Combat System

I mentioned that I'm trying to bring World of Progress into reality, but living up to contemporary idle game standards - that is, you will actually play the game rather than simply letting it play itself. What you won't do is control any of kinds of actions you normally control in an RPG - attacking enemies, casting spells, and so on. Instead, you'll control strategic choices like what gear to equip and what area to adventure in and let the minutiae of dispatching endless hordes of monsters to your able avatar.

I've been trying to work out a combat system that I'm satisfied with. The goals are:

• Many Stats with very different effects so that there are lots of different stats to use on gear
• No Stat Too Obviously Powerful so that picking stats on gear isn't too boring
• No Weapon Class Obviously Better so that you don't feel like you should always use a dagger

It's not really easy to come up with a formula that does all of this and I'm open to suggestions. I can really see how game designers struggle with this kind of stuff. Once someone has developed the world you are living in - we're rolling d20s to see if we hit, or 'block' pushing 'miss' off the hit roll table - you can start figuring out how to weight the different parameters.

But when you start with different parameters, it's not so easy to just jump in with a formula. I don't want to make everything multiply by x over x + y or having everything add x% because that's what makes different stats really boring - stats will always do the same thing an once you've determined the appropriate difference between x and y or the appropriate ratio between x and y you've solved the whole system.

I have the advantage of being able to make the damage roll system extremely quirky, but I want it to make some intuitive sense even if no one will really ever see it. The basic problem I have is that things that add damage make fast weapons better, so unless I subtract as much damage as I add, fast will be better than slow. The typical thing that makes slow better is attacks that use weapon damage but not weapon speed - usually ability that have cooldowns and I don't have those.

I suppose the solution is staring me right in the face - implement abilities with cooldowns. Maybe until then I just have to accept the use a dagger paradigm.