Re: Combat Stats

Carl Edman (cedman@cedman.remote.Princeton.EDU)
Thu, 8 Sep 94 21:34:33 -0400

From: RSOCIA@delphi.com
> Would it be possible to see the actual blow by blow combat for the two
> beligerants, and not for everyone else? That is to say that while
> everyone else sees the generic combat report, the two stack leaders
> involved in the attack could see the details of the combat.
>
> This way I might be able to see where I could have done a better job of
> defending or attacking, or maybe I am just plain curious. :-)

That is something I've thought about as well. It wouldn't actually change
anything, but it would just be nice from a role-playing point of view to be
able to see which noble personally delivered the killing blow against the
dragon, or who killed you. I think all nobles which are part of the battle
should be able to get such a full listing. Adding this is probably just a
few lines of code for Rich. That is all it was in my battle simulator.

However, there are a few problems. A full report at one line/blow can be
thousands of lines long even with forces the size currently available. Apart
from overflowing many mailers, such reports would be dreadfully dull to read.
One improvement is for the report generator to recognize repeated lines and
just print them once with '(n times)' appended. But even that will not be
enough. In a typical battle you'll have a couple of common types of attacks
intermingled. RLE won't save you there. To deal with such a report you'll
have to do some reordering of the output to make it summarizable. This is
not an easy task as too much reordering can distort what actually happened.
A good mean which creates accurate, short and interesting battle reports can
certainly be found, but it'll be a little bit of work.

Carl Edman


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