MedievaLands Forums

Greetings everyone, new player here in MedievaLand, and wanted to bring up a little feedback in regards to my experience so far.

I'd like to see the "stack" spells actually be somewhat viable again; I've been trying spells like Storm Wind and Fireball, and while they do decent damage to the top enemy in a stack (For example, 3 Ornery Halfling Rogues) they seem to not really damage the other enemies in the same stack, at least not visibly. The only exception I've seen to this has been through the Poison Cloud spell, which seems to kill multiple enemies over time.

If this could be explained as to how the damage calculation works, or if the calculation is fine as is, I would appreciate inisght on this; as it stands now it kind of makes Storm Wind and Fireball non-viable since they can at most kill one enemy at a time, which makes Lightning and Blast more viable spells.

- R

(From Reginald's Account)

Never mind; I think I see how the damage calculation is working now; it's individualized per unit. Disregard this post.

- R

Welcome Reginald! It's great to have another person who is as interested in pulling apart the original mechanics as I am...

I think you have figured this out already: a monster stack is treated by the game as a single entity, regardless of the number of monsters in that stack. The difference is that a stack with more than one monster has:

1. more hp (specifically, the hp of a single monster multiplied by the stack count) and

2. will (sometimes, based on the monster's type data) attack with a multiplied dexterity value.

When you attack a stack with a physical attack or a spell that targets a stack (fireball) or all foes (hail), the entire value of the spell's damage will be subtracted from the stack's total hp, reducing the monster count one by one. By contrast, some spells (lightning) will only target one monster - the game handles this by reducing the stack's hp with a floor of (stack.CurrentCount - 1) * monsterType.BaseHP.

Here's a fun anecdote: in the first release of MedievaLands, my combat mechanics code did not put a ceiling on monster stack health. This meant that a healing spell could add more HP than the current stack's maximum health. From the game's perspective, a strong healing spell could increase the number of monsters in a stack - you were effectively spawning more monsters by healing an injured stack!