Here are some tips that may help you better with combat.
During melee, COW creates a battlesystem object, which regulates battles into rounds where each combatant gets a chance to hit the other. This means you don't have to worry about network lag interfering with your ability to fight.
There are 2 melee skills, dodge and aim. The general philosophy is you improve your ability to aim when you miss and you improve your ability to dodge when you are hit.
When fighting, you should consider different goals:
- Player vs Player to the death: use the best weapon and spells you can to defeat them.
- Player vs Player for training skills: use no weapon and only healing spells so that you can fight a long time and improve your skills.
- Player vs Creature for treasure: use the best you have to defeat them quickly. Choose creatures that are known to drop the best treasure.
- Player vs Creature for training skills: find the creature with the best skill and worst weapon and fight with minimal weaponry and use heal spells to extend the training. You want to miss them and be hit a lot to gain your skills, but make sure they aren't so powerful they kill you in the process!
The stats command can help you find good opponents for training. The higher their aim and dodge, the greater the chance that you will improve. If they are wielding a weapon, the stats command will tell you how bad it will hurt.
Chance to hit:
The system sums your aim with your opponent's dodge, then generates a random number from 0 to that sum. If the result is greater than their dodge then it's a hit and they get a point towards their dodge improvement. Otherwise it's a miss and you get a point towards your aim improvement.
The better you are, the harder it is to advance:
You might notice that improvements aren't coming as fast as they did when you first started fighting. There was more to learn back then.
Internally, you have aimpoints that are gained with each miss. When they get past your aim, the system increases your aim then starts the aimpoints over at 0. So each time your aim goes up, getting it up again requires 1 more miss than before. If you have 100 aim, you need to miss 101 times to get 101 aim.
The similar is true with dodge except the system uses dodgepoints and you get one whenever you are hit.
Now let's say Vlad the Veteran with 999 aim and dodge decides to help Nancy Newbie with 1 aim and dodge train combat. Vlad hits her 999 out of 1000 times, so he isn't missing much and isn't gaining his aim, but since Nancy is getting whacked, her dodge is benefitting. On the other side, Nancy only hits Vlad 1 out of 1000 times, so she is missing a lot and gaining aim while Vlad rarely gets hit so his dodge isn't going anywhere.
So when training, you benefit from being the weaker opponent.
Big Bullies Go Nowhere
So let's say there is a player who is way better then everyone else in combat and becomes a bully. As you are being nuked, feel happy knowing you got more skill improvement out of the exchange than the bully.
Unbalanced Creatures
There might be some creatures that are unbalanced in skills. For example, a rabbit coded with a permanently high dodge but low aim might be good for increasing your aim. A giant with a low dodge and high aim might be good for increasing your dodge.
Skill Caps
Skill caps are designed to add a little variety to the grind. Once you reach one, you'll need to complete a quest to get past it. The initial ones are as simple as sitting on a mat or chair and bringing enough money to pay for the 'lesson', but higher levels are a bit more complicated.
The caps are aimcap, healthmax, and manacap. Healthmax serves 2 purposes, to limit your dodge as well as your maximum health.
For magic, each time you cast a spell you get a manapoint. When your manapoints exceeds manamax, the spell system increases your manamax and starts over with manapoints at 0. This ends when manamax reaches manacap.
As with the other caps, raising manacap requires a quest, which may be as simple as 'kill the trainer only using magic' but will get more complicated later.
How to kick butt:
So, training aside, how do you pwn C0\\/\\/ ? There are some things in the combat training school (start/training shed/east) that will help:
- A forge where you can increase the damage of your weapon as well as give it special attacks.
- The nearby blacksmith is also good for a quick fix when your weapon is damaged.
- Some talismans near the top level can be used to add special attacks to your weapon.
If you want to improve your magical pwnage, look for items that restore mana, such as potions or rings. Avoid items that restore health and cast healing spells instead. Over time, you will be able to store enough mana to open a big can-o-whoopass.
How specials work:
Sometimes when you score a hit, the system does a special attack from your weapon. This results in 2 things.
- Small damage to your weapon.
- The activation and dispatch of a randomly selected special attack object stored inside your weapon (if available).
Note that while a special attack object is outside the weapon, it cannot be selected again during a future round until it completes its work and returns to sleep in the weapon.
Some specials are permanant, such as viscious cuts and vorpal slices. Enchantments are temporary, using up a 'charge' each time they are released and erasing themselves when out of charges. (However, there are permanent enchantments for non-player creature weapons, and it might be possible to ask a coder to put a custom permanent special on your weapon).
Safety In Numbers
If you are going against an opponent with a lot of specials in its weapon, then this may help you survive: Bring a few pets with you.
A pet is any 'living' object that you own and therefore can command.
Attack your opponent and force your pets to do the same. So now some of that scary weapon's specials are directed at your pets, meaning less available for you. And imagine working at the forge and talismans to make lots of scary weapons of your own and forcing your pets to wield them. I'll let you do the math.
Of course, it doesn't help if you are using a freshly created living creature with only 10 health. So train your pets by fighting them without weapons. If their skill hits a cap, take them to a trainer and force them to do whatever they require.
One More Tip
Come back and reread this whenever we get armour to work with the combat system...