Looking for some opinions on Doomdark’s Revenge battles.

In Lords of Midnight a Lord cannot be killed until they have no army. This is obviously a one way thing as there are no enemy lords.

In Doomdark’s Revenge the overall night processing cycles through all lords from 1 to 128 giving them each chance to fight at their location if they have not been involved in a battle yet.

It then cycles through the lords at that location given them the chance to become the attacker.

FOR ALL LORDS IN LOCATION – (attacker)
choose defender = random lord at location
1. attacker vs defender lord attack
2. attacker army vs defender army
3. defender army vs attacker army
NEXT
choose defender = random lord at location
4. stronghold vs defender
5. stronghold vs lord defender

If there are only two lords in a location then they will both have a pop at each other. If there is a stronghold then it will take a pop at just one of them ( if both are enemies of the stronghold ), or just the one enemy.

If there are multiple lords in a location, then random selection means that some of the lords might get hit multiple times, and some not at all.

During the battle, If an army is reduced to 0 then there is a chance that he relevant lord will flee or die.

However in lord vs lord the the attackers success is calculated from a formula that includes carrying a battle object, energy, despondency, and recklessness. Gives a number between 0 and 255

The defending lords’s chance is a random number between 0 and 255

if attacker’s chance is greater than defender’s chance then the attacker wins.

When defender loses, then chance of dying is
1 – 50:50 survive
2 – is recklessness less than a random number between 0 and 255
3 – If carrying a battle object then 30% chance

The upshot of all that is – it’s pretty easy for a lord to die in a battle against another lord regardless of size of their individual armies. And it has nothing to do really with strength or even attacker initiative.

I’m trying to add a game play rule option for better battle AI and wonder of ways to make the lord vs lord a little fairer!

I’m thinking of adding runes of protection in at step 3
I’m also thinking of doing some maths on the lords army – ie: rather than just if army greater than zero they can’t die, maybe have a low army threshold eg. Less than 100 soldiers, or a percentage compared to the attacker’s…

Anyway, thoughts…???