The results of the vote were pretty overwhelming for this, so going to start some discussions.
I'm also going to include the #2 point - "Balance magic & combat skills so they are more equal" a little bit - I don't think slowing down combat is going to make that all work out, but it does seem to me that if the speed of combat is radically changed, that is likely to have some effects in that balance, either for better or worse (seems unlikely it would remain completely the same). there is also this point on the TODO list (http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/dev_todo:change_player_speed_ - change player speed, but that is more related to movement speed, not combat speed. I think that helps/contributes to the combat speed problem, but isn't the only fix. I'm going to formalize this a bit. I'll also note that when talking about these things, everything should really be on the table - things should not be excluded because it is different than it is now, would result in incompatible characters (while this change could probably be made without requiring fresh characters, some of the other big points can't be), etc. I think if we try to focus too narrowly we won't be able to find good solutions. PROBLEM: Combats in crossfire right now are generally very fast - less than a second to kill most any monster. This is too fast to really react in much of any way, think tactically, etc. SOLUTION (from a very high level fiew): Combat should take a real amount of time. 30 seconds to kill high level boss monsters does not seem unreasonable to me. I think at lower levels, this time will be less (maybe a few seconds for most monsters?). I don't think there should ever be case (except with maybe things like rats) that a player actually mows through creatures. PLAN/DETAILS: This is the hard part. Just slowing down the character really isn't sufficient unless they were made painfully slow. Just for reference, I decided to quickly create a starting human warrior. With his chain armor and long sword equipped, his movement speed is 1.0, weapon speed is 1.60. When he got second level, weapon speed went to 1.68. Third level it was 1.74. So one thing I quickly see is that perhaps starting weapon speed is just too fast, and goes up too fast. If that got reduced to say .8 at first level, that quickly doubles time it takes to kill things. Maybe even a lower weapon speed - if you look at some games, you can move quite a bit, but get limited attacks - so a weapon_speed of .2 could be interesting (if this was done, then weapon_speed_left would need to be added, and it get added up separately to see if the player can attack, etc). And interesting thing here is that this may open up new tactics - fire a bow, run away for a bit, fire bow again, etc. Or in party player, characters swapping position based on when their next attack happens. The characters damage was 9, which means that pretty much every kobold (2 hp) is killed in one blow, on average, orcs (4 hp) get killed in one blow, and gnolls (8 hp) need 2 blows. The starting character WC was 16. This means that the character will basically hit every time (mechanism is basically ac + d20 > wc means a hit, so tuning wc would also help. Or maybe tuning creature AC. If instead of hitting every time, the character hit only 25% of the time, that slows things down by a factor of 4. I realize that my basic test here was just at low level, but I would think the correct approach would be to try and tune low level combat and then adjust the upper level combat, and not try to get level 100 combat balance then figure out how to do it at level 1. I think stat bonuses may also need to be tuned. But I doubt adjusting this will still be enough. It would also be nice to try to reduce the hp disparity some, but not sure how to do that. It seems to me that adjusting base weapon damage isn't really a fix - most starting weapons go from 1->10 damage, which seems reasonable to me - you can't reduce that too much without loosing meaning of weapons (if a dagger does 2 damage and sword 3, that would seem fairly meaningless). Perhaps a lot more lower monsters should have better armor values, so not all the damage goes through. But adjusting monster kill rate from players is really only half the problem. The other problem is rate of damage that monsters do to players. It may be that if it now takes several seconds for me to kill a monsters, I'll be able to watch my HP more closely, but there are lots of attacks that can kill players quick quickly - especially bolt spells if the player doesn't move out of the way quickly. I suspect if that player to monster hp disparity is reduced, then the damage that things like bolts do to players would effectively be reduced. One idea, which is probably controversial, is to increase player HP. Rather than trying to adjust all the monster HP, maybe we give players more HP. For example, if players (and monsters) had 50 HP at first level, but damage and other things were unchanged, that effectively slows things down by a factor of 5 (5 times more hp than before). It also means that unlike right now, where basically 2 hits may kill the player (which if player just gets unlucky and they happen right at the same time and not far apart, player can't do much about it), it would take many hits. I think under this system, the number of hp gained after first would still be more modest, like in the range of 10. But maybe also remove the cap, which right now at level 10 or so, means hp rate goes way down - maybe the level 110 people should have 2000 hp instead of the 500 they have now. Anyways, got a bit off topic, and don't have real solutions. Relative easy first steps might be: 1) Reduce player speed & weapon speed. 2) Increase creature AC 3) Increase armor value of creatures But before starting work, I'd like to see other peoples thoughts and ideas. I think this may actually be a very good starting one, as at some point, I don't think doing the solution will be that hard - the harder part will be finding the solution. This may also branch off into other areas, like if the stat adjustments are redone, we'd need to think about how that works if that stat range itself is redone. _______________________________________________ crossfire mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
