Mounted Combat and the Equip Menu

This is a post in associated with the main post for Orchold, located at: http://gamedesignproj.blogspot.com/2013/06/initiative-order-options.html

Mounted Combat

It has come to my attention that the previous way I was doing mounted combat is insufficient to capture the power of riding a horse, or warg, or pegisai in combat without being wildly overpowered.

Previously, to become mounted, any unit merely had to have a mount in their inventory, and thus there was no real reason to not have every hero mounted, unless they really want that extra item slot. 

So my solution to this is to make an ability “mounted combat” which allows a unit to gain the benefit of horses and other mounts, with the level of the ability determining which mounts the hero/unit can ride.  This ability currently has 3 levels, so if a hero wants to ride the best mounts in the game they have to purchase the ability 3 times instead of abilities relevant to their combat style. 

 

Furthermore if a hero wants to get a mount, they must choose so at level 1 (so heroes cannot get a mount in campaigns where they have present level-ups).  I however am toying with the idea of having an additional choice at a mid-tier level up, perhaps predetermined by the campaign or perhaps just at a point determined middlish, where a hero can make this choice again (and retain their level 1 choice, effectively getting 2 options from the list).

Now the real questions come in terms of how powerful a mount is: At current, all a mount does is give the character bonus move speed which is not effected by armour, and if the mount can fly, changes the unit’s movement type to flying.  

Here are some ideas for improving this:

1. Mounts count as fighting from the higher ground, so they grant a bonus fighting footmen on even footing or negate the footman’s bonus if he’s on higher terrain.  Also would allow the mounted unit to attack enemies that are too high to reach for a regular footman with the same weapon.
   
2. Grant a flat combat advantage to all mounted units in combat, and/or a combat advantage defense, which can be improved with the level of the mounted combat ability.  (Combat “advantage” grants a bonus to hit for all melee combat)
3. Grant combat advantage based on the mount, so a horse might give 1 combat advantage, and a warg 2, but the warg is likely going to be harder to ride (needs a higher mounted combat ability). 

The other problem with doing this is trying to balance mounted units if they get such a pronounced advantage.  Should mounted units just be valued more, therefore making it harder to field as many?  Should foot units just get buffed in a like way to try and balance this out?  Only foot heroes buffed, foot non-heroes just valued as less?

Equipment and battle

So It has come to my attention a couple times that having the equipment menu attached to the regular attack action is both confusing to new players and somewhat cumbersome for more experienced players.  To this end I am proposing that I move the ability to equip items away from the “action” (or attack) menu and to a new “Equip” menu that can be brought up from the main unit menu.  With this change a player that chooses “action” will only see the attacks that they can make with the weapon they have equipped, or any attacks that do not require a weapon to be equipped. 

The first question is about how much information should be displayed in the new equip menu?   

Here are some ideas

1. It displays only what it’s displaying now -> it tells you what hand you’re equipping the item for and the options for what to equip in this hand. 
2. It displays the above, and also shows what items the unit currently has equipped. 
3. It displays 1 and maybe 2, and also gives the attack, damage, defense and missile defense of the item the player is thinking of equipping. 

The second question is if I do things this way, how should I do spells, which are currently treated as a weapon that you equip, but have a cool down so the mage would have to equip a new item every turn.  Here is an idea

1. All spell users must have a “magical focus” which they cast their spell through, if this focus is equipped and the “action” is chosen, all of the mage’s spells show up on the attack type list.  Spell focuses could be such as a book or wand which allow the mage to cast spells but fairly useless, or could be a sword or bow which could also be used to fight if the mage’s spells are on cool down or to defend against attacks, but could require more investment (in terms of hero abilities) into the spell focus

Item Tiers, Rising Action, Limit Break and Luck

This is made in association with my main page for the Orchold project
http://gamedesignproj.blogspot.com/2013/06/orchold.html

Item Tiers

In Orchold, there are essentially 3 planned "Tiers" for non-unique items.

