combat cards--lean into the card game aspect

[redscarfdemon]

Combat cards are cool, fun to find and teach to people. It would be fun to have a little more strategy (cards that have specific uses, bonuses vs specific creatures, or more strategic abilities) to add some nuance to the "open a color and attack" system we have.

Stomp: if wearing boots, deal 5x damage to small animals: ants, snakes, etc
Sneak attack: add bonus damage based on stealth difference
Opportunist: add bonus opening based on stealth difference
Fight dirty: add bonus based on stealth difference, scent length doubled if vs pc
Soothing tone: accept full damage of attack, if opponent is tamable add X to tame score based on husbandry
Strategic retreat: accept full damage of attack, move pc one square away from mob
Monkey grip throw: create opening based on opponent's attack color, bonus for mobs larger than PC
Seven sided strike: each time this card is used it hits an additional cumulative nearby mob (must be unarmed)
Exploding palm: if used when its color is at 100% or more, causes X ongoing bleeding damage to target (must be unarmed)
Knock out of the sky: if target is flying, create slight openings in all colors and remove all its IP
Called shot: nearby ally gets bonus opening
etc

I think most of us eventually end up with the most useful cards and there's basically just one way to attack for almost everything we encounter, eliminating interesting choices. Perhaps allowing a character to create a "deck" of cards, and each round you have several to choose from, would make combat interesting.

[vatas]

Combat used to be more card based. When hafen/w8 dropped, you needed to consume a combat move card for a move to use it, then drawing random combat move card from your deck to replace it. Since the deck infinitely restocked the used cards, people quickly metagamed to only have 5 cards in their entire deck, thus always having the same set of 5 moves available to them.

I don't remember the exact story of how we ended up with the current iteration of the system, but I don't think people particularly liked the very first iteration. Biggest objective complaint would likely be the fact that you wouldn't have static hotkey assigned to any particular move, as the order of cards in your "hand" would vary.

Not saying the OP topic is necessarily a bad idea if implemented right, but the problem is that neither dev really knows how the PvP combat works in practice, so all their attempts at combat reowrk are more or less crapshoots.

[Sevenless]

Tried it, RNG in a permadeath game with months of investment didn't sit well with people.

[Flameturtle]

You also had to earn your combat discoveries with a discovery card which could screw you especially since it had to actually do damage, and it was never well explained which keybind you used to discard the others so you could be hampered while fighting because of it. It was a bit of a mess and I am very glad we moved away from it.

[The_Lich_King]

Tried it, RNG in a permadeath game with months of investment didn't sit well with people.

It wasn't just the RNG, if your card went down and you didn't have one color defended a single cleave could do 100s upon 100s of damage easy. Essentially all damage back then was what damage is like now if you have 100% opening, so the RNG wasn't the only problem.

[vatas]

Forgot about that. Elaboration: where current default is 100% "closed", in the first system you were 100% "open" and had to actively put up defenses. With current moves system this could actually be bearable but combined with the card RNG aspect, it led to problem described above -you could easily find yourself unable to defend yourself from a big finishing move in any way.

[Sevenless]

Tried it, RNG in a permadeath game with months of investment didn't sit well with people.

It wasn't just the RNG, if your card went down and you didn't have one color defended a single cleave could do 100s upon 100s of damage easy. Essentially all damage back then was what damage is like now if you have 100% opening, so the RNG wasn't the only problem.

There were definitely other issues with the system, but non-static keybinds and RNG in a long term grind permadeath game are enough to bury this concept for me.

[Tamalak]

The old "deck of cards" combat idea was rad. There just should be a minimum number of cards in the deck so people just don't use 5 repeating ones (or some heavy incentive to increase it like combat effectiveness scaling with the square root of the number of cards in the deck)