If you were a newbie combatant....

Saeva

Well, like I said, it was just looking from the outside in - from a newbie's perspective.

None of it was statements based on "This is my combat knowledge" it was just a "this is what I've seen".

While I agree that with the amount of abilities that there are, and the amount of things going on are likely more vast than the prior game mentioned, I am still extremely skeptical that the tactics are more in depth.
BUT! I'm here and I'm playing and I'm figuring it out one step at a time and help from players like you are why I think I'll be able to dip my toe into this pond and not completely drown. The helpfulness of this game and playerbase are supreme.

I'm not devaluing the complexity of the system here. I just don't understand the point of having 10 different things going on, that, like you said, you can't even humanly type the commands fast enough to keep up with, so you have a system in place automating the commands so that you can keep up.

It isn't running me off, and I intend on figuring out what I can do to keep up. I guess I'm just surprised more than anything, at how much you have to rely on a system to keep up. A little disheartened by that, but it's not going to stop me from jumping in.

Dorn

You use the system mostly for automation.

'Zombieing', as you worried about, doesn't happen - you need to both pay attention to your offense (and by extension your opponent's defense) and keep an eye on your defense (and shift things if your opponent is taking advantage of a drawback in your curing, for instance).

A very crude example: If a Serpent stacks up a few afflictions that share a cure with Asthma, they have a good chance of quickly bursting you into a truelock. If you just let your system handle it, you're almost certainly going to die - if you intervene, by perhaps shielding, or changing your curing priorities, you can nullify the risk to yourself and they have to adapt/get around the new addition to your defense.

Meanwhile, your own offense might be envenoming two venoms onto a dirk, jabbing twice, and illusioning, all within two seconds. Or it might be setting up limbs, calculating setups on the fly as circumstances change and watching for the right moment to sweep in when they're vulnerable. Or misleading and misdirecting with tricks and rapid setups until you manage to make them slip and can punish them for it.

In all cases, you need to pay close attention and adapt to things on the fly. If you're setting up limbs, they can move their parrying. If you're using tricks, you need to keep track of what tricks work and what tricks they can see through for various reasons. If you're afflicting, you need to pay attention to what you've already afflicted and what they've probably cured and what you still need to secure a lock.

All while they're trying to do any of the same to you, with various abilities, many of which inhibit your own abilities just as much as yours inhibit theirs.

All the system does is help you keep up with things, and run through chains of actions more quickly than you can. And curing, being about 90% reactive, is primarily chains of actions executed rapidly.

Aedin

Saeva said:

I'm not devaluing the complexity of the system here. I just don't understand the point of having 10 different things going on, that, like you said, you can't even humanly type the commands fast enough to keep up with, so you have a system in place automating the commands so that you can keep up.

Well, I can agree that it can seem kind of fast paced at first, I know it was for myself. After making many cechoes, highlights, I can easily distinguish a lot of whats happening just by sheer color of whats scrolling across my screen. As for doing ten things at once, it's a bit of like a combo system if you'd like to look at that way. For instance a monk is able to do a single kick and two punches in one move. For hunting they use a sidekick and two uppercuts. Now without the help of alias' and hotkeys it'd be rather troublesome to type sdk target followed into a ucp target twice and repeat all within a couple of seconds. 

As for the systems go it's a much needed thing at this point, to keep track of afflictions, health, mana, limbs being broken, whats broken, and so forth.  However combat is quite exciting thing once you get the hang of it!

Nine weeks in and I'm still loving it, hope ya find it enjoyable as I have!

Saeva

I look forward to it all!
I just figured out about the alias' today, which were a tremendously relief and made hunting, already, a lot more fun.

Just want it to be clear, I'm not bashing.. I don't know anything so I wouldn't bash it anyways!
I'm just trying to pick at this little by little to try to understand it better. Not being a know-it-all.. I'm literally a knows-nothing-at-all.
And even the bits of things people have posted since are helping me to grasp it all better, step by step.

