Flanking, charge, knockback near walls

[debo]

Not sure if this is intentional or not, but if you have the following scenario:

########
#.......
+.@.....
#..o....
########

and you simply start moving to the right, you will actually charge the o on every turn (provided that you hit + knockback successfully every time).

I guess this is happening because the 'o' can't be knocked back perpendicular to @, so it ends up moving in direction of the hit? According to a literal interpretation of the rules, this does make sense, but I'm not sure if this was an anticipated rule interaction or not.

It's not superbly useful because you often have more stuff going on in a room than just one dude against a wall, but I just thought it was kinda cool and I only just noticed it now.

[Scatha]

Yes, this is neat. It wasn't a designed feature of the system, but I noticed the behaviour a few months after release. It was potentially very powerful with the original Knockback rule, where you potentially use it to kill Morgoth without him getting a turn (if you had a long enough wall).

We think it's fun now. It's potentially powerful, but you need quite a lot of work to pull it off, and most enemies will die before you can repeat it much.

Note you can also pull this off without breaking your sprint!

[half]

Yes, I'm a little surprised it took people this long to find this. Congratulations for being the first debo (or the first to share it). The knock backs working on diagonals if the straight line isn't available comes up more often than this. It also leads to some other useful interactions. Flanking and Knock Back is a very interesting combination (with Charge and Sprinting making it even better), and I've been encouraging people to try it. Indeed, the next Sil comp character will probably involve this (I have a character in mind).

[taptap]

Half has been advertising the flanking + knockback combination for a while, so this is what is behind it. I admittedly never fully understood whether and/or when you can get the charge on a flanking attack. Looks very powerful. I mean with knockback you can even push them to the wall to begin with.

(I now imagine a large room with enemies pressed to the walls and a mad dwarf sprinting past them mowing all of them down with a great axe. Dwarf Fortress meets Sil?)

[debo]

Flanking and Knock Back is a very interesting combination (with Charge and Sprinting making it even better), and I've been encouraging people to try it.

I've been meaning to get an Edain win for quite a while, but struggled with low Con and just got bored of it. However, after playing with this charge/knockback stuff, I did a couple of Hador runs recently that start with Dodging/Flanking and Charge. It's a very helpful combination to "punch above your weight" and increase survivability in the early game, since monsters seem to get far fewer attacks on you. It's also super fun! I might actually get a win this way

I'm going to try forgoing my usual lore-master rush at the midgame and use the experience to buy knockback or Will-based stuff instead, I think it should help out a lot.

[BlueFish]

Interesting. It's not intuitive that flank attacks come before the move rather than after, which might account for this not having been "discovered" earlier.

[half]

Interesting. It's not intuitive that flank attacks come before the move rather than after, which might account for this not having been "discovered" earlier.

That's right. We could have chosen either, but I thought this was a little better, and since Controlled Retreat has to before the move, I thought consistency also argued in favour of before the move for Flanking.