All Your Base

Current dungeon mechanics are very limited. Go in, kill everything. Pull groups of high HP mobs over and over again. This may be occasionally interesting, but should hardly be the only or primary option. Missions that send you into enemy cities and bases to accomplish some specific goal offer far more interesting possibilities.

Pulling as a combat mechanic can be challenging and interesting and even makes sense in open spaces where you are picking off stray guards or herd members. In a closed, organized area like a base it isn't nearly so effective. To be more specific, pulling is based on three principles: mobs have an alert radius, mobs become aware when attacked and mobs are linked to each other. When a mob is alerted to a player, it attacks that player.

In a base, mob responses should be far more coordinated. First we break the area into sections to simulate line-of-sight/hearing. A long hallway is a section as is an open courtyard while rooms off to the side are separate sections. All mobs in a section are aware of what is going on in that section. Lots of technical tricks apply to doorways, but the point is that awareness is linked to architecture.

Next, we replace the single attack response with a set of possible behaviors. A mob, on becoming aware of an enemy, can:

1) charge the enemy and melee attack
2) attempt to maintain range and range attack
3) retreat and range attack
4) hide
5) cower in fear
6) flee

You could also add in the idea of "cover" to make options 2 and 3 more interesting.

The key now is that if you are in one section (say a side room) and you are fighting, a mob may choose to flee out into the large hallway outside, which will alert all the mobs in that section to your presence. How is that different than mobs that flee or call for help in other games? Well, we're making it harder so far.

Harder is good, because it forces a different mentality. No more methodically exterminating an entire base. Now we need some kind of stealth game play, and any new option should always make us think about player abilities. We can now have numerous schools of disguise and stealth, for example:

1) disguises are consumables, allow unchallenged movement in "public" areas
2) psionics can cause a fleeing mob to forget you are there
3) illusion can hide a party standing still
4) stealth training can help a player move about undetected
etc, etc...

We also need a communication system for enemy bases, perhaps terminals that mobs can get to and alert central command to dispatch hunters. Parties must then fight quickly and efficiently in isolated sections and be prepared to flee into adjacent sections and hide until search is abandoned. This also opens the strategic options of creating distractions and manipulating enemy deployment. Players can sabotage things, create chaos amongst non-combat NPCs and tap into the enemy communications to see where hunting parties are.

Base combat should be the centerpiece of tactical play, and it needs sophisticated mechanics to give it variety and depth.