galehar wrote:Regarding swords and open ground attacks, how about you get a free attack whenever moving to a cell with a monster adjacent to it. Meaning you get first hit when moving next to a monster, you can move around a monster and keep attacking it. You can move through a pack of monster while landing attacks left and right. Whenever you move and there's several monsters adjacent to you, a random one is attacked. Maybe weight it with the last one attacked or the direction of the move.
I like it. This would mostly help with chaff (orc priest + band, elves, summoners, and lots of other stuff) and with ranged enemies (1 free hit on centaurs/yaktaurs/annihilators/liches/etc.). I don't think it would help with tactical movement to use enemies as cover because the cover would quickly be dead. But it would simplify initiating combat in all other cases: no need to wait for the enemy to move towards you, you get the first hit either way. How to handle attack delay is a major problem, though: if movement delay is shorter than attack delay, moving around would let you speed up your attacks. This is especially problematic for fast races and with swiftness or boots of running. The other way around attacking with fast weapons would be faster when standing still than when moving, although I think that is a smaller problem. It would allow more movement attacks with fast weapons for fast-moving characters, though. Also it would mean engaging melee enemies by waiting for them to come into melee range is still optimal with a fast weapon. Clarity is an issue in both cases: newer players might not realize these differences in action speed for quite a long time.
I can think of several ways to handle attack delay, each with their own problems. I'll list all of them so they can be discussed:
1) A simple solution would be to only allow movement attacks if attack delay is less than movement delay. Harsh towards fast races, and would be quite weird when using swiftness or a weapon upgrade would disable movement attacks, but a clear and simple solution with no further fuss. Also makes sense: if you cant even attack quickly with a weapon, you certainly wont be able to attack quickly while moving. Obviously it would be super annoying that the auto-attacks would sometimes work and sometimes not. Slowdown of fast weapon attacks while moving and the effect of movement speed on this slowdown remains.
2) Use the maximum delay for the combined action. This means you might want to switch to a quick weapon for moving past enemies towards your priority target in the orc priest scenario so you don't get slowed down. Probably not worth it most of the time, though. And of course for killing yaktaurs or regular enemy engagement you can keep your triple sword on. If there is something along the path towards those yaktaurs you get screwed, though: not only is your cover gone because you killed it (this is the case with any version of these open ground attacks), but also you took longer to get to melee range. The same is true for disengaging from a group of enemies. Delay got a lot more transparent with the turn display default now being game time, so an observant player should soon become aware of how this works. It is also easy to explain, and would allow players to rely on movement attacks (they would always work). They could no longer rely on their movement delay being constant however. It might be a bit fiddly, variable move delay could get really annoying (although someone who tried euclidean said it didn't bother him in that case, so might be fine). Slowdown of fast weapon attacks while moving and the effect of movement speed on this slowdown remains.
3) A variation of 1): movement attacks don't activate all the time, but with movement_delay/attack_delay probability, leading to the same average attack speed the weapon would have for stationary attacks. Giving a chance for multiple attacks when movement delay is longer than attack delay would allow keeping the attack speed of fast weapons fast while moving. This variant would keep movement delay constant and reliable, but make movement attacks unreliable because of the random nature. This means it is still optimal to engage melee enemies by waiting for them to come into range to guarantee the first attack, losing one of the nice advantages of the movement attacks proposal.
4) Movement attacks only trigger if the delay of the last movement attack is over. So a delay 12 attack would trigger only on every second move. You could still attack directly after making a movement attack with a high-delay weapon, so the initial engagement attack would be sped up (making it optimal to engage by stepping towards the enemy when using a slow weapon), while attacks during continued movement would be slowed down or capped at movement speed. A variant using probabilities depending on movement delay, attack delay, and the time since the last movement attack is also possible and would make this much more continuous. In the all-or-nothing version I proposed there are huge breakpoints. The disadvantages of using probabilities are listed in 3). Depending on the variant slowdown of fast weapon attacks while moving and the effect of movement speed on this slowdown remains or not.
I really have no idea which of these would be best.