Melee combat stages

[Medi_Ding]

Should it have start, middle, and end phases where the attacker is entering a stance, swings, hits, and recovers, with each action taking time, or is it best simplified to just an instant attack and recovery?

[mlangsdorf]

Currently, the game has attacks that implicitly consist of a stance, swing, and recovery, which combined take some amount of time units. Each creature has a turn, and when they have used more time units than their total amount of time units, their turn ends and the next creature takes it’s turn.

For various technical reasons, the game is highly unlikely to implement the ability interrupt other creatures in the middle of their actions. The game is also highly unlikely to reduce the length of a turn below 1 second. So what would be the benefit of adding explicit timing to those phases?

[Medi_Ding]

By implicitly, do you mean the phases are inferred and have been simplified to a single action that takes time units from the attacker, or that the stance, swing, and recovery are 3 different calculations that aren’t shown to the player which get added together to determine the time units taken?

Also, based on what you said about the time units, does this mean when you have quick and swing a sledgehammer that takes 237 movement points to swing:

1. You end up with 110 - 237 = -127 time units, ending your turn and passing 6 seconds of game time.
2. On your next turn, you’re amount of time units gets increased: -127 + 110 = -17, but is still less than 0, ending your turn and passing 6 seconds of game time.
3. On the turn after that, your movement points are -17 + 110 = 93, so your turn begins.

[mlangsdorf]

The phases are inferred.

It looks like that’s how time units work: a big action puts a creature into negative time units, and the creature skips their next turns until they have positive time units again.