New ideas that could be put into crossfire

This is roughly in the order of importance as I see it.

Currently damage messages are hard coded around the amount of damage delivered. This means that if a player hits for over 100 damage, the damage messages include messages such as 'your attack sprays cerebral fluid across the room'. This is a bit silly when it takes over 100 hits to kill said monster and said monster only has 1 head. Instead the damage message should be based on the percentage of health reduced with such messages reserved only for >75% of health reduced in 1 hit.

Magic items provide all spells at no cost. As an offset they are rare and can't be repeatedly used. This means that a level 100 heal rod and can be constantly used to heal with no investment required from the character.

Recharge rate for rods should be related to the difference in level between the operator magic items level and the rod level

• delay (in seconds) = operator level/rod spell level

This would result in the following behaviour:

• Using a level 100 rod at magic item level 1 means you are going to get somewhere between 100 seconds and 300 seconds per use
• while using a level 20 rod at magic item level 20 is going to result in between .5 seconds and 3 seconds
• A level 100 magic item character using a level 20 rod can just spam away

Whilst a great improvement was made with the inclusion of partial resistances allowing for fine tuning of balance to items such as small negative resistances added to balance out wholly awesome items or gods. Currently attack_types are some what all or nothing when added as a damage source. For example, when the fire attack_type is added to a standard weapon with damage 10 now attacks with physical and fire damage of 10. This poses a massive problem for balancing as elemental attacks are either not available, which makes characters simply unable to fight certain monsters with immunity, or, huge damage can be dealt across the board with the right attack types (e.g. weapon magic).

Whilst partial resistances can be used to offset the later, items, spells and gods that grant particular attack_types may become overly popular.

In some cases, attack_types have been hard coded to do a percentage of the total damage to avoid being over powered. For example the Death attack type only does a fraction of total damage to make for its ability to kill any monster in one shot if its level is much lower than the attacker. Whilst this fixes Death instantly becoming the best attack_type it also limits the potential for developers to utilise it fully.

This is even more problematic for attack_types with effects such as depletion or drain which have resulted in either partial protection resulting in a character still realistically being unable to fight a monster, or immunity, which removes the entire mechanic from that characters threats.

The first method is to enable any attack_type to have a percentage modifier added so that it only does a partial amount of damage from the the source. For example a long sword of burning might have the same properties as a normal longsword except also do 20% of damage as fire.

The second method is to do the total amount of damage but a fraction of the time, so in the above example the attacktype3PD now represents 1 in 5 shots landing with 100% damage.

the .arc might look something like:

nrof 1
name long sword of burning
last_sp 8
type 15
face sword_2.111
material 2
dam 8
weight 14500
value 45
attacktype 4
attacktype1PD 1
attacktype3PD 0.20
weapontype 1
name_pl long swords
client_type 101
body_arm -1
skill one handed weapons

THe third approach is to add specific damages to a weapon for each attack_type so:

attacktype 1
dam 8
attacktype 3
dam 2

For attack types that only have effects and don't add damage, a gradient of effect could be employed:

• Paralyse to stop movement but still enable abilities, perhaps integrate into slow
• Confuse to affect single aspects of a player rather than everything, e.g. first interfere with movement, then casting, then attacking
• Blinding to slowly reduce vision, or for vision to return progressively
• Drain to start by only temporarily removing experience
• depletion by limiting monsters to depleting only particular stats (dementor takes away INT, POW, WIS.. Grim reaper depletes CON only.. etc)
• Acid can be repaired with varying degress of success based on the amount of destruction.. perhaps even a weapon durability system?

by using partial damage, better fine tuning of the power of effects could be given. For example a weapon that only paralyses 20% of the time.

The current classes in crossfire end up resulting in the same character with the exception of monks due to little restriction in what a player can do after the early levels (skill objects and scrolls etc). I would like to add lasting variation differences between classes such as adding unique skills to each character that set it apart in a particular area of the game. The classes can be summarised based on the summary text included in the game available here. It could be argued that the most interesting characters are actually race selections and in particular the Dragon race provides a very unique experience for players. Having a similar approach to classes might add diversity and challenge to the characters selection and add interest in players choosing new characters after successfully leveling up and beating key maps with previous characters.These classes could be represented on a venn diagram like this:

Some possible unique skills might be:

• summoners could be the only class to have a familiar
• barbarians could get attack_type 'beserking' which increase attack speed upon each successful hit
• warriors could dual wield weapons or cleave (hit multiple tiles at once)
• Swashbucklers could have a chance of dodging magical attacks
• Thieves could get a chance to do critical strikes or deadly blows

In particular, the missile weapons ability has become very lack luster and almost useless. There is a lot of scope for adding diversity to this group of skills that I propose such as:

• implement a 'spell' like system to add more variety to applications of the skills
  • Guided arrow
  • multiple shot
  • enchanted arrows (see hybrid items)