Potion Variances and Stick attacks

[KnightRider]

Hey Stephen cheers for the work on the new release-Good Work!. I thought to post these lesser port errors (though not as important ) after the 025 has been finished (as you suggested to me to do so after when the dagger bugs have been corrected). ;)

Potion Variances . On the Amiga version the regeneration\super had different health recharge rates ..depending on the *Batch Quality * of the potion.

Stick Fighting
First up i must say though the auto stick drop is an advantage (preventing those annoying situations where you couldn't put your stick down in time by accident while fighting and getting killed cause of it - esp with bats ) :P

However you miss on these fun nogalistic properties..

Virtual quickness : Whenever you have strength, you can exchange it for a quickness by yielding the stick, this because your staff does damage with strength but at double speed.

Bluffing;
With the bluff side  you can use the mentioned principle above to trick your opponent. for example, lets say you have strength\super and your guarding a exit with your stick (with strength/super), the enemy could think "haha like im really scared" and charge in (and get killed).

Also this is reversed when you pick up a stick to bluff an opponent by making him think you have strength/super when you don't , causing him to retreat (even if you have no health and power ups)  :P 

Mocking;
To *best* way to really mock your opponent, is to kill him with a stick (must have strength\super)- my brother used to do that to me back in the day just to mock me. lol

Faster bear trap disarm;
When on the run, the stick is your best friend, blocks trap doors, stuns an opponents that try to block you on the way as you escape (gem mission for example)...and it also disarms bear traps faster than your sword, making a quicker escape.

Possible Solution- Keep the auto drop aspect and put in a configurable second attack to force swing sticks. This way both keyboard/mouse player can benefit . A Keyboard player could configure a second keyboard key for force swing and the mouse player could configure another mouse button as it is faster reaction time over icon clicking (mouse mode).
Also the second attack function could also be used force throw axes maybe? (food for thought) :)
-Just a suggestion, you may wish to do something different.
Cheers Stephen

[Stephen]

Thank you for the detailed report.

I must say I am a bit confused; didn't the original Knights also have the "auto drop stick" feature? It's been a while but I thought that if you just pressed fire + direction then it would drop the stick and attack using the sword instead. If you really wanted to fight using the stick then you had to hold down fire to open the menu then press left. At least that's how I remember it...

Perhaps you had a different version of the game? (I was using Knights 2.42 if I remember correctly.)

[KnightRider]

Hi Stephen, I solved the issue specifically. in the original knights they had the auto stick drop   ,however, you *could* still swing the stick by selecting attack in the *hold fire* options , where the pc version you cant at all , either on  mouse or keyboard controls.

[Stephen]

OK, I take your point.

Of course you are right, Amiga Knights did have "stick fighting", but it was quite awkward to use (because you had to hold down fire / open the menu) so I didn't think many people were using it. Certainly me and my brother never did (when we used to play). However you are right, there are sometimes good uses for "stick fighting" so probably it should be added to PC Knights at some point. I think I will treat it as low priority for now though.

Also I do like your idea of having a "secondary attack button" that could be used for stick fighting and axe throwing. (Maybe daggers as well? Hmm.....)

The potion thing should be easy to change -- that just needs some tweaks to the Lua code. I have put that on my "list of things to do when I next look at the Knights code..." (who knows when that will be though :) )