someone comes up with an improvement to it.

"I like that. How about this for asynchronous combat? Each char gets 5 attack "turns" per day per opponent char. In each turn, a char with best skills and best weapons can cause at most 3-5% damage. The first turn can be taken any time but each subsequent turn can be taken only if the defending char has been awake for at least 2-3 RL minutes since the last attack. This means players won't lose their chars when they are asleep."

This has the advantage that you don't have to wait for 6 hours to attack again.

[CrashBlizz]

An immediate big problem with this line of thought is that all this increases the amount annoying micromanagement that players have to do. Now you must keep track of not just one "combat tick", but 4, and sit around "with a stopwatch" babying your characters moves in and out of shelters to coincide with the right times to attack.

I have to admit that I don't really have to keep track of the 'combat tick' at the moment. I guess I just dont kill enough people over two days. However if you do, then you'll still only have to remember one tick, not 4. The 6 hours starts from your last attack - not 6 hour intervals from the first.

[Kelli]

I like the ideas presented. I'm not so sure about the tiredness though. Unless you mean the decrease would add up after the 4 attacks.... to be the normal tiredness of the current one attack?

[EchoMan]

Just so you know (and also stated before somewhere); The suggestion of a new combat system has been suggested since 2003 (I think), and is accepted. It's currently in GAB where discussions about what and how to implement is being held.

[CrashBlizz]

And its taken 7 years??????

[Cogliostro]

Know what's even sadder, Crash?

I bet it was me who suggested it in 2003...

Btw, the way Cantr's mechanics operate, tick timings are fixed to absolute time and cannot easily be made to count off individual timings per each character. It's not necessary in this case, though. No matter how it's counted, it still doesn't remove the idiotic imposition of the requirement (game - > players) to schedule their day/night around 6 hour chunks of time during which they'll have "their chance" to attack, and deal that 7% of damage.... that the other guy will just swallow some healfood to cancel.

It's reasons like these that make me hope that GAB are finally seriously looking at making a drastic change, and hence pave way to major conceptual improvements in the combat system, not just little tweaks and nerfs.

[EchoMan]

There have been a lot of different suggestions, and some has been implemented. I'm not sure when the "big overhaul" first was suggested, but that's what we're iscussing now anyways.

[Rumaan]

What are these proposed changes?

[Cogliostro]

A small sampling of wacky but neat ideas and unabashed propositions that I personally curated over the years:

Battle Dynamic - Evil and Nice
viewtopic.php?t=17670
"One of the most beloved sports in Cantr (as everyone knows) is "kill the pirate". This is where a town full of bored older characters is informed that a "deadly pirate" is fast approaching. Everyone packs into a darter or sloop, each man or woman in his 90ies carrying at least 3 crossbows. They dock to the pirate ship and, eventually, (there's no way around it) kill the pirate once they break the last lock on his ship. My main moan is not even going to be about how rough the lonely pirate or evil character has it. It will be about how ridiculously easy those 90-year-olds with crossbows have it. They all know there's absolutely no real danger to any of them, and combat is just a formality, and indeed a zesty, sporting past-time for the older bored characters. They know full well that no matter how armed or how strong, the pirate will never succeed in killing any of the "good guys" - it's just impossible within the game mechanic, as long as the good guys brought any healing food (which they never forget to - they're not stupid)."

Healing food being awkward.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17573
"It just seems extremely weird that in the "asynchronous" world of Cantr, I'm obliged to sit around and babysit character's health every time they are in some fight. What if I was away doing other things? Doesn't seem fair that the more "active" characters should simply be able to take down the others by striking them at bad times for the player. Several times it happened to me that I lost Cantr-fights and characters because for some reason I couldn't click things as fast as other players, and the eat-heal-food button lagged out. "

Maxhealth - the possibility to become permanently damaged in combat
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17817
"MaxHealth cannot be recovered, fixed with heal-food, or somehow reset back. Once you're a cripple due to fighting, you are a cripple for the rest of your life. Which, of course, everyone will be able to see on you, and maybe they'll be compassionate with you. Maybe. "


The work that made me the rockstar I am:
Toward a Satisfying, Asynchronous Combat System?
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17804&hilit=+toward
"The criteria for this discussion are the same as usual. We want a more satisfying combat system but it can't be too complex to program. If you imagine it abstractly, currently the combat always consists of a sequence of simple "broadsides" unleashed player against player instantaneously, using the Attack button. Our concern is this instant-ness; ideally we don't want it, since that means the other player has no chance to respond or do anything, this being against the original design philosophy of Cantr. An "asynchronous system" is a fancy way of saying that stuff doesn't happen at the same time, but gets resolved properly and fairly regardless of when exactly you hit the attack or he hit his attack."