Even you guys telling me a glimpse of what your triggers are doing, and how you can modify them on the fly makes it a totally different feel than what I was interpreting.

Arador

The way you described it, Eternal City just sounds like a giant game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. That is not complexity or depth. Achaean combat looks amazingly complex when you are new to it. However once you start to truly understand it you realise it is infinitely more complex than you ever dreamed. It is what I love about it.

Saeva

I'm learning a bit about this combat system and it's still curious to me at this point, but starting to make sense.
But the type of combat I described is utterly far beyond rock paper scissor style.
It takes knowing a -lot- to be competitive. It takes ages to really grasp the combat system in that game (which it seems like it'll take a good while to really learn this one too) and if you don't, you're never going to be effective PvP. People who rock paper and scissor fights end up knocked out, swiftly. And from the sounds of it, that's the same in this game as well.

Isaiah

I love rock, paper, scissors especially because when I choose grenade I always win!

Cidusii

Just trying to wrap my head around the combat system as well. I'm taking systems to mean pre-written scripts. Is combat more about management of those systems rather than I guess more indepth combat tactics? What I mean by that is activating and deactivating the appropriate system depending on the scenario, and then tweaking those systems to make them better post-combat? And are these systems mostly used in team combat as well, or more 1v1?

Is it actually possible to keep up with combat if you use aliases instead for offensive stuff, but had a system in place purely for sipping/applying etc.?

Also, in terms of tactics, what sort of range of skills does a single class usually have for combat? Is it usually spamming a certain attack over and over in a single fight, or is it more mixed? And is there any synergy between attacks that can be used? Say using a certain attack followed by another, and the second attack takes advantage of something the first attack does. For example in elementalism, at the moment I'm pretty much only using firelash to attack things. Is it still an essential skill once elementalism is finished, or are you still only going to be relying on one or two skills you get later on?

Eld

Cidusii said:

Just trying to wrap my head around the combat system as well. I'm taking systems to mean pre-written scripts. Is combat more about management of those systems rather than I guess more indepth combat tactics? What I mean by that is activating and deactivating the appropriate system depending on the scenario, and then tweaking those systems to make them better post-combat? And are these systems mostly used in team combat as well, or more 1v1?

Is it actually possible to keep up with combat if you use aliases instead for offensive stuff, but had a system in place purely for sipping/applying etc.?

Generally when people talk about "systems" they're talking about a set of scripts/triggers/etc to automate curing so that you can focus on offense. Aliases and hotkeys are probably the basis of most people's offense. So yes, what you describe there is the norm (though there's a whole lot involved in that "etc", and even with a system in place, you'll need a solid understanding of what it's doing for you and how to adjust it as needed to do really well). 

Cidusii

Ahh awesome . I was sort of worried that the offenses might be a set of scripts/triggers as well, but hotkeys and aliases make sense for that. Can a sufficient system actually be set up with the base client for Achaea, or do you have to switch to a separate client usually?

Adet

I believe the HTML5 client has (in theory, at least) most of the tools available for a functioning system, but the majority (it seems) of people use the free client Mudlet.  This is relatively new (within the past few years), and has been designed at least in part with the IRE muds in mind.  The coding language in it is lua.  I'm don't know of anyone who has written a system in the HTML5 client.  Other clients, used to greater or lesser extant, are cMUD (and its older version zMUD), TinTin++, and MUSHClient.  Sorry if I've missed anyone's favourite.

There are a couple of publicly-available systems for Mudlet: I'd say that the two most popular are svo, which was built and is maintained by @Vadimuses, and costs either money or credits, and Omnipave, which was built by @Mishgul (Carmain), and is free - though I think he updates it less frequently.  Both designers tend to be very helpful if you have problems with the system, and are happy to help set up or deal with any issues arising.

Nim

I like to think of systems as cybernetics, and that Achaean combatants are cyborgs.

