> The effectiveness of the "shell game" strategy was discovered within the first couple of days after Monster Arena opened, and a lot of people have been using it ever since. It was even more of a problem in last month's tournament than it is this time around.

So, here are some wild and crazy ideas on possible ways to "fix" the dominance of the shell game strategy. Unfortunately, I don't think any of these ideas are coding-lite, so I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if Sam opts to use any of them.

I. Advanced Strategy Options

Players are allowed to set conditional strategies for their monsters. Examples: if my Attack is lower than my current opponent's Defense, switch to the next opponent. Or: if my current opponent has an elemental defense bonus against me, switch to the next opponent.

Since these are on-the-fly tactical optimizations, it would make things more fair if at least one combat round had to elapse before the conditional strategy went into effect, to retain some of the advantages of surprise tactics. (This would also reward monsters with high Agility by giving them more "surprise-round" attacks.) Also, there'd have to be safeguards in place to prevent early triple-teaming of a single opponent.


II. Weapon Specialization

Players can train their monsters in the use of particular types of weapons, to improve their attack ratings when using their "specialty" gear. Pricing might scale with the cost of the weapon, so that it costs less, say, to train with a quarterstaff than with a Death Bringer. Even a weaponless monster might be highly trained in unarmed combat and thus be viable in battle. Perhaps similar training might even be available for different armor types, to improve defense.

One of the main advantages to this is that a player who has invested money in weapons training is much less likely to swap around a single big bad weapon among his monsters -- unless, of course, they have all received exactly the same training. Another advantage is that, IMO, it gives monsters greater individual flavor beyond their base stats and element types.


III. Potions

Players can buy potions that give their monsters a small combat edge -- a Strength potion that gives +1 or +2 to STR, for example. To differentiate these from the other cheap one-shot bonuses (enhancement bonuses), potions could be timed for use after an entire combat round has elapsed, or when a monster is down to 1/2 his HP. Healing potions might be another possibility, though it would take some careful playtesting to keep them from unbalancing battles.

This sort of thing doesn't directly address the "shell game" issue, except insofar as adding complexity to the game would entice players to try a wider variety of tactical options.


I really think that MA has to incorporate more complexity if it's going to retain interest for more than a few games. (Of course, there will always be *new* players coming in, for whom it's all fresh and exciting.) To save Sam time and possibly bandwidth, the challenge is to think of elements that add the most complexity to the game while remaining intrinsically simple, both in terms of code and learning curve. I'd love to hear what other people think might be worthy additions to the game. Especially Sam. :-)

Iss "arena denizen" achar