More realistic turns?

[ClaytonAguiar]

Hi,

Why all attacks of a round happen in a single "block"? My mage had 8 melee attacks per round, and spent all 8 "hits" in a "keystroke". This implementation has benefits, and weaker monsters are just obliterated before the eight strike.

Wouldn't it be more "realistic" (funny to use this term here) if all the strikes/movements dealed by the monsters were dealed in a "fragmented" pattern?

Example: I have 8 attacks per round, fighting someone with 4 attacks per round. To make simpler, both are at the same speed. Instead of:
You hit...
You hit...
You hit...
You hit...
You hit...
You hit...
You hit...
You hit...
[Someone] hits you...
[Someone] hits you...
[Someone] hits you...
[Someone] hits you...

we might have:
You hit...
You hit...
[Someone] hits you...
You hit...
You hit...
[Someone] hits you...
You hit...
You hit...
[Someone] hits you...
You hit...
You hit...
[Someone] hits you...
[Prompt for next turn]

Same hits per round. Just not in a single "sprint".

[Derakon]

Actually breaking things down to that fine a level of detail would probably require one keystroke per blow. SCthangband did this, as I recall, and it worked out reasonably well (and, as a side effect, gave the player many more opportunities to heal/escape since the amount of time passing between each prompt was much smaller).

Vanilla will be moving to a fractional blows system at some point, which as I understand it basically means that when you attack something, you will keep attacking until either you've spent 100 energy (i.e. one turn of blows) or your target is dead. Which doesn't interleave attacks any, but it is related to your suggestion.

I'm not entirely clear on how interleaving attacks is an improvement, aside from "realism".

[Therem Harth]

Think crowd combat. Since warriors could divide their blows between different monsters, they could more easily handle crowds of weak monsters.

(This sort of thing can be found in ToME and several other variants. IMO it kind of stops being that useful once you're consistently fighting very tough monsters, but then, I'm not a particularly good player.)

[Derakon]

Oh, I'm aware that fractional blows will make warriors much more capable of dealing with crowds. I'm saying that I don't see what benefit is conveyed by the OP's suggestion, which is not about fractional blows (though it superficially sounds similar).

[Therem Harth]

Oh I see, N/M. That was dumb.

Seeing as Angband *is* a turn-based game, the OP's idea seems a little silly. However! There might be some merit to it if some kind of system for parry and riposte was added. Something like:


The Berserker parries your blow.
The Berserker hits you.
You hit the Berserker.
(etc.)

You could even have custom messages for some monsters, e.g.

Morgoth, Lord of Darkness laughs as he slaps your feeble blows aside!

[ekolis]

There was one roguelike, though I can't remember which one (I think it was Omega, but I could be mistaken), in which you could set "tactics" for your attacks - if you had 3 "combat actions" (equivalent I suppose to blows), you could use them to e.g. attack, then defend, then evade... The interface was rather clunky, though, as you had to do this outside of combat, and there was no hotkey for switching between various tactics - you had to go in and reset them all every time you wanted to change them!

This also reminds me of one particular tactical RPG... it's called "Hero's Saga: Laevatein Tactics" (don't ask me how you pronounce "Laevatein"... I've been pronouncing it somewhat like a cross between "levitating" and "Ovaltine" but who knows if that's right!")...

In any event, it was your bog-standard tactical RPG for the most part, but there was one crucial difference between it and other games in the genre... Instead of your heroes running around unescorted on the battlefield and doing battle directly with other heroes, they each had a cadre of eight "soldiers" accompanying them. Each soldier was weaker in attack and defense than a hero, naturally, but a hero who had soldiers with him would trounce one who had lost his soldiers, seeing as they provided extra attack power, as well as serving as bodyguards!

Oh, I suppose there were TWO crucial differences... the one I really wanted to get to was the battle system. Instead of "Lumith attacks Eddo for 50 fire damage! End of Lumith's turn!", each attack was not a single attack but instead a minigame composed of 3 phases. Each phase you could assign one of 4 tactics to your men: "attack", "charge", "phalanx", and "defend". Attack was the standard attack, charge was a strong attack with weak defense and evasion, phalanx was a weak attack with high evasion, and defend was no attack at all, but your defense is boosted. The soldiers always had to fight through the enemy soldiers first, but the hero could choose to attack the enemy hero directly; if you had more soldiers surviving than the enemy, your extra soldiers' attacks would go against whoever your hero was targeting (the enemy hero or the enemy soldiers).

Interesting mechanics, no? Heroes who are escorted by abstracted soldiers are not something for Angband, obviously (maybe for some other roguelike!), but the "tactics" idea might be interesting to implement in at least a variant! Of course, unlike in Omega (or whichever old roguelike that was), you'd want several "slots" to assign different tactics to, which you could switch between at the press of a hotkey, rather than manually reassigning them all the time!

[EpicMan]

It was Omega. And even the monsters had a similar setup with a series of combat moves, so once you figured them out (or read the sources) you could tailor your tactics to defeat them.

As you said, the main problem with the system was that it was clunky and time-consuming to set up right (much like the interface of Omega in general). If you could have saved setups and switched on the fly it would have been much better.

The thing I most liked about it was that it was a way you could improve your ability to hurt and avoid attacks of foes that was different from spellcasting.

[fph]

ToME 2 (dunno about the new versions) lets you change tactics, both for attacking and for moving -- you can trade some toHit for AC and some perception+stealth for speed, or vice versa.

[Derakon]

ToME 2's system was pretty exploitable, though. There was no reason for pure casters to ever not use "cowardly" tactics past the first few levels, since they didn't care about melee effectiveness, and practically everyone stuck their movement at "running" because +4 speed was way more useful than the stealth tradeoff.

[Pete Mack]

ToME 2's system was pretty exploitable, though. There was no reason for pure casters to ever not use "cowardly" tactics past the first few levels, since they didn't care about melee effectiveness, and practically everyone stuck their movement at "running" because +4 speed was way more useful than the stealth tradeoff.

I only traded speed for stealth while in combat. When I played ToME, I had macros that opened character info, incremented (or decremented) speed or tactics by 4. (I also had ones that incremented or decremented both at the same time.)

Speed at all times is only way more useful than stealth if you are not trying to dive. (I also didn't play Knight of Rohann. Petty Dwarf, all the way.)