Of course, since those times many other discussions have sprung up involving many people, produced very important gems of ideas, and then died out. I recall some really, really promising dialogues between DougR and Seko, which approached a workable solution as close as anything but got bogged down in nobody being able to agree on what should be everyone's focus.

The following are the problems that must be addressed:

- Make combat asynchronous one way or another, as discussed above.
- Free players from dependence on tick timings and the requirement to constantly "babysit" characters engaged in combat.
- Remove the possibility of dodgy combat tactics related to dragging and popping in/out of buildings instantly.
- Ganking (several players simultaneously online and taking advantage of someone who isn't) is to be dealt with, it should be no part of Cantr, as it's completely against its core principles.
- Make combat truly dangerous and hence exciting again for all sides of the conflict. Danger requires the potential to die in any combat encounter, especially if you are of poor skill/constitution. There must be no impunity for any character, attacker or defender, engaging in warfare. How to realize this in practice is the big question for me.

Here's another old contribution from yours truly toward such an idea: (repost)

It's called "the clash". When person X hits person Y, the server should calculate the result of their "clash", not just the damage dealing by X, but also the retailiation by Y, and the total result. That is, when hitting someone, there is actually potential that your character himself will suffer wounds. Here is the breakdown on how this can work-

An attack by person X can be a Critical Success, Normal, Critical Failure. The probability of these heavily depend on the combat skill relationship between the two fighting characters. Whoever has the greater skill gets more chances for Critical Success, weighted by the difference formed from X's skill minus Y's skill. The greater the skill gap, the more advantages for the more skilled character in this area.

Character Y, our defender, gets a Critical Success, Normal, or Critical Failure rated for their defense attempt also.

If both characters get a Critical Success, their clash is considered to be like the "AI-UCHI" (mutual kill) in samurai martial arts, where the warriors strike and both fall to the ground badly wounded. The damage for both is scaled up a little bit, to reflect the devastation of this combat situation.

If X gets a Critical Success and Y gets a Normal or Critical Failure result, then predictably, character Y is in big trouble. For Normal, it means he tried but was not able to defend from the strike. A lot of the damage still takes place. For a Critical Failure, it means his attempt at defense was a complete fumble, and damage from X's natural strike is even scaled up some.

A Critical Failure by an attacker coupled by a Critical Success by defender means the attacker was caught off guard by a well-prepared and swift opponent, who parried or sidestepped the attempted strike and then immediately struck our attacker down. This is the situation where attacking an expert warrior can result in your own grievous bodily harm, and note that the defending character did not have to be online.

The advantage of this "three-gear" clash is that now we would even be able to make different weapons and shields have different probabilities of success against other weapons and shields. For example, a crossbow is an excellent offensive weapon, but in defense it would be completely useless and will not allow effective retailiation by your character, if you're being attacked by someone with a battle axe. Foils and other piercing weapons might have an advantage against opponents with heavy shields. Heavy shields help against swords and axes, and so on! This way the combat in Cantr can revive itself from its current comatose state and actually begin to make use of all the fascinating variety of weapons and shields that ProgD has already added to the game.

"Clashes" work well when processed by the server asynchronously. Players can in the meantime roleplay however they like, as they are not going to be able to move, or be dragged. If others join the combat, they effectively do not attack "a character" but are actually joining the ongoing abstract "clash", the result of which will affect all those engaged in the struggle, once the server processes it. The idea is that after entering into an armed struggle, there's nothing further to micromanage or do, and you are instead free to roleplay while the real outcome of the battle is decided by a nifty server routine.

A very interesting variation on this has been invented by someone while we were discussing it, I think it even was EchoMan that came up with it: the idea was to allow people to have duels/1vs1 challenges the outcome of which is often death of one of the characters. This was supposed to be a special mode, where the two people involved must both OK it first. Once the duel starts, the two characters involved can exchange hits very quickly, without 1-day rule restrictions applying to them, and their duel can resolve as quickly or as slowly as needed, to accomodate the two players. The damage/attack gets processed when the player opens that character, but not before... This is sort of a luxury system though, but still I feel it shouldn't be forgotten about.