Really good tech might keep you alive if the other person can't figure out how to break it, but a good combatant can make due with crappy tech because they can 1. break the other person and 2. avoid being broken in the process.

Part of me wishes there was an Achaea AI PVP server just for programming legitimate robots, though. >_> Maybe it could lead to NPC combatant development or something like that!

Phraag

If I need to write a few lines to trigger upon taking afflictions to pack a pipe, smoke a pipe, rub myself with topical cream, sip a vial, and combinations of that then I'm not sure how immersed I can remain if I have to constantly have a cure system test against falling down, going to sleep, etc while I smack a button to string setups. I'll have to see what combat is like to really know if it sounds as amazing as it does, but for now (and I've read a few pages of the thread) I really hope to never get into pvp (as of now, not to say this opinion isn't subject to change).

Xli

Achaean combat is subject to an arms race - more sophisticated systems have developed and are now the norm, even for non-coms. Think of it as instinct - your character knows how to cure common afflictions without thinking because they are so common. Your character starts at 17, they know this stuff!

Phraag

My friend and I agreed to do combat (our characters roughly know each other through interaction in a market some time ago and a letter that was sent afterwards) to see what damage does what. In a RP perspective we were bashing near each other and me at lower levels killed things faster (he plays an occultist). Upon our agreed rules I hit him and did no damage to which he replied that did no damage and so I said oh my bad and then impaled him to which I was then terrified as he started to die very quickly and I had no idea what was going on or how to stop it. So from my first incursion into PVP and how actually terrifying (not to mention how fast people know that you did an uh oh) I'm not sure how I'd like my pvp system or no system it seems kinda scary.

Iocun

Phraag said:

If I need to write a few lines to trigger upon taking afflictions to pack a pipe, smoke a pipe, rub myself with topical cream, sip a vial, and combinations of that then I'm not sure how immersed I can remain if I have to constantly have a cure system test against falling down, going to sleep, etc while I smack a button to string setups.

Well, coding itself certainly doesn't go well with immersing yourself in the game world. When I'm working on my scripts, I'm entirely in OOC mode, which is completely detached from Achaean RP.

However, once those scripts are coded and I'm back to actually playing and using those scripts, that's no longer the case. Then I actually stop thinking about my system and it simply becomes part of Achaea as a whole (except when my system is buggy and doesn't do what it should!). In a sense, my system can then even help with immersion, as it relieves me from having to bother with typing in proper syntaxes like "outr 2 bloodroot", which really has very little to do with "roleplay", and allows me to concentrate on the larger, tactical aspects of combat. In order to have an engaging, immersive playing experience, I want to be able to concentrate on controlling my character in a broader sense and not be distracted by doing certain small and tedious things over and over again.

Scripts, if used well, can serve to let you focus on the truly interesting aspects of Achaea (and thus immerse yourself more deeply), by means of making its whole "user interface" more intuitive to you.

Cidusii

One thing that's tricky for getting immersed on the non-hunting combat side of things from a newbie perspective is the defenses for sure. I think that'll ease up once some more easy to use HTML5 defenses become publicly available (unless the newbie is using mudlet or another client with available systems to begin). The auto sipper provided is really nice, but it only covers a tiny prick of the defensive scope required. While I've enjoyed writing some defenses on HTML5, it's been a real daunting task.

Mako

I think the hardest part of starting out in achaea is learning the many cures/afflictions and then realizing you have to automate your defence to a great extent to stand a chance against a combatant. Achaea is a constant work in progress for me as im always getting new ideas or wanting to add something to my defense. The more energy and time you put into achaea the easier it gets though. Now this is one of the easiest games out there that I play. To me at least 

Strata

Mako said:

I think the hardest part of starting out in achaea is learning the many cures/afflictions and then realizing you have to automate your defence to a great extent to stand a chance against a combatant. Achaea is a constant work in progress for me as im always getting new ideas or wanting to add something to my excessive-auto-shield.xml. The more energy and time you put into achaea the easier it gets though. Now this is one of the easiest games out there that I play. To me at least 

lol FTFY :P Mako

Mako

Oh come on now @strata i have to do something to combat your excessive running, do you expect me to let you truelock me?

