Combat Update (0.1.14) Feedback

[ninered]

Didn't see anywhere discussing how combat is since the change and what could be done to further improve it, so I'm gonna throw out my two cents here.

I suppose my initial take on it is that there's no good way to go through combat the way we were previously. If you want to let companions take their own actions, but still specify what you do on your turn, you're going to have to swap between auto and manual and back again.
Every. Single. Round.
Which is obnoxious beyond belief.

I could see a possible solution involving allowing you to select auto vs manual for you and and party members separately (or individually) in, say, the characters page.

 

[Upcast Drake]

It is pretty cumbersome to do things the old way now. The problem with just making it an out-of-combat setting is that then you lose the ability to change the flow during combat, which I think would be a bigger issue. Trying to add buttons and such to switch between 3 different combat flows in-combat would be too confusing and cluttered I think. I might experiment with it some just to see what the least-painful way to do it is, though.

 

[ninered]

Yeah, that's what I figured would be main issue in trying to set roles like that.
For in-combat swaps, allowing one to switch a character to Auto while in Manual mode could be alongside the combat options on whoever's turn it is, or just "inside" the Auto button.
Going from auto to manual for individuals is a bit stickier though, without getting bogged down in menus or prompt spam on an auto character's turn. Hmm.

The old system had a pretty good balance of control with speed/flow. Auto leaves a bit too much up to chance for my liking, but battles take three times as long as before with full manual control. Especially since Initiative means you have to check who you're controlling at each player-side turn, because their order is constantly changing.

 

[Stemwinder]

The old system most definitely didn't have a good balance of control vs. speed; only being able to throw one action into the fray and getting a dozen results was far too overwhelming. Everything changed immediately and there wasn't much you could do to affect how things went. You were sacrificing control -for- speed.

Battles taking too long is a multifaceted issue. The heftiest parts are how long the actual encounter takes, how often you're thrown into an encounter, and how enjoyable the actual ins and outs of the encounter are. They all affect each other.

The most visible thing that slows down combat is simply that most encounters have at least 8 participants and there's no way to know the turn order. That's a fairly big oversight; most every RPG within the last two decades will display that information specifically because it makes crowd control much easier, and in turn speeds up battles, when you can direct everyone to focus on the enemy next in line to take a turn. Having strategic options also reduces click fatigue; if you're just clicking attack over and over you're not having fun but if you're exploiting weaknesses or using synergistic skills or otherwise engaging your brain combat doesn't -feel- slow. The intention of the original system was geared toward minimizing repetitive clicking but a better way to address that issue is just to find ways to make combat less mindless. A good many RPGs have some sort of tide-turning mechanic that can be activated if certain conditions are met. Thinking up something like this for CoC2 would help, I think; when you've got something like Persona's all-out attacks even densely populated fights can be handled efficiently.

An example for CoC2 would be something like giving every enemy party a "leader" and knocking the leader off-balance by either attacking them repeatedly or hitting their weakness or something allows party members to use some unique and powerful skill with the potential to make big progress in the fight. The once-per-encounter skills could even be beefed up and adjusted to fit in with the idea.

 

[The Observer]

I suppose my initial take on it is that there's no good way to go through combat the way we were previously. If you want to let companions take their own actions, but still specify what you do on your turn, you're going to have to swap between auto and manual and back again.
Every. Single. Round.
Which is obnoxious beyond belief.

I could see a possible solution involving allowing you to select auto vs manual for you and and party members separately (or individually) in, say, the characters page.

It is pretty cumbersome to do things the old way now. The problem with just making it an out-of-combat setting is that then you lose the ability to change the flow during combat, which I think would be a bigger issue. Trying to add buttons and such to switch between 3 different combat flows in-combat would be too confusing and cluttered I think. I might experiment with it some just to see what the least-painful way to do it is, though.

My suggestion would be to set defaults in the journal, then have the button that currently toggles full manual and full auto do a manual/partial/auto cycle instead.

 

[Upcast Drake]

I made some changes in the latest version. It should be a lot less cumbersome to only control the PC now.

 

[Hanzo]

I'd like an option to have the name of the characters always displayed under their portrait in the turn order bar. That way I wouldn't have to spend time hovering over their portraits to know who goes last when I'm in a fight against mutiple copies of the same enemy.

 

[DrMostlySane]

One minor thing I hope gets changed up a bit in the future (is nowhere near a priority thing) would be to have the "highlight" color for the character portraits be a bit thicker or brighter - when you have around 7-8 scaled down portraits at the top of the screen it gets a bit hard to figure out who is going first or whose turn it is, especially when said character portraits largely share the same face since enemy portraits have no differences unless they've got different art.