More significant AC

[Derakon]

While I'm theory-crafting, I'd also recommend considering allowing evasion to factor in on allowing players to dodge bolt spells, and armor to reduce damage from ball/breath spells. The same could be true for monsters, but it's important then to scale up the damage to account for new misses.

And then reduce the amount of damage reduction that resistance gives you. This could work. We'd have to figure out how to scale damage with respect to monster level, though. That is, if AC ranges from (say) 0 to 100, with 100 giving 50% damage reduction, then you derive relatively little benefit from AC until you start finding the really big armors late in the game. Ideally the utility of AC should scale evenly across the entire game.

I guess we could simply remove AC scaling from the game -- an early-game heavily-armored character would have the same AC as a late-game heavily-armored character.

[wobbly]

I guess we could simply remove AC scaling from the game -- an early-game heavily-armored character would have the same AC as a late-game heavily-armored character.

Or just reduce it by a lot. I doubt I'm the only player who likes the "I'm getting more poweful" aspect of finding better & better equipment.

[Nick]

Good to see you guys are designing Angband's new combat system. Keep it up!

[Derakon]

Good to see you guys are designing Angband's new combat system. Keep it up!

You'd think one of these days I'd get tired of rehashing old ground.

Speaking of which, Vanilla 4.0 should use finesse/prowess combat.

[AnonymousHero]

Good to see you guys are designing Angband's new combat system. Keep it up!

THERE MUST NOT BE ANY NEW COMBAT SYSTEM!

... oh, wait. Sorry, had my luddite goggles on there. Have at it!

[Nick]

You'd think one of these days I'd get tired of rehashing old ground.

Not in my experience

Speaking of which, Vanilla 4.0 should use finesse/prowess combat.

I am not at all on top of how the v4 combat worked, but I have two issues with it that I know of:

1. Numbers were even less intuitive than the current system (IIRC - I may be wrong here) and
2. The words "finesse" and "prowess"

Off the top of my head, my design goals would be

• Easy to understand
• In keeping with the Angband spirit
• Better balanced between major components (armor, evasion, melee, breaths, spells, archery)
• Most fights simple (not the same as easy), some fights interesting, few fights drawn out

I think drawing on V-combat, O-combat, v4-combat and Sil combat we should be able to come up with something.

[Derakon]

I think drawing on V-combat, O-combat, v4-combat and Sil combat we should be able to come up with something.

You'd think so!

V-combat has weird emergent behaviors, like warriors swinging daggers around, and damage dice being borderline irrelevant on non-slaying weapons. Damage is easy to calculate as long as you ignore blows calculations, critical hits, chance-to-hit logic, and AC damage reduction...which is basically like saying you can't easily calculate damage.

O-combat...I haven't played many O-combat games, since they tend to be masochistically hard, but it seems broadly similar to v4-combat but with diminishing returns, as I recall. That is, damage is derived from weapon dice, and magical bonuses apply multipliers to it. O-combat has a similar blows calculation system as Vanilla does.

Sil is highly praised, but it seems like it probably wouldn't mesh well with Angband's numbers inflation. There's an entire thread about how to transfer concepts from Sil to Angband proper though, and I think it touches on melee at points.

v4-combat was hampered by some dumbass deciding to multiply all the pluses by 10. It also hasn't been heavily tested, though it seems promising and with evasion/absorption implemented should provide a decent amount of diversity in fights. The logic's very straightforward throughout except for critical hits (I never managed to come up with a satisfactory rule for them) and the balance seemed to be basically right, albeit possibly biased against finesse fighters due to their weapons tending to have smaller dice. That's an edit file tweak though.

Feel free to suggest better terms than "finesse" and "prowess". They were chosen for the lack of pre-existing uses of those words. As for the numbers, it's pretty straightforward:

chance to hit = 75 - target evasion
damage = (1 + finesse * balance) * (dice * prowess * heft) - target absorption

In other words, your #blows is based on your finesse and how well-balanced your weapon is, while your damage multiplier per blow is based on your prowess and how hefty the weapon is.

[Estie]

My gripe with v4 combat is similar to vanilla. Funnily, what got it started was the strong troll warriors flicking fast daggers issue, but as it is, strong prowess types favor finesse over prowess equipment again. I would like to see trolls wanting heavy weapons/str/prowess, not daggers/dex/finesse.

[Derakon]

My gripe with v4 combat is similar to vanilla. Funnily, what got it started was the strong troll warriors flicking fast daggers issue, but as it is, strong prowess types favor finesse over prowess equipment again. I would like to see trolls wanting heavy weapons/str/prowess, not daggers/dex/finesse.