Iocun

He was threatening to truelock you by running?

Eld

Iocun said:

He was threatening to truelock you by running?

Yes, the key part is when you get too impatient waiting for him to come back.

Strata

Mako said:

Oh come on now @strata i have to do something to combat your excessive running, do you expect me to let you truelock me?

You could displace me more often but you'd have to pause auto-touch-shield-loop-9000.xml in order to do that I think.

I've seen your logs, you can't fool me.

temper

touch shield

look

touch shield

ha

say to strata You can't touch me.

touch shield

Mako

There would be no point in displacing you because you dont stop running so its impossible to catch you and I mean everyone who  has half a brain would shield when a serpent snaps them 

Xith

Yeah Strata if you just attacked less frequently, he wouldn't have to shield as much!

Maybe lead hypno with confusion or disrupt with impatience in second.

Tvistor

I can actually feel my IQ dropping.

Strata

@Iocun said my dirk is too light. I need to put weights on it to slow it down.  :-?

Phraag

Honestly combat needs to take an approach from the games actual client. As much as things like mudlet are good for combat, and curing with all the things you can load into them I figure from a purely marketable, and new player side it would be best to have something that supports a system that can be used on the website GUI. In essence supporting outside systems, or interfaces does not support the websites usage which is terrible I think. Something should be looked into to make the websites GUI for the game and overall system work either on par with things that can be used via a secondary interface program like Mudlet. I think ideally no one should have to use a secondary client for the game just to be combat competitive.

Sylvance

Phraag said:

Honestly combat needs to take an approach from the games actual client. As much as things like mudlet are good for combat, and curing with all the things you can load into them I figure from a purely marketable, and new player side it would be best to have something that supports a system that can be used on the website GUI. In essence supporting outside systems, or interfaces does not support the websites usage which is terrible I think. Something should be looked into to make the websites GUI for the game and overall system work either on par with things that can be used via a secondary interface program like Mudlet. I think ideally no one should have to use a secondary client for the game just to be combat competitive.

I agree with every word of this post.

But it ain't gon' happen.

ETA: DAMMIT these quotes suck all kinds of ass.

Dolomar

I admit I haven't really read most of this thread, only the first post and the last page or so. While it seems much of it devolved by the time I started reading, here are my thoughts as a new player coming from several years of experience in other MUDs (so I grasp basic mechanics and concepts, but not the intricacies and novelties of Achaea in particular). I've also been working on writing my own system--I got the public one to lift lines out of, but have written everything else myself for mine.

o Tracking afflictions. Without a system especially, and even as someone new who has one, good lord there's so freaking many lines. I don't know if the reason for non standard lines is to help discourage systems (it really doesn't, anyway) or what, but something as simple as adding generic 'You are now paralysed.' or 'You are no longer paralysed.' would make thing so much more accessible and easy.

o The speed at which things happen. My day...oh, two or three, of playing, my city was raided and I desperately wanted to help. But holy cow man. I couldn't keep up with -anything-. The best I did was sketch jera on random people, send WHO HERE and follow the first name, and type DEFEND TESHA once in a while if it didn't look like we'd moved in a bit. I'm not sure there's really any way to fix this, but one of the major things that stood out was that I didn't get a look at the room when I followed someone into it. Just the 'You follow so and so this way to here', with no idea where 'here' is or what or who is there. As spammy as it might be, I really think that adding in the ql to following would make new players WAY more comfortable.

o Those handy little tips on DIAG for newbies--make them clickable links for ones with mxp enabled! We can't type that fast, guys, really!

I'm sure there's other things I've forgotten, but those are the three that stuck with me anyway. Hopefully a little perspective from a newbie looking in might offer some insight.