[MUD-Dev] Cognitively Interesting Combat

[Byron Ellacott]

cruise wrote:

>  http://www.casual-tempest.net/combat/

>  Choice and strategy.  Variation - sometimes complex, sometimes
>  quick and simple.  Easy to learn, but hard to game, with no
>  guaranteed win.

Always use the blademaster and thrust.

There is no guaranteed win because the game is very random.
However, blademaster+thrust is guaranteed to be more likely to win
than any other combination.

Your move is made with no knowledge of the opponent's move.  They
might be defending or attacking.  If they are defending, you should
attack. You will win if you go first or if their defense fails.  If
they are attacking, you should attack.  You will win if you go first
or if their attack misses.

Alternatively, if you defend, and they defend, you both lose a bit
of balance and then continue.  If you defend, and they attack, you
will lose if they go first or if your defense misses.  You cannot
win from this position, though you can hope to upset their balance
more than your own.  However, it seems that the chance of doing more
harm to their balance than your own is very low.

So, you must attack, you must hope to go first, and you must hope to
have your attack succeed.

At this point, I'm assuming that thrust is faster than feint, and
feint is faster than slash.  I'm also assuming that the person who
goes first is dictated by (a) the attack being used, (b) the
relative balances and wounds, (c) a random number, and (d) the
relative speeds of the characters.

You can't do anything about (c), and initially (b) is equal, so you
have room to improve (d) or (a).  To improve (a), you choose thrust.
To improve (d), you choose the thief.

That maximises your potential to go first, as far as I can tell.
You also need to maximise the chance of your attack succeeding.  For
this, you choose the blademaster.

You then have to decide if potentially missing is worse than
potentially not going first.  With the way the game is currently set
up, it pays more to have a greater chance of landing an attack than
it does to have a greater chance of attempting the attack first:
once again, if you fail the attack, you will lose anyway.  A smart
opponent is also attacking, and a not-so-smart opponent will have
you at a balance disadvantage if you miss.  So, the blademaster,
with his greater chance of successfully striking, wins the day.

With the way the game works, you can tune the numbers in the back
end to make another combination more likely to always win, or to
make all combinations equally likely to win, but you cannot make the
game complex.  The initial choice is made blind, and therefore will
always either be the same initial choice, if there is a choice that
maximises your chances of winning, or random, if all choices are
equal.

See the game Spellcast[1] for an attack/counterattack game that
isn't played blind.  In this game, the two players are duelling
wizards, who make various hand signals to cast spells.  In each
round of combat, the wizards make one hand signal each, blind of the
others' choice.  Spells require sequences of signals to complete
casting, and so over the course of a few rounds the list of possible
spells being cast is reduced.  As an added complexity, wizards have
two hands.  Some signals require the use of both hands, some spells
can be cast entirely with one hand.

Richard Bartle should be pretty familiar with it, under the name
Spellbinder. :)

--
bje

[1] http://www.eblong.com/zarf/spellcast.html
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