combat wish list/questions

[manikus]

is there a way so that there can be neutral combat participants? i have an idea for having 'innocent bystanders'. [img]smile.gif[/img]
by neutral, i mean that they will not effect the end of battle conditions of either the monsters or the party being killed. (hopefully the monsters )

[img]graemlins/diablo.gif[/img]

[Arrowhawk]

If the neutral participants are not going to be involved in the actual combat why would you want them in the combat sequence at all. Depending on the outcome of the combat the party could have some interface with these neutral participants. It seems like an unnecessary complication to the combat programming (which is difficult enough) to me.

I, for one would like to see a basic program that at least emulates the original UA in the handling of magic and combat before adding numerous complications.

[manikus]

the neutral characters would be very important to the storyline and hence the battle, but i want them to be in the combat because there would be the option to do damage to them, maybe even kill them. this would be for furtherance of the story, i.e. if the main character eliminates the neutral character, one story line, doesn't eliminate the neutral character, another story line, enemy eliminates neutral character, a third story line.

as to richard implementing this, this is on my wish list and would ask that it be put at the bottom of the list he already has [img]smile.gif[/img] , i'm just not sure if this is even possible, so thought that i'd ask.

like you, i'll be happy and more than content to have a combat engine that functions like ua's.

[img]graemlins/monster13.gif[/img]

[Warlock]

Hi guys,

When playing the gold box games I noticed that the two opposing sides had different coloured names - The goodies were blue and the baddies were yellow and this changed from game to game as well with conditions such as stoned (grey), held (green?) etc.

Maybe we could look at having a third opponent neutral to both sides and that the goodies must defend them like you suggested. It would involve some more coding on the combat side of things and that may be difficult to do - but then you could have an automated script on the neutral combatants to either panic, fight or cast spells or run away for half their total movement rate in one round for each round. Almost like a confusion spell but make the most likely option to just stand there and do nothing and cower in fear - forcing the PC's to defend them!

Also, in most of the games you could have allies or enemies as toggled on or off on the combat option screen in FRUA. This is similar and works very well with a few minor differences.

Finally, this is a great idea but there is already a lot of stuff being worked on at the moment - it would be great to see it implementd if possible [img]smile.gif[/img]

Just my thoughts on this scenario!

Cheers

Warlock

[ 05-10-2002, 11:08 PM: Message edited by: Warlock ]

[Arrowhawk]

I understand more about what you are asking for now. It would be an interesting enhancement to the combat sequence providing you could query the combat results in some manner. Right now you either win the combat, run away or lose the combat. There is no way of that I know of to decide who was killed unless they were a member of your party which ultimately won or ran away from the combat.

[Rami Sihvo]

Most basic query would be if party run from battle. I missed that chance in old UA. The party would just run away from battle aganst boss monster and story would go on based on that characters beat up that thing. The game could be count characters that fled from battle and player could set amount on PCs. After x PCs or NPCs run from battle game would decide that players lost battle and prompt diffrent events than in winning. The player could be force player lost or make it possible by adding coward NPC in party.

[CocoaSpud]

I'll add the neutral combatants to the list of things to do. I'm not sure how hard this will be until I try it. Once the AI scripts are working it might just be a matter of using the right script.

It is a simple matter to expand on the post-combat details that are stored as global attributes. This is how the Win/Lose/Flee results are stored. For instance, I can list how many monsters/NPC/PC's were killed.