Derakon's combat revamp

[Magnate]

Yet another. Use Prowess for to-hit for your first blow, and Finesse for to-hit for all the blows after the first. It's dead simple and it works!

The flavour is that your first attack is usually the one with most motion and strength behind it. After that the combat turns to quick attacks and counter-attacks that mostly require quick and accurate reactions.

I think we need to Keep It Simple. Having breakpoints at which different rules apply is a bad thing. Having stats have two different impacts on to-hit (one directly and one via a skill like finesse or power) is a bad thing.

I like d_m's suggestion that to-hit is determined in a similar way to damage, by weighting the player's Finesse and Power skills according to the weapon's preferences. But my one slight misgiving is that Finesse intuitively should be the dominant factor in to-hit for all weapons, however power-orientated (I think Derakon made a similar point).

That said, we don't want Finesse to be any more important than Power in the overall system. I think I preferred Derakon's original idea where Finesse essentially replaces to-hit, and Power essentially replaces to-dam. High-finesse characters using high-finesse weapons improve their damage by getting more blows and more (small) criticals. High-power characters using high-power weapons do lots of damage (with BIG criticals) in a smaller number of blows. The only problem is making sure they can actually hit things.

When we think about the evasion/absorption split, we can see that high-power characters are going to have a terrible time with really evasive monsters ... but perhaps that's as it should be?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I like d_m's suggestion that to-hit is determined in a similar way to damage, by weighting the player's Finesse and Power skills according to the weapon's preferences.

A simpler way to do that would be to use the sum of the weapon's blows + damage multiplier for to-hit. The minimum possible to-hit score would be 2, which is probably a good thing.

But my one slight misgiving is that Finesse intuitively should be the dominant factor in to-hit for all weapons, however power-orientated (I think Derakon made a similar point).

I suspect that having the same skill determine both blows and to-hit is a bad thing, even if it could be balanced somehow. If you take both of these away from Power-based warriors, players are going to get really frustrated.

[Magnate]

A simpler way to do that would be to use the sum of the weapon's blows + damage multiplier for to-hit. The minimum possible to-hit score would be 2, which is probably a good thing.

That's an interesting idea. I wonder if it is sufficiently granular. I guess it would be possible to come up with something that worked, once we included race, class and clev.

I suspect that having the same skill determine both blows and to-hit is a bad thing, even if it could be balanced somehow. If you take both of these away from Power-based warriors, players are going to get really frustrated.

This is a good point, but I think it would make more sense for power to affect the number of blows (being able to reverse the swing of high-power weapons, etc.) than the to-hit. But then it might seem a bit lame for Power to affect one and not the other.

I guess, as you said earlier, this isn't a major issue. The system seems fundamentally sound, and we can tweak the contribution to each equation made by each variable once it's up and running.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

A novel thought. Forget completely about how to-hit used to work.

All monsters have a "parrying" score. For example, a fairy would have parrying at 50%. For each blow against the monster, halve the parrying number. Against your first blow, the faery will parry at 50%, against the second 25%, and so on. As you can see, Finesse-based warriors have a clear edge against evasive monsters.

All monsters also have an "armor" score that reduces the damage you do by a set number. Against heavily armored monsters, Power-based warriors have an edge.

Balanced warriors would likely carry both fast weapons against faeries and heavy weapons against trolls.

[buzzkill]

Balanced warriors would likely carry both fast weapons against faeries and heavy weapons against trolls.

... or more practically, a weapon that suits them to deal with most monsters and then have other means available (or not, flee) to deal with the outliers. The basic premise sounds good but it's getting bogged down in the details, especially the fringe situations which are always going to be problematic.

I'd say take an older, stable version of V and put the basics to work and see how it plays. It's not going to be known what needs to be tweaked or tossed or built upon until the fundamentals are put through the ringer.

[Estie]

As for to hit chance:

I still think that that is bad place to introduce difficulties for the @, for the same reason it was bad to have high spell failure rates back in the days. Having a long sequence of misses just feels more depressing than, say, having your damage reduced by armor each hit.

I would go sofar as to make to hit chance a constant, maybe 90%, and only modify it under special circumstances (like: attacker is stunned, target is of (much) higher level, attacker is a mage(?), attacker is blessed, ....).

This is not neccessarily also true for the monsters; having various means of not getting hit might be interesting for item choices, however as it stands now, the impact of high AC is small enough that applying the constant to hit for monsters would not change much.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I'd say take an older, stable version of V and put the basics to work and see how it plays. It's not going to be known what needs to be tweaked or tossed or built upon until the fundamentals are put through the ringer.

