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                     JOURNAL FOR SATURDAY 18TH JUNE, 2022
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Some details on combat
   DATE: Sat 18 Jun 19:57:32 BST 2022

It’s been a while since my previous update. I’ve been hard at work on the
combat system, but just haven’t found the time to write about it — even this
update has taken all week to put together. Weather is improving, an overgrown
garden, Go 1.19 Beta 1 released, new Hertzbleed[1] vulnerability, bill paying
work — you know how it goes :(

People have been asking about the combat system — how it will work and the
progress being made. I thought some details would make an interesting update.

I have a combat system now working, based on a “score” calculated from attack
and defense values. Attack represents how well an actor can inflict damage on
a target. Defense represents how well a target can fend off and/or survive an
attack.

Very basic stuff. Attack and defense are comprised of a number of components
including current health, armour worn, items worn or wielded — in the future
skills and other elements will also be included. The armour and damage values
can be assigned to any items. If armour or damage is directly assigned to a
player or mobile it represents their natural armour and damage.

For now I’m using the following for attack and damage:


   ATTACK = natural damage + (natural random damage/2) +
               item damage + (item random damage/2)    + current health

  DEFENSE = natural armour + item armour + current health

    Note: Items must be worn or wielded to be accounted for,
          Half random damage is rounded to zero


Using the attack and defense values, a percentage chance to hit is calculated.
First, a score for the actor and target are calculated. Next, the percentage
chance to hit is then calculated for the actor (A) and target (T):


  A.score = (A.attack × A.attack) / (A.attack + T.defense)
  T.score = (T.attack × T.attack) / (T.attack + A.defense)

  A.chance = A.score / (A.score + T.score)
  T.chance = T.score / (T.score + A.score)


It should be noted that A.chance + T.chance = 1 (i.e. 100%) and that for a
round of combat either the attacker or target will always hit. There are no
long drawn out “You miss… They miss… You miss…”, either you hit or they hit.

The minimum chance to hit is limited to 0.000001% and the maximum chance to
hit is limited to 99.9999% — this allows for a 1,000,000:1 chance to hit, even
against the most powerful opponents ;)

As an example lets take a standard human using “natural” kicks and punches:


  Human: armour 10, damage 1+[0-2], health 30


The ‘human’ is the standard model, scaled up/down for other mobiles. For
weapons the standard is a dagger/shortsword doing 1+[0-3] points of damage,
scaled as needed.

The opponent will be a small, winged imp using bites and claws. Compared to
the human the imp is smaller reducing its armour value, but it can fly around
and so not lowering it too much. The imp’s attacks are scaled down to 1+[0-1],
but scaled up again for multiple teeth and claw attacks to 2+[0-3] damage:


  Imp: armour 5, damage 2+[0-3], health 10


Calculating the values we get:


  Human,  attack: (1+(2/2) damage)+(30 health)          = 32
         defense:      (10 armour)+(30 current health)  = 40
           score:        (32 × 32)/(32 + 15)            = 21.787234
      hit chance:        21.787234/(21.787234+3.188679) =  0.872330 ≈ 87.2%

  Imp,    attack: (2+(3/2) damage)+(10 current health)  = 13
         defense:       (5 armour)+(10 current health)  = 15
           score:        (13 × 13)/(13 + 40)            =  3.188679
      hit chance:         3.188679/(3.188679+21.787234) =  0.127670 ≈ 12.8%


An interesting point of note is that it gets harder to attack and defend the
more health you loose. For the first example, both parties at full health, the
percentages are 87.2% and 12.8%, this changes to 91.1% and 8.9% when the imp
is at half health. If instead the human is knocked down to half health the
chances are 59.1% and 40.9% instead. Then again you can just quaff that health
potion — unless both hands are already full… sword and shield maybe? ;)

At the moment armour is defined as a single value, fixed and random damage are
also single values:


        Armour: 10
   DamageFixed: 2
  DamageRandom: 2


The plan is to expand this in the future to handle different types of damage:


        Armour: 10 FIRE→-5 PIERCING→5
   DamageFixed: 2  POISON→2
  DamageRandom: 2  FIRE→2


The final calculations may change as I’m still trying to balance them — health
can swing the chance to hit wildly, armour and damage have less of an effect.

All of the calculations are going into core/combat.go to make it easy to
change or replace them. I’m also busy updating all of the mobiles, weapons and
armour to have suitable attributes and values.

Hopefully I’ll get some changes out soonish for others to play with. However,
I still need to build a release for the terminal changes… *sigh*

--
Diddymus

  [1] Hertzbleed vulnerability: https://www.hertzbleed.com/


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