Thanks for bringing this up. Recently I’ve been thinking of reworking the combat mechanics a bit, so I might use some of those ideas.
My goal is to have a rock-papers-scissors relation between different fighter types. This gives the player a lot of decisions to make in recruiting troops, assembling the right team, re-positioning during combat, and so on.
For example, if we have staves or other magical attacks, they could presumably bypass armor, and be effective against heavily armed warriors. But to be good with magic, wizards themselves can’t wear any metal armor, which interferes with spellcasting. So they would be prone to conventional ranged attacks, and so on.
I’m not sure if the R-P-S relation should be the same regardless of who’s the attacker. In some tactical games there are units that have a big advantage if they attack first, and have an appropriately weak defense. In KeeperRL though, with tile-based movement, these kinds of advanced rules may not work too well.
“no magic weapon,” “no ranged weapon,” and “no two-handed weapon” traits are created (this has been suggested on the wiki already)
I think using skills for that would work best. There would have to be some changes regarding how much use you can make of a weapon without having the right skill (right now it is still a lot). But I wanted to fix that anyway.
The existing dexterity (but NOT the strength) attribute controls a minion’s proficiency with a magic weapon
Hmm, maybe. But I don’t see a problem with adding another attribute dedicated to spellcasting. I’m not really sure if we need magical weapons at all, maybe just let the magicians cast their spells?