Wait, really? I played a v4 half-troll and smashed face with the biggest, meatiest weapons I could find. Granted that I was playing a paladin, not a warrior -- warriors were as I recall pretty balanced between finesse and prowess, while paladins are pretty substantially biased towards prowess. Anyway, if that is indeed the case then it ought to be solvable with edit file tweaks.

That does raise one potential problem with v4, though: depending on your class biases, some weapons may be substantially less useful than others. I think e.g. that rogues get 3 times more finesse than prowess from their class (which in turn makes up something like half to 2/3rds their overall combat stats, the rest coming from stats and race), so any rogue is going to be a lot less excited about a great hammer than about a rapier.

[Estie]

Rogues wanting rapiers and not hammers is as it should be, but the brawny warrior troll (or paladin) still profits more from finess rings than prowess rings. The reason is the simple multiplication in your formula which favours the increase of the smaller factor over the larger one. I believe we have discussed this topic before.

In an old post that I am too lazy to dig out I suggested a formula for vanilla combat where number of attacks is determined by dex stat while str puts a cap on the amount of attacks depending on weapon weight; so with a dagger, you might get full attacks (according to your dex) while a heavier longsword would get capped by your too low str to a lower number, and a MoD even more so. As str increases, the cap would lift, allowing full attacks with longsword aso.
I still would prefer this over current vanilla.


Back to v4....I will ponder this more. Maybe squaring the finesse and prowess values in the formula would make emphasizing the strong side desirable.

[fizzix]

Sil is highly praised, but it seems like it probably wouldn't mesh well with Angband's numbers inflation. There's an entire thread about how to transfer concepts from Sil to Angband proper though, and I think it touches on melee at points.

This is because Sil's combat is linear and Angband's combat is super-linear. However, if we're talking about revamping combat, then it makes sense to do it from the ground up. And if that means reducing numbers to use Sil's system, because it makes sense to use Sil's system, then that's what we should do.

The nice thing about Sil is that it's much easier to balance. It's very easy to figure out exactly what value of evasion a monster should have at a given level.

The real problem with using Sil's combat is Sil has no magical attacks. Adding in magical attacks is going to be the difficulty, although I don't see it as being that difficult.

And if we use Sil, we might as well go all the way and add in their will based checks for effects, because then we can actually allow a true rogue playstyle where you put monsters to sleep and steal their stuff.

[wobbly]

Rogues wanting rapiers and not hammers is as it should be, but the brawny warrior troll (or paladin) still profits more from finess rings than prowess rings. The reason is the simple multiplication in your formula which favours the increase of the smaller factor over the larger one. I believe we have discussed this topic before.

What about the brawny troll rogue? I'd picture these more as footpads/bandits then burglars. I'd favor a dex/str split over a class split for just this kinda reason. I'd certainly picture a heavy club/staff over a delicate rapier in the hands of the half troll mage, the rapier is a fairly flashy weapon after all.

[Estie]

What about the brawny troll rogue? I'd picture these more as footpads/bandits then burglars. I'd favor a dex/str split over a class split for just this kinda reason. I'd certainly picture a heavy club/staff over a delicate rapier in the hands of the half troll mage, the rapier is a fairly flashy weapon after all.

Well the class rogue is gonna get a dex bonus, the race troll a str one, so the troll rogue is in the middle with no or little bias. Same applies to many other combinations like for example elf warrior.

If you want the troll rogue having prowess and the elf warrior finesse, the racial bonus would have to dominate the class one. This runs contrary to d&d, but I see no reason against doing it this way.

[Derakon]

And again, all of the race and class modifiers and growth rates are in the edit files, so they're easy to tweak to get the desired result

[mushroom patch]

I find this talk about AC being irrelevant somewhat astonishing. It's extremely relevant. The only two required fights in the game are against uniques with big melee attacks and probably the most effective and straightforward way of killing them is by meleeing them. These monsters don't even have breath attacks! (Admittedly, they do have mana storm, but that's like 1 time in 10 or less.) How often and how hard these melee attacks land makes a huge difference in the amount of resources required to win these fights.

If you don't like getting hit by big breath weapons, just don't get hit by them. As for the thematic aspects of weapon choice... Again, I don't understand this discussion, but the right way to think about it is that when you start out, you're a weakling who dies in fist fights with the town drunks. At the end of the game, you're a force of nature who kills gods. Getting hung up on whether you're a troll or a rogue and what your conceptions of those roles in fantasy settings are kind of misses this basic dynamic.

(And by the way, a difference of 15-20% in damage is very significant in serious fights. E.g. against Morgoth, taking another 15-20% melee damage is going to be the difference between drinking 8 *heals* and 25 *heals* if you have a total of around 900 hp. That 15-20% is putting you one worse case melee damage turn away from having to quaff rather than two from full hp, so you can expect to quaff a whole lot more.)