Maybe (just maybe, and I really should be doing something else) I could run a little test in Fay, since this intigues me and my weapons are already balanced almost like in Derakon's system. Shouldn't be too time-consuming.

In the test fork, I'd like to eliminate to-hit bonuses completely. For archery and throwing, I could have a percentage based Archery skill. Before rolling for hit, substract range * monster's speed, with slow monsters having speed 1, normal speed monsters speed 2, and immobile monsters speed 0 for targeting purposes.

The whole combat system would be even simpler than Eytan's original system, which is already the simplest *band combat system that I know of. At the same time tactical possibilities would increase, which is exactly what I'm striving for.

Argh, and then I would surely have to remove player's AC too, add a Parrying skill, random hit locations, and player's armor substracting damage from blows. The resulting game would just have to be called RuneQuestBand because almost all mechanics are borrowed from that classic rpg (with little tweaks).

[Derakon]

Magnate asked me on IRC what my timeline was for this, and then promptly logged off. So I'll post here instead.

I'll start familiarizing myself with the relevant parts of the codebase this weekend. My holidays start next Wednesday and extends through the Monday after New Year's, so I'll have more time to code then -- but for awhile in there of course I'll be spending time with family. We'll see how it goes.

My thought was to start with the skill growth, adding the Power/Prowess/Force/whatever skill (fiat decision: call it Prowess for now) and renaming the current Melee skill. Then update the weapon definitions in object.txt to include the two multipliers (using a regex to insert default values for every weapon). Then re-name the to-hit and to-dam variables throughout the code. That should cover all of the groundwork so that all of the actual mechanics changes can be cleanly implemented. So that's the point at which it really makes sense to start dividing work up...unless someone wants to start setting biases for the different weapon types early.

Getting back to how those mechanic changes should actually work...

* For now I'm going to assume that Bless improves Finesse a bit, Heroism improves both Finesse and Prowess, and Berserk improves Prowess.

* Likewise, for now I'll assume that to-hit is given by 10 * (bonus blows + bonus multiplier), which is basically d_m's suggestion. The factor of 10 is to give us room to breathe in an integer-math system. So your base to-hit is 0 (1 blow at 1x damage) and you could max out around 80 with 5 blows/round and a 5x multiplier. That's still a fairly small range, but oh well.

It's clear that there are many different ways we could tackle this (I rather like Estie's suggestion to just make it a flat X% with provisos for unusually easy/hard-to-hit monsters, actually), but I need to start somewhere. This will probably be revisited when evasion/absorption is implemented anyway.

* Ditto with critical chance.

* Starting skills. Let's assume for now that we want a rogue to be able to start out with 2 blows with finesse weapons, and a paladin to start out with a 2x multiplier on prowess weapons. Assuming we keep the current semi-exponential growth from stats, contributions to skill by stat will end up looking something like this:

10     0
18     25
18/50  40
18/100 80
18/150 140
18/220 220

If we target an endgame of 5x bonus whatever (6 blows/round, 6x damage multiplier), then that means that about a third of that will come from stats and the rest from skills and equipment bonuses. Let's go ahead and split that evenly -- one third from stats, one third from skills (i.e. level), one third from equipment.

That means that we should expect an endgame character's skill level to be around 200, while given our desire to start with a 2x multiplier, starting skills should be around 75 or so. Meanwhile, bonuses on equipment will start out at around 0 and range up to the heady heights of 200+ by the endgame. Those are some big numbers...but dividing everything by 10 would make them too small (?), while dividing by a lesser number (e.g. 2) would make the math less convenient.

* For calculating new values for artifact weapons, we can start by comparing their current values to their damage dice and base weapon type. Ringil, for example, is a 4d5 weapon with (+22, +25). Max dice roll is 20, so we end up with a weapon whose to-dam roughly doubles the weapon's damage output. That means that its finesse / power bonuses should combine to roughly double its damage (this is clearly bogus, but roll with it). It's a longsword, so it has a balanced contribution to finesse and power. That means that the New Ringil would look something like (4d5) (+110, +120). Deathwreaker would be a power-biased weapon. I don't have its stats handy ATM, but let's assume it's a 7d6 (+18, +24) weapon. Max dice damage is 42, meaning that the to-dam can multiply its damage by roughly 1.7. Its Finesse/Prowess bias would be something like .2/.8 -- so we end up with the New Deathwreaker being something like (7d6) (+36, +144).

This approach is assuredly flawed in some aspect (for one thing, under the old system, way more than 1/3rd of your damage comes from your equipment, so these numbers in practice would have to be much higher to match the old weapons), but it should be easy to apply and will give us a starting point to work from. Every weapon will need to be rebalanced anyway now that damage comes ultimately from the dice.