Basic Items

Basic items are the base for the item type.

Masterwork Items

These are better made versions of the basic items.  I used to have them give a to-hit bonus, sometimes a defense bonus and a good scaling bonus to damage, but I feel like this is too much of an improvement over regular weapons. 
Therefore I'm looking at what is better for masterwork weapons?  Should I give them +1 to hit +1 defense or +Skill to damage?

Magic Items

This is the top tier item without delving into ruins to find legendary stuff (which would all be uniquely crafted) for your heroes.  So far I'm leaning towards giving magic items +1 to hit, +1 defense and a bonus to damage.  If the Masterwork item has a +Skill to damage, then magic items probably wouldn't do more damage then masterwork, just add the +1/+1.  If masterwork items already give the +1/+1 I'd probably give magic items a flat bonus to damage, so as to not make them completely broken in the hands of skilled heroes who would be wielding them. 

Rising Action

Here's a number of ideas I've thought about while browsing the inter-webs to deal with how combat winds down, or to just make things more interesting.
Basically in a regular combat, both sides are going to lose troops, which leads to a loss in damage output per turn, which leads to the battle drawing on in the later stages of the fight.

Note that rising action of any kind adds another level of complexity to the game, which is not necessarily a good thing.  

Escalating Action:

This method is pretty simple, basically all units on the map get a buff every turn that passes granting them a small bonus to hit and damage.  This bonus stacks with previous turns and probably will cap out at a bonus of + 30% to hit and damage.

Desperation:

This method is that whenever a unit dies, all units on it's side get a buff to hit and damage, possibly proportional to the number of troops that side had in total (aka a bonus when 10% of their troops die or w/e).

Limit Break:

This is an alternate idea which isn't exactly in the same category, but is worth mentioning none the less.  Firstly limit break would not be available in all battles, only in specifically hard boss battles.  Secondly limit break would only happen a tiny handful of times, perhaps only once per hero if I decide to do it on a hero by hero basis, or twice per campaign if I decide to do it on whole party basis.

How limit break would work is when all the heroes in the party have been taken to half health or below, the hero that can limit break (or all of them if I do that) would gain an immediate level up mid combat and gain an ability that is far beyond the available list of abilities allowed to them at that point -> either it could be high on their list of available skills or it could be a hand crafted ability for the hero.  They would also gain an immediate heal of 25% of their maximum health.  They would however not get a level up at the end of the fight.

If a character goes through their limit break fight without activating the limit break, they gain the super level up (special high level power) at the end of the fight instead of a regular level up. 

Luck:

Luck is concerning to me because almost all of my formulas used for combat scale well up to infinity for factors such as to hit, defense, damage and armour.  However my current formula for luck sets it as the maximum % chance that the character will be hit, or the minimum chance that the character has of hitting an opponent, which, obviously will start causing problems with numbers over 100.

My idea to make luck scale to infinite heights like other numbers is to allocate a certain portion of an attack that's based on luck -> say 10% for regular attacks and 20% for critical hit calculation and divide that between the attacker and defender depending on how much luck they have. 

Here's some stats for attacks that this would effect

Attacker Luck	Defender Luck	Old Formula To-Hit	New Formula To-Hit	Old Formula Critical hit	New Formula Critical hit
2	6	2% to 94%	2.5% to 92.5%	4% to 76%	5% to 85%
20	60	20% to 40%	2.5% to 92.5%	40% to -140%	5% to 85%
5	7	5% to 93%	4.2% to 94.2%	10% to 72%	8.3% to 88.3%
15	10	15% to 90%	6% to 96%	30% to 60%	12% to 92%
5	0	5% to 100%	10% to 100%	10% to 100%	20% to 100%
15	0	15% to 100%	10% to 100%	30% to 100%	20% to 100%

 
Note that if I do this, I might make an archer skill that doubles this luck threshold for them -> meaning archers (who can be somewhat luck based) could have 20% of the attack determined by luck and 40% of their critical hits determined by luck.