Melee combat training

[Christian Knudsen]

(Split off from other thread.)

The damage you do with melee combat increases your skill relatively. So it doesn't matter if you hit him where the percentage is lowest as long as you do damage.
 

[Iltsuger]

Might be good to have basic self-defense courses or something, because it takes forever to do damage when your skills are low, and since my interest in personal combat is to stun people, I don't see how learning to stab people would make me better at stunning.

Then again, maybe I'll take a vibro blade to a few of the people I'm going to kill anyway, see what happens. I'm sure the Kilrathi will approve of a little mano-y-mano.
 

[Christian Knudsen]

I was recently thinking about how to allow players to "level up" their melee combat skills and thought that having a planet with an arena where you fight against slaves that are leveled to your skill would be pretty neat. Or maybe a mine on an asteroid base with deeper and deeper levels like in proper roguelikes where you can practice your melee skills?
 

[GLI]

[Christian Knudsen]

I feel a dojo would be too much like grinding to increase your skill (I'm actually not that fond of the shooting range and would probably remove that if I implement an arena base somewhere), plus I could tie an arena base into the plot...
 

[Iltsuger]

I'm not sure I'd ever fight slaves, since I find the whole slave thing unappealing unless that was the only alternative to killing my potential murderers. Maybe prisoners? You could have a side-thing where you can sneak into a Kilrathi world and actually participate in arena fights :) Arena stuff seems more of a Kilrathi thing, I think. Or maybe Pirates, too, but again, the slave thing seems like a pretty messed up way to train.

The dojo would actually make the most sense, and maybe they'd have different training programs you'd pay for and have to hit targets for a short amount of time, like GLI said. You get a limited number of hits, so your skills increase at random, and the cost increases based on your skill.

Are there different skills for different weapons and for barehanded strikes? Would be cool to train in stunning or disarming in one place, deadly strikes in another.

The roguelike, though, sounds really cool. But what would the enemies be?

Why not a place on a planet, where there are animals that have to be culled in order for them to use the place as a mine. So you can have several weird animals there to fight, where you can discover trapped people, loot, hidden bandits, that sort of thing. A game within a game! :)
 

[Christian Knudsen]

Yeah, prisoners would work too. Running Man!

I'd like to keep it to humans, as I would otherwise have to redo a lot of stuff for targeting displays and damage calculation.
 

[GLI]

[Iltsuger]

Oh, I see what you mean about human targets. Well, how about this:

You know all these event conflicts that go on between workers and management, where management wants to employ robot workers to cut costs?

How about you go into the mines to fight either disgruntled workers, or to fight robots that have gone amok. The robots would be in human form in this case, and would fight with mining lasers and the like. Loot would be some junk, some credits, some weird weapons that you can't buy in stores (same as you can't buy Kilrathi weaponry but they're very effective), an Autodoc Micro, robot heads that they can study to see what went wrong with them, protective-but-heavy mining armor, whatever.

There would still be an object to going in there, though, like you have to retrieve a Quine that was stolen by rebel workers, or destroy the infected robot that's been controlling all of the other robots, or shut down a transmitter that's making the robots crazy, or capture the leader of the worker resistance.

EDIT:

Another way to do it would be that each planet and asteroid has its own like mission zone, a doorway that you can go into that will either have random enemies in there, or mission-based. You check the entryway for notices of rewards, take missions or don't, and then go in.

That way you could also have Retro cells operating in there, smugglers, or Kilrathi saboteurs, and not just one type of event there.
 

[Cthulhu]

[Iltsuger]

That's probably because he trained in both :)

Using a stun rod wouldn't be like punching to do damage. Some might argue it'd just be easier in general, but you'd have to make sure you got as close to the skin as possible (inverse square law), making sure the weapon was pointed straight. I'd argue the skills were as different as having rifle and pistol skills.
 

[GLI]

[Iltsuger]

GLI, if CK suggests it in the very same post, I figure it's not out of bounds. Boarding ships isn't Wing Commander, neither is ground combat, but we have it and many of us love it.
 

[GLI]

[Christian Knudsen]

Another way to implement melee training without it feeling like training or grinding is to have ground combat missions from the Mercenaries' Guild. That would also mean that the missions and the targets' skill levels would be able to increase while your Guild rating increases, so there'd be an automatic leveling up (instead of the somewhat artificial difficulty leveling of a roguelike dungeon where the enemies' level increase the deeper you go).
 

[GLI]

[Christian Knudsen]

Please try to keep your posts on topic. None of what you wrote seems to have anything to do with melee combat training.
 

[GLI]

[Matt_S]

[GLI]

[Cthulhu]

[GLI]

[Lancer]

I found the shooting range really useful... spent a long time there to improve my chances when faced with a live enemy in my ship, but the melee hand to hand stuff - at this level early its far too frustrating to bother with. I just can't hit the enemy with my fists. I've tried the spray and it also misses... every time.

My current method of winning hand to hand combat:

• Save the game just on landing
  
• Try hand to hand combat. Die (again) or just quit the game.
  
• Load in the game afresh
  
• This time, use guns.

Something needs to be done to "level up" beginners for melees for sure.
 

[Flyboy]

Maybe we could buy training dummies at the equipment shop.
 

[GLI]