Another major slew of ideas had to do with keeping combat as is, but making DEATH ITSELF stop being instant. In this line, you simply cannot instantly die from a gank attack, you go into a moribund state and people have a chance to care for you (or not), possibly bringing you back by using medicines and healing foods.

And all this is really just the tip of the iceberg, so it's no wonder people find the challenge of improving the combat daunting. It's about the great variety of ideas and approaches, most of them workable, but each addressing some smaller piece of the puzzle.

[gejyspa]

Cogliostro, thank you for your post.

Unlike the last two dozen messages you've made on this subject on the past three days, this message shows you actually have been thinking (for a long time) about constructive ways to make combat better. I'd been become increasingly frustrated with your rants which seemed to me to be just saying, "Yeah, you lost a massive amount of characters because the combat system is broken, so get over it, you sissies. (And, oh yes, totally aside, fix the combat system)" This caused me to respond, "Say, I've got an idea... why don't we just 'nerf' all the weapons? This will cause Cogliostro to reason, but that's just one person, instead of the (dozens?) that resigned over the last fiasco." Some people don't happen to think that combat is the be all and end all of role play. I'm one of them. I accept that some people do, however. But I was wrong in my opinion of you that you were just a simple powergamer, so I hope you accept my apology.

[Cogliostro]

No worries! We are all powergamers, even the rare Cantr ladies who swear they're in it only for the roleplay. Their social roleplay is a power building relationship network, sometimes with as many winners and losers as any famed virtual war in Cantr.

[Ryaga]

First I'd like to start with a skills rehash.

Instead of 'Fighting' and 'Strength' I think we should go further.

Strength - The stronger you are, the more damage you do. The affect is more prominent with larger weapons.
Nimbleness - The faster you are the higher your chance to hit. The affect is more prominent with ranged, and light weapons.
Endurance - The more you can endure the more health you have. The affect shouldn't be gigantic, but should let you take an extra hit or two.
Acuity - This is a lot like a 'luck' stat. An acute character is in tune, and knows what's happening. They stay calm in combat etc. It'd just basically 'buff' your 'rolls' by a random amount.

This allows there to be a lot of different kinds of fighters, and allows you to think things out and decide how you'd want to confront a known enemy. If he's a big brute who carrys a large axe you'd most definitely want something that'd allow you to get in quick and make hits.

Now when you wanted to engage an enemy you'd do exactly what you do now.
Once you clicked attack and chose your weapons both sides are locked in. You're both considered to be in combat now. Others can join in on either side as well. If the initiator wants he can back out and stop it. Other ways for combat to end prematurely is if either character is dragged from combat, just like a project. Now combat is like a tick it happens every so often. Once that happens the real combat starts. Remember that all rolls mentioned are affected ever so slightly by acuity. Tiredness and existing damage would subtract from your stats based on their current level. If you're very tired you shouldn't be very fast, or very strong.

First the game does retreats. Are any players retreating? If so roll for the player retreating and the player attacking and then add that to their base speeds. If the retreating player's speed is just barely over the attacking players with the modifiers added then the attacker gets a hit in but the retreating person makes it away, so they can not be engaged again until after the next tic passes. If the players speed after modifier is significantly higher than the attackers they make it away unharmed.

Second it determines the order of attack, each player gets a 'roll' that's added to their speed. Player with the highest speed after that hits first.

Third attacks are dealt. This works just like now except blocks take speed and acuity into account. If you die you don't get to make a move, so if you're a huge slow guy with a big axe and get killed by a bunch of guys with crossbows and rapiers fair is fair, because if you do manage to hit one chances are they'll be very close to death.

Fifth is everyone is disengaged and those who died are dead. Tiredness is also given here. Anyone who wasn't retreating can be immediately reengaged. But if they were retreating they have an entire other tic to make it away from you.


I haven't thought of what a proper tic length might be, but I think this could be interesting, especially if the gap between average and expert wasn't all that huge in combat. It should give a significant boost but a hit with a sword is a hit. Being an expert in strength should give you a couple extra points of damage.

[EchoMan]

Ryaga, I merged your post with the newest topic in the same forum. I know some people hate searching, but please check for existing threads before making new suggestions. It's all in the sticky post RULES ABOUT POSTING SUGGESTIONS viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6046 in this forum.

And as already stated this is already in GAB being fleshed out. Moved to accepted.