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…???
How about the percentage chance of a lord dying trebles if the size of their army drops below 20% of the size of the opposing force. You could play around with the actual figures to find the right balance.
Maybe something like this controlled by the difficulty mode.
I think this could be maddening if you are chasing the best ending and Sharerh runs away 🙂
But I do think it can be far too easy to lose a lord who had a big army and meets a similar force
But questions.
1 are there two lord vs lord phases. I Get having one but the second us odd. I would expect the Lords to have a ‘save the men’ one on one but two? (Yes I guess it’s just a process phase… not a real thing 🙂 still a bit odd.)
2. Steonghold vs Lord. I guess this would he ‘stray arrow’ sort of thing as I wouldn’t expect a monty python style single lord attack on a stronghold. I know processing again just thinking how a battle would go…
I do think balancing this could be a real challenge. But tightening the reality of the fighting does make sense.
I’ve updated the post because it wasn’t really clear.
The lord phases are because of the way the system walks the lords in the location – they all get a go. Essentially everyone has an attack phase of their own.
I dont really agree with changing fundamental mechanics in a classic game. Fixing bugs is ok. Maybe create a new game with improved mechanics?
These are all covered by the game rule options – so are completely optional. Playing the game with difficulty set to normal, and none of the game play rules set – is just playing with the classic game mechanics.
Not sure if this is helpful but I always liked the idea that a lord can’t die unless their army has been destroyed too.
Always an option… who says I need to resolve this one way or t’other.
On EASY mode then the players lords could be killed only with no army, but the opponents rules could stay the same or be tweaked. The MEDIUM / HARD the numbers/rules could be juggled.
It all sounds very interesting. I think additional options, like those stated here, will give the player a different experience away from the core game rules.
I’m glad you’re looking at revamping the rules for DDR. To be honest, and no judgement on Mike Singleton because we are talking about the early days of gaming here, but DDR always felt unsatisfactory compared to LoM. I disagree that you should not fix this kind of thing, classic game or not.
Problems included:
– Being able to recruit even enemy armies.
– Battles resolving as recruitment-competitions.
– Shareth dying randomly on some corner of the map.
My preference would be to have the option to prevent recruitment of enemy armies – once they’ve been recruited by a side, it should not be possible for them to change sides again.
For the specific issue discussed in the OP, I’m OK with just having the same rules as LoM.