[MUD-Dev] Combat system in persistent world

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 26 Dec 2001 17:43:42 +0100 
veynom  <veynom at swcombine.com> wrote:

> I refused to use a turn by turn system as all other actions are
> real time or scaled real time (last shorter or longer).

You might also like to have a look at the combat systems used in
Play by Email (PbEM) games, as well as variations on the various
round-based systems used by standard RPGs.

> I can not use a full real time system or a logged player could
> kill a non-logged player within a few minutes and months of work
> could be put to trash (yes, some of our avatars have over 3
> years).

> So I decided to use a "delayed real time" system. It works as real
> time but the "reload" time of weapons (or time between 2 shots or
> hits) last a few hours (from 2 to 12h)

Translation: You've inserted a fixed scalar ration between realtime
and game time.  ie 1 hour realtime == N * 1 hour in game time (where
N is your constant).

> That's it. What do you think of this?  For a detailed review of
> the current rules advancement about combats in our Sim, you can
> refer to:

>   http://student.ulb.ac.be/~zbalogh/ICIS_space_combat_rules.html

The apparency is that you're attempting a rather strategic design to
the game rather than tactical.  On that basis:

  Can you conclusively determine when an arbitrary set of players
  are in combat?

  Is reaction combat (I see he did X, I should do Y) critical, or is
  attempted prediction combat more significant (I think he'll do X
  so I'll try Y).

  Can (or could) a player queue a number of commands to be executed
  in sequence without their direct interactive supervision?

Assuming the answers are Yes/prediction/Yes, consider:

  Take the longest time of a possible combat command.  That's your
  default combat round time.

  The first player to enter a combat command also resets the round
  time to the length of that command.

  As each combatant enters their combat commands the round time
  reduces (as needed) until its equal to the longest command
  entered.

  At the expiration of that time, all combat commands are resolved.

Some fudging of things like reload time etc will be required (in
many cases that can be rendered in terms of command resolution
sequencing).  

The natural tendency will be for each combatant to attempt to stuff
their command queues with command until the max possible time is
reached.  If you remove the command queuing OR add significant
combat commands which can't be effectively queued, then the patterns
become much more interesting (Is he going to try a command queue
like X, or is he going to be clever and do something shorter like
Y?).

--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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