* Grond is going to be a 100% Prowess weapon. I trust there will be no disagreement.

[Estie]

It seems you are assuming the paladin gets 1 blow with Deathwreaker ?

I dunno, maybe use as corner values 2 blows/1 blow and x1/x2 multiplier at level 1, 4 blows/2 blows and x2/x4 multiplyer at level 50.

The aim is to let each of the extreme prowess/finesse characters grow a little even with their opposed skill. The needed finesse/prowess comes from drinking the respective stat potions and equipment bonus, and weapons arent 100%/0%, so this should be achievable.

Of course the difference between 1 and 2 blows or x1 and x2 multiplyer is so big that you probably want fractions for both.

[Magnate]

Magnate asked me on IRC what my timeline was for this, and then promptly logged off. So I'll post here instead.

While I'm very glad you posted all that here, I'd just like to point out a couple of things:

- I was still logged in: magnate2 logged out, which was me leaving work, but magnate was still logged in (my home account)

- this is why we keep channel logs. Since we all live in different timezones we don't overlap often, but we still type into the ether as if the other person's there, and they reply when they get back. So please don't feel you need to wait for me to be there.

That said, I like your habit of renaming yourself to Derakon[AFK] when you leave. I'll try to get into the habit of that.

[Estie]

There is a problem here, a flaw with the whole system I think:

The damage done is the product of damage per blow and number of blows. You can imagine it as a rectangle where the one sides length denotes the damage and the other side the amount of blows.

Damage then is proportional to the area. Given a constant length of the sides, the rectangle with the biggest area is the square. What this means is that, in order to maximize their damage, the extreme ends of finesse and power characters will prefer an increase in their opposed stat, because it shapes their rectangle closer to a square. So the troll paladin is going to wear rings of finesse/dex, the hobbit rogue str/power.

I dont like this at all. In current vanilla, this doesnt surface because in the early game we have a combat table thats dominated by str (everyone wants str first, dex later), while the lategame takes place at the capped values for attacks (more stats wont give more blows). A relic of it is still apparent in the fact that a weapon with extra attacks is more useful to a 4 base attack mage than a 6 base attack warrior.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

There is a problem here, a flaw with the whole system I think

I thought about the same thing (but wasn't sure, so I didn't write about it).

If I'm getting this right, somehow the damage should be multiplied by the sum of Finesse and Prowess, not by Finesse multiplied by Prowess.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I didn't do the math but it this might help:

Critical hit chance is:
(Modified Finesse * Modified Finesse) + (Modified Prowess * Modified Prowess)

Then developing only one skill would lead to potentially devasting critical hits, with the price being lower normal damage.

This works better if the two styles have distinctive criticals.

[Derakon]

There is a problem here, a flaw with the whole system I think:

The damage done is the product of damage per blow and number of blows. You can imagine it as a rectangle where the one sides length denotes the damage and the other side the amount of blows.

Damage then is proportional to the area. Given a constant length of the sides, the rectangle with the biggest area is the square. What this means is that, in order to maximize their damage, the extreme ends of finesse and power characters will prefer an increase in their opposed stat, because it shapes their rectangle closer to a square. So the troll paladin is going to wear rings of finesse/dex, the hobbit rogue str/power.

Good observation, and one I hadn't noticed myself. Still, I don't think this is such a huge issue that it needs to be addressed before we see how the game plays. I say this for several reasons:

* These characters will tend to be using weapons that favor investment in their "favored" stats. A hobbit rogue will probably be using a rapier, dagger, or the like which would give only relatively small returns on each additional Prowess point -- but larger returns on each Finesse point.

* Balancing your blows and multipliers towards a square is not a trivial thing to do, especially since the balance point is different for each weapon. Thus the equipment decisions are interesting, which is a big part of Angband's gameplay.

* Why shouldn't a character want to fill in their deficiencies rather than overemphasize their strengths?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I agree it's not a huge issue. That's why I originally got confused when I thought about this. I noticed the issue in theory, but then all my example cases told me that it wasn't an issue after all.

You may want to limit the damage dice of "balanced" weapons, though. Otherwise balanced warriors with balanced weapons might get too powerful.

... except again my test cases tell me they won't. That's because there's the minimum multiplier 1 that helps the "unbalanced" warriors.

In many cases all the points you put into your lower skill are simply wasted with an "unbalanced" weapon. So the system is very interestingly "flawed" in two ways that balance out each other.

EDIT: It will probably be very fun to try to "game" this system in actual play.