MedievaLands Forums

Date: 2/8/20

Time: 8:11 AM CST

Location: Dungeon

Description: Whenever I have encountered a stack of enemies (For example, 5 Troll Rangers) I am noticing that whenever they fight, only one per stack really seem to do anything, even though it mentions there's more than one of them. This is especially noticeable when encountering multiple casting enemies, as they should be one of the bigger threats by being able to cast once per unit in the stacks.

Is this a feature change, or something to eventually be looked into? A suggestion I could make at least for combat stacks would be to add additional damage calculations based on the number of units in the stack, kind of like adding additional damage dice in a classic D&D game. (Example: Instead of one unit doing 1d8 damage, three would do 3d8 damage.)

Hopefully I'm not being too complex here; I'd like to see enemies get a chance just as much as we do.

- Aza

I think my answer here would benefit from an explanation of the way that combat works in original Yserbius game, which I've emulated (I think perfectly or nearly so) here.

As a preface, each monster entity in this game is built from a template. The template data describes both how big a stack can spawn, and how many in that stack can "attack" at once.

The game only spawns one monster entity for each stack. The stack count is set by the map scripts for scripted encounters, and is set by the template for random encounters (the template has values for both 'base' and 'additional' count: a random stack will have a count equal to Base + a random number between 0 and Additional).

Stacks containing more than one monster are different from singleton stacks in two ways: the stack's max health is equal to the template health multiplied by the current stack count; and if the template's AttackCount value is greater than one, then the stack's dexterity will be multiplied by a random number between 1 ...

... and the smaller of the template's attack count value or the current stack count. So, if a monster stack has a current stack count of 5 but the template for that monster has a max attack count of 2, then at most only 2 monsters will attack each round.

This is for physical attacks. Each stack can only cast one spell per round if it is casting at all.

I think that this suggestion is a good one. My worry is that it would change the game balance and make monsters tougher - lower level characters and squishier classes would be impacted by the higher damaging physical attacks, and everyone would be affected by multiple casts of higher levels spells. A 6 stack of mages casting high damaging spells and debuffs would be murderous.

I think this conversation would benefit from a thorough outline of how combat mechanics work in this game. Which would be a great topic for a Friday post.

(A quick footnote: I mentioned 'dexterity' in the post above. Dexterity is the amount of damage a character or monster does in combat).