Conquest of Elysium 3 dev log

[Edi]

The issue of the combat sequence has been raised. We'll see what the answer is, though likely as not I'll only learn the results after the 13th, since I'm out of the country from 4th to 13th of January.

Like Gandalf said, anything that has a label of "lots of work and requires lots of time" is unlikely for exactly the reasons he listed.

A sequential 3 phase combat with spellcaster, missile and melee phases would probably only alter combat sequence mechanics (basically the order in which who does what they already do now) and I don't have any objection if the current system is changed to something like that. I don't have a vested interest in the outcome from a personal point of view.


However, anything like adding an initiative system would require some or all of the following:

- unit structure changes (and making them to all 650 (as of now) monsters)
- significant AI rewriting for 17 (as of now) separate AIs
- complete rewrite of the existing combat sequence code aside from damage mechanis
- significant rewrites of magic mechanics and spell structures, if magic initiative was to be spell-based rather than unit based
- integrating unit initiative of spellcasters with spell initiative of the spells they know
- since weapon and spell mechanics are essentially identical, initiative for weapons? And same problems there as above.

And then you would need to debug the whole shebang, which would be definitely be a non-trivial and very time-consuming task on top of all the time consumption that goes to the bullet points above.

Yes, there would be enrichment. But at what cost in time and effort required? Going "This would be awesome" is easy enough but making it a reality is another thing entirely.

[nordlys]

Originally Posted by Edi

A sequential 3 phase combat with spellcaster, missile and melee phases would probably only alter combat sequence mechanics (basically the order in which who does what they already do now) and I don't have any objection if the current system is changed to something like that.

However, anything like adding an initiative system would require some or all of the following:

That's understandable, if attack speeds weren't written into the system to begin with, retrofitting them in would be a royal pain in the ***.

However, how about some plain old random factor affecting the order of units within a phase? That shouldn't be any big deal to implement. The way I imagine it, all units about to participate in a given phase are enumerated, sorted randomly and act in that order. The defending units could get some bonus in order to keep some of that "defenders go first" advantage (which *is* reasonable when not taken to such extremes as in COE2), like all shifting a couple of positions up the sorted list.